Prologue

3,000,000 Years Ago

The Blessing Stone was born uncountable light-years from Earth, on the other side of the stars.

It came into being in a cataclysmic explosion of stellar proportions that sent cosmic fragments plunging across the gulf of space. Like a shining ship the searing hot chunk of star mass sailed across the sidereal sea, roaring and hissing through the dark night as it hurtled toward its inevitable destruction on a young, savage planet.

Mastodons and mammoths paused in their grazing to blink up at the flashing streak in the sky, the meteor’s iron content creating a blazing wake as it burned up in the atmosphere. Witnessing the catastrophic event was a family of frightened hominids, small creatures resembling apes except that their brow ridges were not so prominent and they walked upright on two feet. They froze suddenly in their foraging at the edge of a primeval forest, and a moment later were knocked off their newly upright stance by the shock wave from the meteorite’s impact.

The collision heated rock so that it melted and scattered fragments like rain. In Vulcan’s furnace the meteor’s stardust liquefied and fused with crystalline elements in the earth, homely quartz fracturing to embrace cosmic microdiamonds as if by the wave of an alchemist’s wand. The crater formed by the impact gradually cooled and filled with rainwater and for two million years streams running off nearby volcanoes fed the crater lake, silting it up, covering the heavenly fragments with layer after layer of sand. Then a geological upheaval shifted the lake’s drainage basin eastward, creating a stream that began to carve out a gorge that would one day, far into the future, be called Olduvai on a continent called Africa. The lake eventually emptied and subsequent winds carried off the layers of silt to expose the meteor fragments once again. They were hard, ugly pellets glistening only here and there. But one was unique, forged perhaps by chance or luck or destiny. Born of force and violence it was now smooth and ovoid in shape from its millennia of being buffed and polished by water and sand and wind, and it flashed with a deep blue brilliance like the sky that had delivered it. Birds flew overhead, dropping seeds that sprouted into lush vegetation, providing the stone with a protective blind so that only the occasional flash of sunlight reflecting off its crystal surface indicated its presence.

Another thousand years passed, and another, while the stone that would one day be revered as magical and horrific, cursed and blessed, waited….