The Stone's Slow Pulse

The weight of it is a slow exhaling, a long breath held since the cooling of the crust. It sits in the palm like a cold, grey heart, veined with the ghosts of ancient tides.

It does not speak of the wind that polished it, nor the river's rush that carried it down. Silence is its language, a dense accumulation of centuries pressed into a single, jagged edge.

If you listen, you can hear the vibration of a planet turning on its iron axis. The stone remembers the heat of its birth, a molten secret kept beneath a skin of lichen.

It waits for the return of the mountain, for the slow heave of the earth to claim it back. Until then, it remains a tethered anchor to a world that forgets its own weight.