For twelve thousand years, no light touched the bones of Naia.

The cave was dark — absolute dark, of the kind found only underground and in the deepest ocean, where there is simply no source of photons and the visual system has nothing to work with.

The bones lay in this darkness through the entire span of human recorded history, through every civilization and every catastrophe and every transformation of the world above the cave.

The first light to reach her since her death was the artificial light of cave divers’ equipment — the powerful LED torches that modern cave divers use to navigate in conditions where their eyes are, without technology, completely useless.