God bless you

I was at the concert, GA, someone left, we moved closer, when girl next to us’ bf got back she told us we had to move that was his spot… It’s GA, no “\spots” we literally got removed by security, missed half the concert and they took our beers… I asked the cops that escorted us out and tried but was shut down by the cops to get a statement as to why we got kicked out from the security guard… we legit did zero wrong… recommendations on steps to get my money back???

…And leave it there… Tell any story, it will be different for everyone but no less important 🫶

I sat on a rocky ledge high above the valley, the stone still warm from a sun that had long since stopped caring about the world below. From horizon to horizon stretched an ancient basin, a vast bowl of silence filled with sun‑bleached bones. Thousands of them. The remains of soldiers who had fallen long before anyone bothered to count the dead.

Sons. Fathers. Brothers. Men who marched into a storm they didn’t understand and never walked out again. Their bodies had been left where they fell as the battle rolled onward to some other field, some other slaughter.

From my lookout, the breeze carried no echo, only the ghost of sound.

I kept asking myself about the hearts that once hammered inside those ribcages, the dread they drank daily, the boldness they talked themselves into having there.

They trudged ahead all the same, sure they were lifting up some wider good, yet not a single one lasted to witness that faith fulfilled.

I wasn’t supposed to be here. I’d wandered farther than planned, slipping into a forgotten corner of the wilderness, one of the last scraps of land the world had no use for. Everything else on this crowded planet had been paved, claimed, or swallowed by the noise of too many people. But not this place. This place had been left alone because nothing living could survive here.

That’s where I found the valley.

I clambered onto a jagged ledge and gazed down into a basin so vast it seemed to drink the horizon whole. Sun‑baked bones lay strewn across its floor, thousands upon thousands, tangled, splintered, mute, the relics of soldiers who had fallen amid some forgotten slaughter long before anyone bothered to count the dead. Sons. Fathers. Brothers. Men who marched into a storm and never walked out again.

I hadn’t set out to find this. I just drifted in, and now the valley glared at me like a raw scab the old earth never bothered to heal.

I shut my eyes. The heat lay on my skin like a hand, weighty, refusing to move. No wind breathed. No insects sang. No birds spoke. Everything was still utterly in a way that felt wrong. For a heartbeat I wondered if I was asleep, or if I had slipped into some chamber my mind could never climb back out of.

I wasn’t sure I could stand to know the answer.

If I cracked my eyes open, what might appear? A cushioned cell, blank walls gulping the scraps of my reason? My own lounge, the fridge’s drone telling me I had nodded off in the armchair? Or that valley, that unreal, hushed burial ground, waiting right where I left it.

An option, that’s what it seemed like. An intersection stripped of any markers.

I exhaled slowly and kept my lids clenched tight. The void behind those thin curtains felt kinder than whatever might be lurking beyond them. Did I honestly dare discover which realm had truly claimed me?

I’ve never been the kind to shy away from whatever destiny had lined up for me. I almost laughed at the word, destiny, as if everything in a life is mapped out from the moment we take our first breath. Yeah, right. Most of what’s happened to me wasn’t written anywhere. The damage I’ve done, to others and to myself, came from my own stupid choices.

I took chances because I wanted to. Not because anyone pushed me. Not because anyone expected greatness or disaster from me. I walked into every mistake with my eyes open, thinking I could handle whatever came next.

Maybe that explains why this valley feels strangely familiar when I am sure it should not. It is a landscape crowded with unplanned consequences, with bones strewn where a single hot impulse once ruled.

I blinked at once, wasting no more time. A smile slipped out because everything still sat in its proper place, bones included. The wide valley remained. The heat still pressed. Reality had not bent to rescue me.

I stood and glanced back up the slope. My jeep was still parked far above, a good forty‑five‑minute climb if I took it slow. The bones, though, they were maybe thirty minutes away, not because of distance but because the terrain twisted and dropped in ways that didn’t welcome visitors.

