the prose is a little terse for my liking, but that's a matter of personal taste, and i enjoy a lot of the more incidental worldbuilding going on throughout the piece — the effect of feeling like a small peek into a much larger world is achieved quite nicely. what i don't enjoy are the more direct expositional asides, where the narrator takes two or three paragraphs to talk at me about various aspects of the local environment. they break up the pacing of the story, and i find them dry and uninteresting. i would suggest cutting everything that can't nicely be integrated into the overarching narrative and ending on the wanderers finding safety without the two paragraphs of additional worldbuilding in the middle of that sequence.
as for the twisted time, i didn't really find that it came across at all in the piece, unfortunately. the bones being of the same species as the wanderers isn't sufficient to imply that idea on its own when it's suggested that this group is merely a small component of a much larger effort to explore and understand this world, i don't think. i assume at least a little subtlety is desired, but one extra little crumb of familiarity for the narrator could go a long way, i think.
