STONEWALKER

They have been looking for him for a hundred years.

Photographs. Footprints. Stories told around fires in the dark.

They are looking in the wrong direction.

His name is Stonewalker. He is nineteen seasons old. The Okwan'xi, the species your world calls Bigfoot, and he carries something his kind rarely produces: the ability to hear the land itself speak. Not as a metaphor. As a fact. A pulse moving through root and stone and deep bedrock, ancient and steady, the memory of everything the earth has witnessed since before the first human story was told.

He does not know yet what that gift will cost him.

In the deep wilderness of the northern Yukon, Stonewalker follows the migration path of his bloodline. His direct kin, Elkshadow and Swiftbranch. The two elders who have walked beside him since birth. When an ancient figure emerges from the northern timber one night... vast, patient, carrying the same frequency Stonewalker has felt his entire life but never had a name for; everything changes. He is taken north to begin a training that will reshape his understanding of what he is, what his species guards, and what is approaching from beyond the edge of the sky.

Something is coming. The land has been feeling it for seasons. A cold signal. A wrong star holding its own impossible course. Something that has been broadcasting from the other side of a very old seal. Patient, directed, and growing stronger.

The Okwan'xi were not placed here by accident. Neither were the guardians of the sea. And whatever seeded this planet with its watchers is returning to assess what they have protected.

Stonewalker: Watchers of the Land is Book One of The Veiled Star Series - a five-book literary science fantasy beginning in the wilderness of the Yukon and building toward first contact.

For readers of Richard Powers, N.K. Jemisin, and Susanna Clarke.