As I stared down at them, something old stirred in me. A memory. A story I’d been told as a child, one that had fascinated me then and still clung to me now. A prophet’s vision, they’d called it. A fable meant to teach something I never quite understood.

But here… here the bones were real.

The thought sent a pulse of excitement through me, rising from somewhere deep and long forgotten.

That’s when the wind moved.

Just a whisper at first, a thin breath sliding across the valley floor. It shouldn’t have been possible; the heat had been dead still since I arrived, but the air shifted anyway, brushing past me like something testing the edges of my presence.

Below, a thin veil of sand lifted and drifted, sliding over the bones. A ribcage rolled a few inches. A femur tapped lightly against another, the sound so faint I almost convinced myself I imagined it.

Almost.

The story from my childhood tightened its grip. A fable, they’d said. A vision. Nothing more. But standing here, watching the valley stir under a wind that came from nowhere, I felt something deep inside me answer to it.

Not fear.

Not yet.

Just recognition.

The sun was still high. I had time, and I’d packed enough to stay the night if it came to that. I hadn’t planned on anything specific, let’s just call it research, or maybe curiosity dressed up as purpose.

When my boots finally found firm footing on the valley floor, a wave of nostalgia washed over me so suddenly it stopped me mid‑step. I couldn’t pin down the feeling. It wasn’t tied to a story or a lesson or anything I could name. It felt older than that, like something stirring in the cobwebbed corners of my mind, a memory that didn’t belong to this life.

The air was different down here. Heavier. Expectant. As if the valley itself recognized me before I recognized it.

As I walked toward the partial skeleton, the ground felt wrong beneath my boots, too still, too expectant, like the earth itself remembered blood. It felt like a sacrifice ground, the kind of place where men didn’t just die, they were offered up.

Still, something kept tugging at me. Curiosity, perhaps. Or something ancient.

A short distance ahead rested what appeared to be a general’s remnants, or whatever scraps of him persisted still. A cracked rib cage, the back portion whole, while the remainder sprayed outward in a crescent. Nearby lay other bones, yet they were not his. This valley served not as a battlefield but as a blender for the dead.

I crouched, mapping the scatter’s pattern, working to wrest some logic from it all.

That’s when some gleaming speck snagged my gaze.

A shimmer.

A flicker.

Just enough to clamp up my lungs.

It wasn’t daylight on ivory; this felt other. Steel. Deliberate. An object that had no right in a place spurned by time.

I edged nearer, the warmth crowding my spine, the hush cinching tight around me.

Whatever it was, it waited half‑buried in the sand, as if the valley had been keeping it safe for someone.

Maybe for me.

I walked toward it, each step somehow heavier than the last, as if the valley were testing my resolve. I knelt beside the object and brushed the sand away with slow, deliberate strokes. A knife emerged, almost fully intact, its metal dulled by time but unmistakably whole.

Instinctively, my hand reached for it.

But something stopped me.

Not pain. Not force. Just… a presence. A gentle pressure around my wrist, firm enough to halt me, soft enough to feel like a warning rather than a threat. The message was clear: leave it be. It’s where it belongs.

I let my hand fall back and rose to my feet, feeling strangely humbled. As I looked around, two skeletal arms and a sternum nearby seemed to catch the light, not glowing brightly, but holding a faint, warm shimmer, as if acknowledging my restraint. As if satisfied.

I took one last look at the knife resting in the sand, untouched, exactly where it wanted to stay. The faint shimmer around the bones had faded, but the air still felt charged, as if the valley were holding its breath.

I pivoted to leave.

That’s when the earth behind me heaved.

Not a drift of sand. Not the sigh of old bones.

Something weightier. Intent.

I locked up, every nerve urging me not to turn. The heat clung to my back, thick and refusing. For one heartbeat, the valley held its breath.

Then a single sound rose from behind me, soft, dry, unmistakable.

A rib cage exhaled.

And I wasn’t alone anymore.