Hall of Infinite Doors
Emerging from your cavern, you find yourself in a wide, bowl-shaped valley studded along the edge with deep caverns. Small bushes and growth mark the ground before the caves, along with primitive attempts at sowing small gardens, the leavings of former meals and broken tools, and several wide, charry fire-pits. Footpaths snake randomly through the open green, and you see movement in the caverns, creatures similar to yourself, hairy and large and watching.
Memory meets with reality and provides you with a bit of information. You know these people are banded together as a tribe, for survival and mating, but have not grown sophisticated enough to work in true cooperation. There is no trade, and the dead are as often eaten as they are left or buried, and each man hunts and gathers for their own self and children and mate, nothing more. The mountain you reside beside is seen as a great gray god, and several of your people worship it, but some others do not. Your memory recalls worshipping it with the others, kneeling in the snow and placing your hands on the stone, but you have difficulty thinking like this with your new consciousness. You remember other things as well, but most importantly YOUR mate. Images of a small, hairy individual of opposite gender to you float throguh your head, along with images of a bloody and painful birth, and a son, your son, cooing and growing and hungry in the face of winter.
To your tribe, winter is white death. The people do not know how to cooperate to clear clumped snows and hunt sleeping bears, to burn holes in river ice and fish or climb the mountain in search of goats, lizards and sheep. Whatever you were before, you did not know these things either.
But you do now. You see the people, hungry and huddling, sleeping or hanging skins or gathering herbs or trying to understand the growth of plants. You have a language, though it is crude and often augmented with drawings, and you know that if you tried, you could lead them to greater triumphs, even in the face of the cold.
Memory meets with reality and provides you with a bit of information. You know these people are banded together as a tribe, for survival and mating, but have not grown sophisticated enough to work in true cooperation. There is no trade, and the dead are as often eaten as they are left or buried, and each man hunts and gathers for their own self and children and mate, nothing more. The mountain you reside beside is seen as a great gray god, and several of your people worship it, but some others do not. Your memory recalls worshipping it with the others, kneeling in the snow and placing your hands on the stone, but you have difficulty thinking like this with your new consciousness. You remember other things as well, but most importantly YOUR mate. Images of a small, hairy individual of opposite gender to you float throguh your head, along with images of a bloody and painful birth, and a son, your son, cooing and growing and hungry in the face of winter.
To your tribe, winter is white death. The people do not know how to cooperate to clear clumped snows and hunt sleeping bears, to burn holes in river ice and fish or climb the mountain in search of goats, lizards and sheep. Whatever you were before, you did not know these things either.
But you do now. You see the people, hungry and huddling, sleeping or hanging skins or gathering herbs or trying to understand the growth of plants. You have a language, though it is crude and often augmented with drawings, and you know that if you tried, you could lead them to greater triumphs, even in the face of the cold.