http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/grand-canyon-dawn-light/

Light danced on the side of the canyon. Ilasos stood at the edge of the massive ravine and watched. No shadows moved across the firelight projected onto the striated rock. He heard nothing from the protected shelter below, though he wondered if he was too far away for that to mean anything. By all accounts, it was a natural fire started by a lightning strike from last night’s storm. Except it was lit in a huge nook of a large canyon where, Ilasos presumed, no dead foliage sat around waiting to catch a spark.

It was a campfire. Someone had lit it.

In the two years since he left the only home he’d ever known, Ilasos had done much to avoid contact. He hid in trees, ran from unnatural noise and worked around known population centers. Here and there, a meeting had been inevitable. Yet those encounters had been brief and tense; exchanges of supplies and information followed by quick retreats. By choice, he had spent most of those two years as a ghost, homeless and wandering.

Strange times had made for strange choices. Why he’d elected to head west, out of all the options available, was anyone’s guess. Ilasos hadn’t felt a particular calling, and he had no information to suggest the world was healthier there than it had been at home. Perhaps it was the poetry that moved him, a loner marching west toward the place the sun sets in a world without sunlight.

Strange choices. Ilasos thought back to the last time he’d encountered someone on his westward walk. Had it been four months? Five? Certainly the weather had already started to turn colder, so no more than six months ago.

He stepped back from the canyon edge and found a promising rock formation that formed something of an overhang above the ground. Beneath the vague shelter, he unpacked his bag and made camp in the loosest sense of the term. Gloomy afternoon became gloomy evening and, all at once, gloomy night.

Before settling in for the night, Ilasos walked back to the canyon edge and looked down. The orange light was still there, flickering against the blue-grey shadows on the rock.

Morning came, as it had for years, with hardly a whisper. The dimmer on the clouds turned, and night transformed into the almost-light of daytime. A strong wind now pushed the low clouds above the pretty, melancholy rockscape at a brisk pace. Ilasos was halfway through packing his bag when he remembered the fire. A twinge of something coursed through him as he hustled to the canyon’s edge. It took him a moment to recognize the feeling: excitement. Down below, in the narrow nook, the orange light wavered as strong as it had the night before. This was an unequivocal confirmation – it could not be natural.

Maybe it was this revelation, or maybe he was just tired. Either way, Ilasos decided to investigate. It would take him most of the dreary day to hike down, but that didn’t much matter to him. All days were dreary and cloud-covered in the post-human world.

Late afternoon looked roughly the same as morning. Weak light filtered through the cloud cover as it raced to the southeast, thick and grey and without end. Ilasos pulled himself up a ledge at the mouth of the curved canyon nook. On a flat stretch of rock much narrower than he’d expected, a bonfire roared with enthusiastic fizzes and crackles. A figure sat on the far side. Hides covered flat patches of rock in vague seats.

Ilasos stood at the mouth and waited. No one had come or gone from the hollow all day. Below them, another sixty or seventy feet down into the ravine, a small river flowed at the base of the canyon. He could not hear the water trickle above the noise of the fire.

The figure lifted a hooded head. “Traveler?” It was a woman’s voice.

“I am,” Ilasos answered.

The figure pointed to a pile beside her. Ilasos took a few steps to the side to get a view around the fire. There was a makeshift camp, just a little less modest than his own, with extra hide blankets and cooked food. Meat, roasted vegetables, greens and a few jugs that he presumed were full of water from the river.

“I can spare a meal if you need it,” the woman said.

Ilasos hesitated. If he accepted, he would have to move into the hollow and any potential escape would be cut off. He’d have fire on one side and a few hundred feet of rock on the other three. But the temptation of the jugs of water was too much to ignore. With a nod, he walked around the fire.

“Here, pull that darker hide out,” the woman offered. “Set yourself up right there.” Ilasos followed the instructions, got as comfortable as possible.

“Thank you,” he said quietly. His voice was hoarse and raggedy. When was the last time he spoke out loud?

The woman smiled. “That’s a traveler’s voice like you read about. Any particular destination in mind?” Close enough now to get a good look, Ilasos noticed she was an attractive woman. Everything about her screamed middle age, and yet she still looked youthful, like someone who looked and felt younger than her years. In hides and leathers, she should have appeared wild and dangerous. But she sat with a regal bearing, and her voice spilled out in a rich tone with impeccable diction.

“West,” Ilasos growled in reply. He opened a jug and sniffed – water. He took a few gulps. “Doesn’t much matter where, though, does it?” That sounded better, much less gravel in his throat.

“Indeed. How’s the water?”

He nodded. “Good.”

“Not quite the same?” she asked, eyebrow raised.

She knew. He considered bolting. But then he remembered she could only recognize him if she was one too.

“It’s not,” he answered, voice controlled as possible. “Nothing ever will be, I don’t think.”

“You’re probably right.” She adjusted herself on the hide-covered rock. “Can I ask what happened?”

He shrugged.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pry,” she said. “If you’re not comfortable-”

“You’re the first one I’ve met,” he interrupted. “The first one of us, I mean. Since… since I left.”

“Am I? Where did you drink between the east and here?”

“Where you’d expect.”

“If you drank water from the streams of our brothers and sisters, how is it that you managed to meet none of them in the process?”

Ilasos fidgeted, and his eyes darted to the hollow’s entrance. For a long moment, running was the only thought in his mind. But it had been years since he’d met one of his own kind. The river spirits had become endangered species after the humans’ collapse.

“I avoided them,” he admitted, quietly.

The woman nodded and reached a hand out to comfort him. She pat his shoulder with a gentle touch.

“What happened?”

“I waited until they moved up- or downstream, then slipped in to fill my canteens and left before they knew I was there,” he explained.

She shook her head. “I mean what happened? To your river?”

Ilasos struggled to get the words out, but he managed. “It went underground at first. I thought that might be the end of it.”

“With the humans, there was only one end,” said the woman, sagely.

“Yeah.” Ilasos took a moment to compose himself. “I lost it when they began to reroute. They pushed the headwaters to some other river. It was gone in a few days.” He confessed and felt something uncoil in his chest, a tightening that lost its grip once he unloaded his burden.

“I am sorry.” She paused a moment. “Why did you ignore the others? On your way west?”

Ilasos took a deep breath. He shook his head, and answered, “I didn’t want… I wasn’t ready to talk about it. It was my river. I was supposed to protect it.”

“They did not make it easy,” the woman consoled. “On any of us.”

“Yours survived,” Ilasos said, as if determined that the shame of his loss be magnified.

“It is a stream now, cold and clear. A little thing. In the glory of its youth, it carved this canyon from the flat rock of the world.” Her voice filled with a resilient kind of sadness. Ilasos could hear the pain of her loss, yet it was colored with a thin sheen of hope.

“Can it recover?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I do not know. But maybe two spirits can revive it better than one?”

Ilasos picked up one of the jugs of water. He took another large gulp and swallowed. It was a different taste than his own river, the one he had lost to old follies. But for the first time, he began to think of them as the follies of others. He didn’t have to carry the loss alone, not anymore.

“Yes, perhaps it would,” he answered.

She smiled, and the warm orange light of the big fire washed out the slight lines of her age. Ilasos could see in her face a tremendous beauty, from a time when her river was powerful enough to cut a massive canyon through the land. Maybe it could again. Maybe, in time, when he drank its water, it would start to taste like his own.