The wind blew, and Thomas stared out over the fields lit by a setting sun, back to the congregation gathered behind him. His tongue ran over his teeth – his teeth, his own teeth – and he smiled. It was not a smile that expressed pleasure, but something more basic, more primitive.

“The regularity of civilization should not match the regularity of life, the ascent of man should not look like the ascent of a budding plant, a universe set to bloom by a fern, an elder god of some bygone age when giants traveled, unheeding of the physical laws they trampled underfoot. Unknown gods, whose footfalls set or ended our existence before our universe has even begun to bud, when it was an egg, whose first unfurling was an explosion the likes of which we tiny agents of man will never know.”

The voice came from behind him, rhythmic, melodic, beautiful. Thomas was careful not to pay too much attention to the words, which he knew, from past experience with these sermons, would tug at his mind in a very uncomfortable way.

“Life, begun as a crawling machine, teeth and nothing more, turning into ever-greater and more complex machines, with ever-finer and sharper teeth, gears set into gears set into gears, a mouthed monstrosity with no end, the world going into its maw - and life, flowing out.”

His lips twitched; he couldn't ignore them entirely. And they did have technology, here. Rockfall was home to industrialized magic; they didn't burn fuel, but instead mages powered the gears more directly, with a variety of spells. The bread he had been eating, had been summoned, he had learned as well – Norris was, apparently, a conjurer, and the bandages and flavorless bread he possessed in endless quantity were the staples of the craft. Manna, as the summoned food was called, was cheap. The flavorful food he had grown accustomed to in the villages, made of real fruits and vegetables and meats and fats? That was a luxury good here.

“White. Purified by the tides. Moons, echoed by the rocks and the stones, sky and earth in unity. The reds of the sunset bleeding in from the edges; like lions, eating at their prey the red seeping into the soil. Life unto life unto life unto life. Each wave washes the other away, an arc, a spray, aching to touch the sky - life. Airborn. A thousand humming machines, pushing her aloft - the night sky has fallen and it shall take all the machines of man to plant her back.”

Thomas was whole again, but felt less than he had. The pain and agony were still marked in his mind; he was still afraid, deeply afraid, of the pain. The healing – the cheap healing of wounds that might be impossible to do anything about back home – had fixed his body. His mind teetered; he felt like he was walking a tightrope, and if he moved in any direction he'd plunge into the horror and misery he had thus far mostly successfully avoided embracing.

“The roar of a thousand motors humming, water streaming through the white-hot caves, metal cast and hammered upon ringing anvils, forging - what? A mechanism its creators cannot fathom, a creation of metal that strains and crashes its way out of the mountains it has been forged from.”

Thomas glanced back at the preacher, starting to walk along the path. He wasn't even certain what the … man? Thomas wasn't sure if the preacher was even human. He wasn't sure what the preacher was, nor what his sermons were even about. They all had a nightmarish quality, like something that should make sense, twisted beyond all recognition. Another preacher was ahead of him, speaking to a smaller crowd.

“You can't escape yourself. This, the other will have learned long ago. Subjective time, of course; it could be tomorrow that it learned it, in truth. Subjective time had passed in measures unknown to the other; it had long since stopped trying to count the eons, or even our lives, although it counts them still. They were so short as to be without consequence, they will be.”

This wasn't nearly as interesting, but Thomas paused to study the crowd who were gathered to listen; he supposed he could be counted among them, at the moment.

“It had watched a world blossom, and collapse in eternal fires. Several times, in point of fact, and though memory could deceive, the other suspects that it has seen the same worlds several times in its long existence. Observation was most of its existence; subjective time could pass in seconds to the eon, or hours to the millisecond. Its fondest memory will have been of a gaseous mote dancing across subjective eons. There is to be much to be learned from the verses.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Thomas shook his head, and started moving away from the increasingly erratic words. The city – and it was a city – of Rockfall had many of these preachers about. Prophecy, or whatever this was, was apparently part of the local culture and flavor. Behind him, the preacher continued.

