Stonewalker: Watchers of the Land | Del Mar Hill
The Veiled Star Series · Book One

STONEWALKER

Watchers of the Land

They have been looking for him for a hundred years.

They are looking in the wrong direction.

A novel by Del Mar Hill
Begin
The Story

His name is Stonewalker. He is nineteen seasons old. 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 metaphor. As 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 yet know what that gift will cost him.

In the deep wilderness of the northern Yukon, Stonewalker follows the migration path of his bloodline. Then 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. 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.

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From Chapter One

The Silence Between Footsteps

The sky above the frozen wilderness was the color of old bone.

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On the ground, the snow did not fall. It simply was. A great white stillness laid across the land like breath held too long. Nothing moved. Nothing dared make a sound. In this part of the world, far beyond the edge of human maps, deep in the northern Yukon, the silence was more than silence. It was a presence. A pressure. The land breathed in, and all things held themselves still, waiting.

The being known as Stonewalker ran through the forest. The trees did not notice him. That was the thing; not his size, not his silence, but the specific quality of his passage: a shape moving through the world without announcing itself, the way a current moves through water. The forest gave way before him without breaking; no snapped branches, no disturbed snow, no wake of startled birds. Seven feet of mass and muscle pressing through old-growth timber and leaving almost nothing behind.

His eyes, sharp and deep-set, burned an intense shade of amber, reflecting a mind alert and always thinking.

He was in his element.

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The World

Three guardians.
One planet.
One returning civilization.

I

The Land

The Okwan’xi have walked the deep wilderness since before the first human story was told. They communicate through signing, a complete gestural language. They are watchers, memory keepers, and the species that holds the land’s pulse in its hands.

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II

The Sea

In the deep ocean, Vaelora carries the memory of every Naga who came before her. She is the threshold keeper, the voice of deep time, the oldest living witness on this planet. She has been waiting longer than anything else still alive.

III

The Sky

The Above Ones placed the guardians here before they departed. Now their vessel is approaching across thousands of seasons, hidden behind a Veiling that only the gifted can feel. They are returning to assess what their watchers have protected.

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The Book
D. M. HILL
STONEWALKER
Watchers of the Land
Book One · The Veiled Star Series

Available now on Amazon. Kindle edition out today. Paperback coming soon.

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

The Author

Del Mar Hill

Del Mar Hill is a west coast author who has spent a lifetime thinking about what else might be out there. Beyond the tree line. Beyond the atmosphere. Beyond the edge of the maps we trust.

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A long fascination with Sasquatch not as legend but as possibility, combined with a persistent curiosity about life beyond our planet, eventually became something larger than either: a five-book series asking what would happen if both were true simultaneously.

The Veiled Star Series is that question, told as fiction.

Del Mar Hill is a pen name

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The Series

Five books. One planet. The full assessment.

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