The First Skin Prologue
1005 Words
The desert was quiet in a way that didn’t feel peaceful. Not tonight.
Lina Yazzie stood at the edge of the sandstone bluff, the hem of her black dress fluttering in the breeze like a restless spirit. Below, the land stretched for miles—jagged red mesas and twisted juniper trees bathed in the fading glow of the sun. The air smelled of sage, dust, and something older. Something watching.
She tightened her fingers around the bundle in her hands. Deer hide. Rough and dry. Tied with a strip of red cloth.
Her grandmother’s final gift.
Lina hadn’t wanted to come back. She hadn’t stepped foot on Dinétah—the ancestral homeland of her people—since she was fourteen, and even then it had been under protest. Raised in Phoenix by a single mother who left the reservation behind in search of jobs and “a better life,” Lina had grown up feeling split between two worlds. She was Diné by blood, but not by rhythm. Not by spirit.
Not the way her grandmother had been.
Náázhą́—Grandma Rose—had been the real thing. A medicine woman. A singer of old songs. A woman who spoke to the earth like it was her kin. And now she was gone.
A crow screamed overhead, slicing the silence. Lina flinched.
She looked over her shoulder at the line of mourners disappearing down the path toward the hogan, their footsteps soft, their voices hushed. The fire ceremony was over. The songs had been sung. The bones of the day were buried in ash and chant.
And Lina remained. Alone.
Almost.
“Still up here?” came a voice, low and crackling like old wood.
She turned to see Shiye, her grandmother’s cousin—an elder with sharp cheekbones, silver braids, and eyes like smoke. He leaned on a cane carved with protective symbols.
“You don’t belong to the wind, child. Not yet.”
Lina swallowed the lump in her throat. “I just wanted a minute. She used to bring me up here. Said it was where the spirits speak the loudest.”
Shiye nodded, stepping beside her to gaze out across the ancient land. “She wasn’t wrong. Some places… hold memory. The good and the dark.”
A long silence settled between them. Lina studied the bundle in her hands.
“She left this for me. Wouldn’t let Mom or the others open it. Just said it was for me, when the time was right.”
Shiye’s brow furrowed. “She told me that too. Said your bloodline would carry the weight, but maybe not the burden. I didn’t understand her then.”
Lina frowned. “What kind of burden?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he lifted his chin to the horizon.
“The moon rises red tonight. Like it did when she was born. And when her grandmother was born. You see that?” He pointed.
A pale circle had begun to climb the sky. The Blood Moon.
“Bad omen?” she asked, trying to make her voice sound casual.
Shiye’s mouth twitched into something like a smile. “Not bad. Not good. Just old.”
He turned to go, but before he did, he reached out and rested a weathered hand on her shoulder.
“When you open that,” he said, nodding toward the bundle, “do it with respect. Not fear. Some stories… they’re not meant to scare. They’re meant to warn.”
And with that, he disappeared down the path, leaving only the wind and the whisper of ancient roots.
—
Lina sat on the packed earth just outside the hogan. The moon had risen fully now, swollen and ruddy, casting everything in an amber glow.
She placed the bundle before her.
Her fingers hesitated at the knot.
She didn’t know why she was nervous. It wasn’t like her grandmother had been cryptic on purpose. This was probably some family heirloom, some tribal relic or medicine pouch. Something ceremonial.
Still, the weight of it…
She exhaled and undid the knot.
The hide unfolded with a whisper like dry leaves. Inside was a sheet of stretched, tanned skin, old and stained, but still intact. Etched onto it in faded ink was a story—handwritten in old Navajo syllabary and translated beneath in English.
Beneath the words was a scrap of something darker. Thick. Coarse. Fur, but not fur. Like animal skin fused with something human.
Lina’s pulse quickened.
What was this?
She touched the edge of the hide, and the moment her skin made contact, a sharp chill ran up her spine. The wind kicked up. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howled.
And then she began to read.
THE FIRST SKIN
Written by the hand of Tocha, Daughter of Spirits, Keeper of the Old Ways
"Before the curse, I was a healer.
Before I became the hunted, I was the watcher.
And before I wore the skin in fury, I wore it in reverence.”
Lina’s eyes widened. The ink felt alive beneath her fingers.
She read on, feeling as if the desert itself was leaning in to listen.
“This is the story of how I became what I was never meant to be.
Of how the land gave me its breath, and how I used it to kill.”
Suddenly, the air shifted.
The night deepened.
And Lina saw a vision—brief and searing—of a woman in animal pelts standing beneath a blood moon, her eyes glowing amber, her mouth split open in a silent scream. Behind her, the earth cracked and shadows slithered free.
Lina gasped and looked up.
The desert was silent again.
But she could feel it now—something watching. Something waiting.
Clutching the old skin close to her chest, Lina backed toward the doorway of the hogan, her breath sharp in her lungs.
Whatever this story was, it wasn’t just a tale.
It was a warning.
And it wasn’t done with her yet.
- Writer
