In early September of 1799, the Stone Expedition reunited deep in the unmapped wilderness beyond the Ohio River. Nine men gathered at the designated rendezvous, carrying fresh provisions and renewed hope. They could not have known that within weeks, two of them would be dead, and the survivors would carry secrets that would haunt their bloodlines for generations.

This episode chronicles the expedition's darkest chapter as they pressed deeper into forbidden territory than any Europeans had ventured before. The creatures that had watched them for months began gathering in unprecedented numbers, converging from all directions toward something none of the men could see but all could feel drawing them forward. When the expedition crossed into hostile territory without realizing it, the fragile peace they had built shattered in a single night of violence that left Henri Beaumont scattered across a forest clearing in pieces too small to bury. But the horror of that night was only the beginning. 

Guided by creatures whose motives remained unknowable, the surviving members discovered a hidden valley—a vast sanctuary concealed between mountain walls where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these beings had lived in complete isolation since before human civilization began.

What they found in the caves of that valley would challenge everything they believed about the natural world and reveal a relationship between humans and these ancient creatures far more terrible than any of them had imagined. The bones told the story. Scattered. Broken. Some fossilized with the weight of millennia, others bearing traces of recent flesh. Teeth marks near the joints. Evidence of breaking for marrow. The native warnings had not been exaggeration. 

They had been truth. This episode also documents the final descent of Will Harper, the expedition's artist, whose mind had been unraveling since his first encounter with the creatures months before. His death in a forest clearing—surrounded by silent witnesses, his heart simply stopped, his face frozen in an expression of terrible transcendence—remains one of the most haunting passages in the Stone journals.Two men entered that valley who would never leave it. The seven who survived would carry the weight of what they witnessed for the rest of their lives, bound by an oath of secrecy that would echo through their descendants for two hundred years.Some knowledge demands a price. Some truths are paid for in blood.