I was sitting on my father's shoulders as we made our way to the Smithy, gazing at the awe-inspiring outline of the Sunrise Mountains that dominated the view to the north of our village. They were so tall and yet so faint and far away that I had first mistaken them for the shards of a shattered moon that were somehow locked in a geostationary orbit around our planet (that is, after I had gotten over my initial bout of 'the sky is falling' induced panic). Not that I knew if such a thing was even possible, but them being mountains hadn't even occurred to me.

"How tall do you think the mountains are, Dad?"

"This again, Heller?" I could tell Jaws was smiling, even though I couldn't see his face from my vantage point, "and I suspect you want a different answer this time, correct?"

I was grinning as well. This was a game we played sometimes, one of my favorites, and I loved it for many reasons - not the least of which being that my father was the only person I knew who actually put enough thought into his answers (even when speaking with a child) that I could use them as part of my ongoing scientific investigations. This world didn't seem to have knowledge of trigonometry - or any advanced math, really - so everything was done through craftsmanship, experience, and a very thorough apprenticeship system; and it was probably this same apprenticeship system, combined with years of experience building and repairing complex tools and weapons, that allowed my father to develop his critical thinking and analytical skills to a level that far and away surpassed those of everyone else I knew (like Mom, for instance).

"Yeah! I already heard that 'nobody knows because they are so tall that they are beyond what we can hold in a dream', or that 'they are taller than the sky itself', or that 'the sun hides behind them when it is resting, yet they are so tall that not even a hint of light can be seen'."

Jaws went silent after that, but I knew better than to rush him. Pushing him to answer quickly would only result in him apologizing and saying that he didn't know, but if I gave him enough time to ponder it he might surprise me again. All the things I mentioned had been examples of 'answers' that I had received from my mother, and I noticed that reciting them all lumped together made them sound even sillier than they had already. I wanted a Blacksmith's answer, dammit!

As I let him ponder, my attention turned to the houses around us. Measurements in general were a little strange in this new world, and I wondered how tall these buildings would be if placed side-by-side with structures from Earth. An example of something I found odd about the village architecture was how none of the doors I could see would be too short, or too narrow, for my father to pass through... yet he was more than half again as tall as the average person on the street. To put it in 'English' numbers, if I assumed the average person was just over five feet tall, then my dad would be at least eight feet tall and my mother would be just under five feet. So why would the doors be built to such an extreme, since giants like Jaws were less than one percent of the population? Was it because anyone could have a child who was randomly super tall and wide, therefore they future-proofed the design? Or, maybe, because of the beast attacks we designed our buildings so that even the larger monsters could enter and exit (while we were safely hidden in the fortress, of course) without unduly damaging the walls, windows, or doorways?

Another minor oddity was the trees and bushes that were scattered around town in neat little green-space parks. The plants themselves resembled those from Earth enough that I couldn't readily tell the difference (having never studied botany or plant biology to any notable extent), except that they were just... a little smaller, and thinner, than looked natural to me, and I couldn't help but wonder if the soil lacked-

"The mountains get bigger."

I jerked in surprise when Jaws finally began speaking, having been so lost in my thoughts that I had almost forgotten my earlier question entirely. Luckily, his shoulders were so insanely broad that from my perspective they were more like a mobile platform than a body part, so maintaining my balance was easy (the downside was, of course, that I was so high up that I didn't know if I would even survive a fall).

Wait... did he just say the mountains grow? "Bigger? What do you mean, Dad?"

"Everyone says they stay the same size no matter where you are, like the stars or the sun in the sky. Do you recall what I told you about the Clearest Day?"

"Oh, yeah, about the day before I was born, when you could see shapes in the sky in every direction?"

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"Not just shapes, Heller. Mountains. But only the tops, as if they were floating above us, disconnected from the world, like the stars themselves. Except they were stationary, and all of them were of a height with the Sunrise Mountains we can see every day. An old friend of mine told me this happens a few times a generation. A Clearest Day, when the faint outline of the Sunset Mountains appears over there," he said, pointing southwards in the opposite direction of the much closer Sunrise Mountains, "towards the City."

