“Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways” -- Sigmund Freud

  I awoke with a start. Though a purely intellectual one. There was no movement, no gasping for breath, only a sudden awareness of self and an instant panic. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t even feel my heart beating inside my chest.

  “No. NO! NOT AGAIN! I’m already dead, no more suffocating!”

  The panic slowly subsided, though I’ll admit it wasn’t a rapid thing. The lack of active suffering and the relative clarity of thought began to register. I lacked sensory input, but I wasn’t still buried alive. I hadn’t forgotten how that felt; possibly I never would. This wasn’t that. There’s no feeling of compression, no straining labor to breathe, no flush of adrenaline through the system, no sense of impending doom. Only quiet, absolute darkness and a sense that nothing was really going wrong.

  After a minute or two of calming down, with my mind settling from its initial racing, I began to take stock. “What the actual fuck just happened.” Okay, so maybe not calm just yet.

  *****************

  Recent events were a bit hazy, but some details were starting to come back. I’d been at work, on site at our project’s excavation site in northern Guatemala. I’d climbed down the simple ladder cobbled together from branches and vines to inspect the smooth plaster surface of a Late Preclassic floor and examine the remains of a smashed vessel (a Sierra Red chocolate pot with its characteristic waxy slip -- there’s information I’ll never use again...). 2000 years of additional construction and pedogenesis meant the unit was a pit, in the traditional sense, almost five meters deep through layers of cobble, midden, and earth, along with later floors and walls.

  The last thing I remembered was the annoyance and alarm of looking up to see some idiot tourists crowding the unstable edges of our neatly squared unit. The largest stone on the edge broke free from the earth under their feet, dropping quickly towards me. In a 1X1 test pit of this depth, there was nowhere to run. I raised my arm to protect my head and leaned away as best I could, but there was no escaping the blow. A sudden pain shot through my arm and shoulder, but that was survivable; the ensuing landslide of muddy soil and stone as the wall of the unit collapsed, rather less so.

  It’s an admitted occupational hazard for an archaeologist, and one I’d pondered before. Sand is the worst matrix for that sort of thing, but, given the early afternoon downpour that is a feature of the rainy season here, mud was a real concern and the tarps we’d erected only did so much. I had just enough time to think “well, this will make for a more dramatic obituary than a heart attack at the farmer’s market, at least”, and then it was all straining to stand or find a pocket of air, with no success.

  Unfortunately, it took several, deeply unpleasant, minutes before anoxia drove me unconscious and death claimed me.

  ****************************

  Well, not death, I don’t think. I didn’t actually get her name, and she didn’t seem open to answering questions. Not sure if all deities are like that, or just the one who snagged me. For that matter, I had the sense that any real awareness of the deity had been deliberately removed, leaving me with just a solid conviction that I’d been removed to a new world and given a task, and that there was no going back. I’m pretty sure I’d agreed to it, but it’s not like I had a contract or any clear instructions. The overall impression was of a warm, feminine presence, a sense of infinite patience, but transient attention, and an aura of divine authority, and that’s more than an agnostic like me had ever expected.

  I knew, without knowing how, that I’d been brought to a world of magic, in a universe similar to, but distinct from, my own. I knew I’d been given a specific mission, but not one with any immediate urgency. To be clear, I was explicitly NOT trying to take over the world or make it over in my image; rather, I got the impression that it was hoped I would provide guidance or advice to correct an issue I was particularly appropriate to address. What exactly that might be, I was left to discover on my own.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  That was a relief in some ways; I’d never been a fan of stories that followed a predetermined path – Joseph Campbell's hero’s journey being a bit too proscriptive for my tastes. While not a fan of all the uncertainty, I at least appreciated the implicit freedom to set my own path. Fate and predestination are deeply unsettling since they remove any significant choices or personal responsibility.

  As a college professor, a social scientist, and an observer of humanity, I had been all too aware of my limitations. Advice, I could do, if asked, but I long ago learned to keep most of my opinions to myself. I’d be grappling with the notion that gods are real for the foreseeable future and what that means for how religion functions in this new world. Magic, similarly, was going to take some mental readjustments, and I was curious about what that meant for social structures in my new world. That said, I got the impression my task was more technical than social, with social interactions mostly needed to organize efforts by those affected.

  *********************

  That’s a concern for another time, though! Where have I been dropped? And why am I in a state of sensory deprivation? And why isn’t that bothering me more?

  It slowly began to register on me that I wasn’t actually devoid of sensory input, it just wasn’t taking the form of traditional sight, sound, taste, touch and the like. There was still a sense of kinesthesia, but rather than an aging human male of middling fitness, I was a crystalline stone embedded in an earthen matrix. Truly, an odd feeling, and not one I can readily describe. Beyond that, I had a solid sense of everything around me in a spherical, but quite limited range. It wasn’t part of me, but everything in that range beyond the crystalline core was clearly “mine”. I knew which way was up and I could also feel the local magnetic field pointing towards the presumed poles. Oddly, there was a general sense of movement as well, roughly perpendicular to the magnetic field, but no obvious evidence of that. I could even feel the planet rotating and the ambient radiation that could penetrate to whatever depth I was at (or was given off by the decay of isotopes nearby). No sense of heat or cold, but just the passage of stray particles through my zone of control. I still possessed the same personality and the same emotional responses, but they were a bit muted by the lack of adrenaline triggered by the stresses involved.

  The matrix was uniform – a dark, loamy soil with granitic inclusions (I’ll spare you the Munsell evaluation). That suggests that either I'm not that far below the surface or there was a truly deep topsoil here. I could also, oddly enough, register the life within my spherical range – rootlets, seeds and spores, invertebrates of a few varieties, and even an array of microscopic organisms. Nothing exciting, and nothing I recognized from my earlier life, but fascinating, nonetheless. With little else to do, I spent a few moments watching the movement of life as it swirled through my zone of control. Assuming these creatures were of similar size to their analogues on Earth, I guessed my range to be about 50 cm radially in all directions from my crystalline form. Mostly I felt a vague hunger arise, and a desire to absorb the life around me.

  So, I’m a tiny stone? There’s clearly something I’m missing here. I know gods have a reputation for being inscrutable, but what kind of mission can I perform as a conscious but immobile object? I could really use an explanation or some form of guidance. Hint, hint?

  Divine guidance apparently not being forthcoming, all I could do was to examine my sphere of control. Losing interest in watching worms (or their otherworldly analogues) burrow through the soil, eventually I slipped into a generally meditative state, aware of the pulsing of life in my area, but without a focus on anything in particular.

  After a while, flickers of movement, like motion in the corner of my nonexistent eye, drew my attention. Frustratingly, any attempt to focus on them caused them to disappear; deliberately defocusing my attention, the motions became clearer, and I could feel something change within me. The flows of energy, though distinct from electromagnetic or nuclear forces, came into focus – mostly moving without much direction, drifting slowly like food coloring through water. Some, though, seemed more directed, apparently being pulled into my central core and recirculating.

  That was interesting, and potentially concerning, so I attempted to focus on that movement. Slowly, I could feel that circulation, like a constant tug on my being, albeit a slow and gentle one. With a distinct mental effort, I tried to speed the flow to see what would happen. Like a sudden burst of adrenaline, energy coursed through me, and it seemed as though I experienced some incremental growth in my core.

  If only I had some way to track what was happening to me, some way to track my current status!

  [Status]

  With a noticeable, if entirely inaudible, *ding*, a blue screen appeared within my sphere of control, intangibly within the soil yet clearly apparent.