Foreword
People of Earth who find these words, I hope you’re of the patient sort. I’m not sure what you expect and I can’t promise you’ll come out of this satisfied or any wiser. What I’d like to present you with is a story of a place separate from the one we live in.
I’m working with ideas and information that don’t belong to me. I’m not sure how I’ve received them but the process certainly wasn’t lossless. We’re built to see things as stories so that’s how I’ve processed it and that’s how I’ll try to tell it, but that's not what it is. Whatever distant drumbeat thrums through realities and times has found some resonance with my mind, which must be equally stretched thin.
So while the characters will speak English, they’ll want the things we all want, they’ll be stuck in our patterns and the rhythm will be that of our adventures, none of these things will be true. But with a little patience, maybe we’ll see the truth pounding against these words, trying to get out.
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First Transmission:
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
God ripped the world apart, so that others might have their own.
A boy was born with his world busted, no known function, all alone.
In between I glimpsed the truth: the sleeping fire in steel and stone.
-Coyote.
It was a small town, and its name hadn’t mattered. The people there were small people who concerned themselves with small things and watched a small horizon not expecting anything but another small day ahead of them. This was until the ground around this small town cracked and mountains and other big things started thrusting themselves into existence around them.
It was no real cause for concern for the people in this town; what concerned them was all the curious people that came to look and wonder and concern themselves with all this new stuff popping up. These new people, who thought themselves big, whose concerns and interests and curiosities were big, decided to stay and explore. The small people learned to make due with their new neighbors and what was a town was now a city.
The names of cities matter, and so this one was called Speculation City, since those who were given to naming such things were also endlessly trying to figure out just exactly what was going on there. Enough time passed that the small people whose small horizon was interrupted forgot they had been there before such things – really, they couldn’t be bothered with holding on to such worrisome details – and the small town whose name hadn’t mattered faded from memory.