I sat in contemplative silence upon his wide shoulders, attempting to reconcile this new information with what I had already discovered in my quest to calculate the size of this new world of mine. But what could cause such an effect? Wasn't there a maximum distance things could be seen through an atmosphere, simply due to refraction or something? Did that mean the mountains actually poked outside the damn atmosphere!? But no, that was silly... right? Perhaps, because the air got thinner the higher up you went, there was therefore less obstruction from the atmosphere, and-

Jaws began speaking again after a long silence, breaking me out of my thoughts as I refocused on his words, "We are told the Sunset and Sunrise mountains exist outside our world, not as part of it. But the mountains..." His steps slowed down, and in the distance I could see the Smithy at the edge of our village, smoke lazily rising from the chimneys over each forge, as it sat like a squat monolithic firebreathing toad beside the fortified structure that served as its emergency shelter (but was, in reality, mostly treated like an overflow storage room). "I visited a... place... before you were born, Heller, deep in the foothills between us and the Sunrise Mountains. And the Sunrise Mountains themselves... to my eye, Heller, they were bigger. But the difference was slight, and none noticed but I."

He was silent for the rest of the journey, and I used the time to think about his words. It was an odd answer, and it didn't exactly provide any easy solutions to my query, but that in itself wasn't something new to me - a lot of the answers I got from my fellow villagers were quite weird from my perspective, and often contained more superstition and mysticism than fact. What struck me more was what he didn't say... and I wondered if there was more going here on than I suspected.

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All manner of monsters and beasts inhabit the areas around the mountains, with the weakest generally living closest to our lands, where rocky hills slowly turn into the forests and gentle plains upon which we dwell, but they are not generally considered to be a serious threat to our village. The reason for our relative safety was due to the constant efforts of the Garrison of House Flameward, which controls the land to the north of the City – and the soldiers of that garrison were exactly those red armored warriors I had seen during the attack a year ago.

North Stone Village itself was founded hundreds of years ago, along with three other initial villages that were each established a three-day walk from the City; East Stone Village, South Stone Village, and West Stone Village (someone obviously had a very imaginative naming sense back then). With the four initial settlements as a starting point, farms, garrisons, outposts, and even smaller villages had spread across the land.

Mother told me that our people had always lived in the City, with its massive walls and impenetrable gates keeping us safe from the horrible monster-infested wilderness outside. Then one day a man fell from the sky, dropping directly from the embrace of the sun itself. He spoke little and listened to none, simply taking what food he needed and leaving the City, not even heeding the leaders of the Four Great Houses when they warned him of the dangers beyond.

Years passed, and everyone assumed him dead… but strange things were happening out in the wilderness surrounding the City itself: Fewer and fewer monsters and dangerous wild beasts were spotted by the scouts on the walls. Eventually, word returned from the search parties the Four Great Houses had sent to rescue this man who was born in the sun - he needed no saving, for he himself was the Savior!

And thus began the legend of The Merrik. His arrival changed everything, allowing our people to finally leave the protection of the City and settle lands further afield. Mother didn’t go into the socio-economic impact such an event would have on a pre-existing culture (obviously) and I couldn’t exactly ask, but from the legends and tales she told me I had managed to piece a few theories together. Our culture had a severe taboo against large families, probably due to overcrowding issues in the City when it had been the only space available for people to live. Then this Merrik figure arrived, killed the most dangerous creatures around the City, and we could suddenly spread out for the first time – but we did so quite slowly due to our deeply ingrained cultural habit of having small families, and fewer children. On top of that, it was still much more dangerous outside the City than within, even with The Merrik guarding us, so thick stone fortifications needed to be built before any settlers could 'safely' move into new areas - fortifications to hide and shelter our people until The Merrik arrived to save them.

Legends asserted that this mysterious savior was immortal, and as far as I could tell no single individual has ever noticed him age over the dozens of generations that had passed since his arrival. When I questioned her, my mother even confirmed that he looked exactly the same now as he did when she saw him as a young child herself - a short old man who spoke little, and moved so quickly he was only seen when he wished to be. But it struck me how he had looked so... frail and ancient, despite his great power, and some of the earliest tales described him as handsome, or as having a full head of luscious hair. These minor details were discounted by my mother as mere embellishments, yet I found them disturbing as hell.