Chapter Four: The Womb as Compass

Althea walked alone. The path before her was not marked on any map, for the maps themselves were lies - shaped by the hands of men who named the world to suit their stories. But Althea did not seek the names of rivers or the boundaries of kingdoms. She sought the unspoken places, where the earth still bore the weight of forgotten truths.

The womb was her compass.

She moved through the tangled forests, the wet soil clutching at her feet. Every breath of wind carried the voices of the matriarchs, though no one else could hear them. They whispered in the language of blood and bone, urging her forward. “Remember,” they said. “Before the stories told by infantile monkeys, we were known by all.”

Her first destination was the Valley of the Absent Mothers. The scribes called it a holy site, though no mother’s name was inscribed upon its walls. Althea found it in ruins - jagged stones and crumbled pillars, the sky weeping through the empty arches. But even in its desolation, the truth lingered.

She knelt at the base of a shattered column, brushing aside the dirt that had swallowed its carvings. Beneath the grime, the image emerged: a woman, round-bellied, her arms cradling the curve of her womb. No divine light shone from above her. No man stood at her side. She was alone, and yet complete.

But the faces of the priests had not endured. They had been chiseled away, their authority reduced to dust. Althea ran her fingers along the rough edges where their eyes had once glared. It was not the work of time that had erased them. It was something older, something defiant.

The Earth itself had refused their memory, as it erases all lies.

Althea did not linger. The valley had given her its truth - the first of many. She continued her pilgrimage, tracing the pulse of forgotten knowledge. The roads led her to the caves where ochre-stained hands had pressed themselves against the stone. Not the hands of kings or prophets, but the hands of women who had bled, birthed, and buried. The womb had been their map, the stars their witnesses.

She knelt before the ancient walls, her own palms tingling with the memory of their touch. In the flickering torchlight, she traced the painted curves - the roundness of bellies, the crescent lines of breasts. They had known what the scribes had not: that creation did not belong to words. It belonged to the body.

But not all the truths she found were painted. Some lay in the dust - bones curled in fetal positions, the remains of women buried with their arms wrapped around their unborn children. The earth had cradled them as the mothers once had. And in their stillness, they spoke.

“We were the beginning,” they said. “And we remain.”

Althea gathered their memory like threads, weaving them into the fabric of her own knowing. She no longer sought the gods the men had written into the sky. She sought the womb that had birthed all gods.

But as her truth grew, so did the weight of it. She could not ignore the stories that still ruled the minds of men. The First Man’s shadow lingered, cast wide across the world. Even now, the priests stood in their temples, reciting the same hollow tale. They did not know that their monuments were already crumbling.

For every step Althea took, the Earth shifted beneath her. The ground remembered. The trees bent in recognition. The rivers sang of the waters that had once parted for the mothers to give birth. The story of the First Man was no longer enough to hold the world together.

And Althea knew that soon - very soon - the lie would break.

The womb had spoken.

And the world was listening.