Dawn came pale and thin over the mountain lake, the light stretched flat across the water like breath held too long.
Mist clung low to the surface, curling around stones and reeds, muffling sound until even footsteps felt intrusive. The clan arrived quietly, not because they'd been told to—but because it felt right.
The lake sat cradled between slopes of dark stone and fir with the waterfall toward the back drifting water spray into the air. Talia walked at the front, she stopped beside the narrow strip of stone beach where she had left a flat area for a future park. For a moment, she did nothing.
Turning to Auntie Junia she asked, "Here?"
Aunty Junia nodded in approval.
Then Talia opened her panel and selected the Divine Pillar from her Earth rewards. She had noticed that the options in her normal building blueprints were not of the same quality as the rewards she had earned from Earth.
Stone flowed upwards from the ground, forming a large monolith of neutral stone—smooth, pale, undecorated with no carvings or symbols, just a plain but overwhelming Pillar.
A Divine Anchor without a deity was just that: an anchor with nothing yet tied to it.
The pillar stood a little taller than two men, broad enough that it felt stable even before it proved itself. It cast a faint reflection on the water, a twin shape trembling with the lake's breath.
Nothing else happened.
No system alert, no pulse of power, no voice.
Auntie Junia stepped forward then, her shawl pulled tight against the chill, hair braided back with careful hands. She did not raise her voice.
"We will take our time," she said, and it felt like instruction and permission both. "There is no rush today."
She explained the order simply. Who would step forward first. Where offerings would be placed. When silence would be held. When words would be spoken—and when they would not.
"This is not a performance," she reminded them gently. "No one is watching us from above."
A few people smiled at that.
The clan gathered closer, forming a loose semicircle around the pillar and the water beyond it. They had brought what they could carry honestly.
Candles molded from bush-chicken tallow, each one uneven, smelling faintly of smoke and fat and effort, leaf-feather bundles tied with grass twine, stones carried from the meadow where they'd first arrived—scratched, chipped, ordinary.
A bowl of soil taken from the exact place where boots had first broken ground. A cup of water drawn from the valley river, sealed carefully, reverently. Strands of woven hair, one from each family—some thick, some thin, some already greying and small relics from Earth: a smooth river pebble from a childhood creek, a pressed leaf from a backyard fig, a piece of clay shaped once by hands that no longer remembered its making.
Old world and new world, neither fused, nor abandoned but connected.
Junia gestured for the offerings to be placed.
As people stepped forward, no one hurried them. Some knelt, some stood, others touched the pillar briefly, as if checking whether it would feel different. It didn't.
Yet.
When the last offering was laid out in quiet symmetry around the stone, Junia returned to the front.
She did not face the pillar. She faced the people.
"This is not summoning," she said, voice steady despite the weight pressing her shoulders. "We are not calling something that does not already exist."
She turned then, slow and deliberate."This is an invitation."
She placed one hand against the stone and spoke.
"We call not for salvation," Junia said, and the words carried across the lake, soft but unbroken. "But remembrance. We call not for power, but presence. We honour the world that bore us—and the mother who did not abandon us, even as she died."
Silence followed and the air tightened.
Not sharply or violently, just enough that breaths came a little shallower, like pressure changing before a storm. Torches set into the sand flickered—not upward, but sideways, their flames bending as if listening.
The stone hummed, low, subtle. A vibration felt more in the bone than the ear. Like a heartbeat remembered rather than heard.
Light bloomed from within the pillar. Not gold or white, but a deep blue. Oceanic, endless. The colour of Earth seen from space—whole and fragile and alive all at once.
The stone rippled and contours rose as if coaxed by invisible hands. Lines deepened, curves softened. The monolith reshaped itself with patient inevitability, becoming something that felt less like sculpture and more like emergence.
A figure formed.
Humanoid. Curled inward slightly, arms folded as if cradling something unseen. Protective. Resting. She stood taller than any human present, but not towering—her presence expansive rather than imposing.
Warmth radiated outward, subtle but unmistakable.
And above her hands, a small sphere coalesced.Earth.Cracked and dimmed, but still glowing faintly.
A deity who was present—but felt distant and faint.
Auntie Junia gasped.
The sound tore free of her before she could stop it. Power surged through her, sharp and sudden, making her knees buckle. She caught herself on instinct, one hand lifting—and freezing as green light flared across the back of it.
A lotus mark bloomed there, vines entwining its petals.
It burned, but not painfully. Then sank into her skin, vanishing as if it had never been—leaving behind a resonance that made her breath shake.
Around them, people dropped to their knees.
Not all, but many. Some wept openly, others clasped hands. Most stared, unmoving in awe.
Talia did not kneel. She swayed, the pressure came next—weight settling into her chest, her spine, her bones. Not crushing but grounding her, like a hand brushing her cheek, familiar and unbearably gentle.
Her wrist flared with light. Vines wrapped around it in a living spiral, petals forming a four-element wheel. It glowed, burned, then sank beneath her skin, invisible unless called.
Breathing deeply she suddenly sensed that she could feel the land. Territory edges whispered to her senses and the stone called to her in recognition.
Somewhere behind her, a teenage girl sucked in a sharp breath and hid her glowing hand in her sleeve, pressing close to her mother's side. When the pressure eased, it left behind a trembling quiet.
After moments of quiet, breath returned.
Laughter broke through tears.
A woman sobbed, "She's still alive."
"Even like this." Someone else whispered.
They celebrated—not wildly or recklessly—but with relief. With warmth, and the fragile joy of knowing something precious had returned.
The lake reflected Gaia's form, distorted by ripples, but unmistakably there.