The Visitor 

10,500 years after the Mid-Ultimocene

My name is Eve, and as I rest alone within the roost abandoned now on the cliffs, I tell this remarkable story to the world itself, for there is no-one individually left to listen.

It began almost twenty seasons ago, as I completed a full cycle of the sun alone, without even one sighting of another. When several more seasons came and went, and still found no one at the gatherings, I realized I might be the very last. Yet I was never truly alone in a world so full of life. I was accompanied as I traveled by the songs of the birds, the buzzing of the bugs, and the rumbling of great herds below which gave me life in their deaths. The waves spoke to me as they crashed against the shores, telling the stories of even the smallest fishes. Even the wind carried the quiet, excited murmurs of the grass, as its fuzzy seeds took flight and wandered away to find their new homes. Our world itself was alive, and I was just one small part of something so much grander than any of us upon it.

I still saw the untamed then. They looked like me, but they didn't speak. It was told to me long ago that we were once one kind, gentle yet with a quiet mind. Our kind’s mind grew louder, while theirs stayed silent. Time also eroded their kindness away, like the banks of the flowing stream always carved into new paths, leaving them fierce and cruel. They fought now over the carcasses, fighting even amongst each other. Beaks bloodied from their own, even their children were sometimes killed by the grown. So I did not spend too long among them. Yet if I was quiet too, they accepted me for their own. Sometimes, I admit, I would pretend. I wished, looking out upon the world below, for a friend who reciprocated. Just one, to not be the last alone.

This was my life for a long time. The sun and the shadow spun across the lands at the extremes of the world cyclically and in alternation, and so I learned to count the passing ages. It was by now nine seasons, nine full cycles of the sun, since I began counting since I saw another tamed. I didn’t recall how many since I found my soul. It must have been far more. But nine years after I knew there were no more, I was granted my wish… 

...when the visitor came down from the stars.