“But you couldn't escape yourself. History cast a long shadow, and though its earliest memories rested on the shakiest foundation, there was inescapable shame. The grotesque realities had been masked by that first body; it had existed long enough now that it could sense the limitations its forms exerted upon it, and hindsight could be very clear indeed.”

Thomas found a bench and sat on it, looking around the streets. They were paved, here in Rockfall, and the buildings were three and four story structures made mostly of stone. There were more trees here – real trees – and wood wasn't so unusual. Mostly it was stone, however, as this community had apparently grown around several deposits of marble, long since depleted, but skills that had cut marble for export had turned easily enough to cutting granite for construction.

The street, though darkening as the sun set, was lit by golden lights, easily mistaken for electric streetlamps – but electricity was never so constant, so stable, so silent. They didn't so much as flicker. A city of magical streetlamps; it was breathtaking, even three days after arriving. A voice rose to his left, and Thomas glanced over, frowning to observe another person starting to gather crowds.

“All power over others is borrowed. There is no such thing as a gift of power; all such gifts have price tags. Know the price in advance.”

They really were everywhere, here. At least this one sounded more or less sane, and without the nightmarish quality that seemed to imbue so much of the words. Thomas relaxed, watching the – yeah, that was a woman underneath that hood – waving her hands about as she spoke loudly into the dusk.

“All power borrowed is borrowed with interest; an unknown price will always be higher than you expect, and may be higher than you can afford! Borrowing power gives others power over you. Lending power gives others power over you; you are responsible for how they use it. The only power you have over yourself is anonymity!”

Thomas sighed, and stood, starting to walk again. He had helped Trenton get the injured man to the healers, and then spent some coinage there himself, to get his teeth fixed, to get ... everything fixed. He was healthy, and the recovery of his teeth had helped a lot. Just … not as much as he had hoped it would have.

He'd then set up shop in a local inn; there was paying work here, and it wasn't helping twist grass to make nets. There wasn't just paying work – there was steady work. He was helping load a warehouse, and got a little bit of extra pay for working in his larger size, which let him lift heavier loads, and reach higher shelves. It did require him to basically wear a loincloth, but he'd found he just didn't care that much anymore; sometime in the past few weeks, his bashfulness – his insecurities? – had died. Thomas could probably work naked without minding too much, at this point.

The warehouse gig would last another couple of days, then he was going out with an excavation team, who needed some heavy lifting done at what, he gathered, was some kind of archaeological site. He'd paused to ask around, before accepting the job, and they weren't working in a crypt, or a mass grave, or anything like that; apparently they were just investigating an old mine to see what techniques had been used to dig it out. The people he'd talked to had regarded it as boring, which sounded perfect for Thomas, as he'd had more than enough excitement in the last few weeks for his entire life.

“...outsiders have already won. Massive battle, where universes are mere -cells- of the beings at war. Outsiders won, the outsiders we see mere -maggots-, consuming our world simply because it's what is left. We are just last remnants of organisms, cellular defenses about to get swept away in a wave we cannot even see coming.”

Thomas gave that one a wide birth; the voice sounded half mad. He walked back the way he had come, winding his way towards the inn he had rented a room in for the night. Behind him, a voice called out loudly.

“The other knew what hell was! Hell was living forever, incapable of forgetting your sins! Existence in this evolved brain, as opposed to the existence imparted by clouds of gaseous matter, provides some brief respite, but the long years it knew it existed outside of any normative shape were tortuous; no sight, no sound, nor any of the dozens of senses it had since discovered, just thought. Eons of thought, to mull over its sins. And it is here, with us!”

Thomas shook his head as the hubbub of the prophets was drowned out by the hubbub of the inn's common area, crowds gathering around a man and woman on a stage, singing a bawdy song full of double rhymes, which was either about a prolific miner emptying every mine in town, or, well. Thomas shook his head as he passed through the common area, dodging a server moving past him carrying far too many full mugs of something frothy, making his way back to his bedroom.