I’ve been sitting here for at least an hour. I have no way of checking this, but the sun has visibly moved along the sky. I sit cross-legged, baking in the sunlight and praying for rain. There is a question in my mind that I have been avoiding. I’ve been avoiding it since I arrive. The moment came when I stared at the mountain, and exploration looked back at me as some mindless promise of prehistoric tourism: all sites, sounds and colors, but with no home to return to.
Home. Interesting concept, given the circumstances.
I am arrived from a time of steel and stone to a time of mountains, ferns and field. I am of middle age, modestly fit before my uprooting, with clear vision and no burdens upon my physique. I look down upon my kingdom, an unclaimed panorama of life waiting for nothing in particular to happen. As a former resident of “nothing in particular”, I have to wonder how I might get back there. This plain offers all life’s infinite promise of industry and conquest, uncontested by any sentient soul save my own.
How have I been brought to this?
The last few days have been a blur. I avoided the question, or even the real thought of what could have done this. There are no answers offered, no signs or sigils carved in the landscape. Of whatever did this, I know only that it can. Perhaps this is all that it wishes known of itself.
My memory has been strange since I arrived. I know in my marrow that I am from somewhere else. I remember words, but not images. I recall faces, but not names. No names, not even my own. I can only recall the thin visceral of the world. Pushing past it reveals only a void, another silence, one that is no longer mine to rule.
I will rule this place, using what I can remember. I recall that things are possible, though I doubt I knew how then. I know that one can build a wheel, an axe, that there is metal inside of stone, of many types with many properties. I know that mathematics can clarify the properties and relationships of matter. I can recall no equations, nor any table, but I know that they are possible. I know that the moon is an orb on the other side of space. I recall that its gravity commands the tides. I recall other things. I should probably begin writing them down.
Before I begin my record, before my ranging gives me any peace, I must make my separate peace with the past. I am no longer of that place, that silence denied me. I will take from it only what I recall, and make of it whatever I choose.
There is a spur upon the mountain range north-west of my cave. I’m sitting on it now, and I have been for the past hour. It’s firmly rooted in the mountainside, about 150 km square, and lay at the last area of any real conifer density upon the mountain. It’s all scarce plants above.
There is a pile of shattered rock at my feet. I can make many small axes of this. I will do so. I will build a house of wood upon this slab and survey my unconquered, uncontested kingdom.