It was not the fact that the trees in a radius several hundred meters all around had been snapped like twigs before the tidal wave of otherworldly energies that was so startling to her, nor was it that the cultists devoted to this ritual had been rendered into red, pulpy smears on the forest floor. More frightful and incomprehensible even than the Euclidian despotism of the forms of things being definite and unchanging — the vastness of her being having been compressed into this terrifyingly static geometry of orderly atoms arranged into an abominably symmetrical sinew — was the unerring linearity of one moment following the next. She sat, an utter foreigner to this body describable as an attractive, naked woman, petrified at the ineluctable, immutable reality that the rite had ensnared her in.

Her senses were so limited now, a pitiful electrochemical perception that was blind to most of the spectrum of electromagnetism, and deaf to the gibbering chatter of psionic undertow. How did these creatures fathom this truncated existence?

"Are you alright?" A man's voice asked from somewhere behind her. He spoke slowly, cautiously, as if afraid of scaring her away. Communication by the crude vibration of molecules was so strange to her, who had spent uncountable aeons where thought and being were one and conceptions and meaning were passed directly between melded minds.

This body possessed unfamiliar instincts, a response to the new sensation of fear that she should take up locomotion, to scurry away and cover herself that her exposed form not be seen. More from unfamiliarity with command of muscle and bone than from prideful, stubborn resistance to the concept that she might have been reduced to a prey animal, she remained still as he closed distance.

He pursed his lips, whistling as he surveyed the gore-spattered clearing. "Jesus. What happened here? I thought I saw a meteor land in these woods. There was an awfully bright light and… I guess none of that matters now. Are you okay?"

Something about the flutter of expressions on her face must have inspired his pity as he offered her his coat. The comfort of its warmth was an unexpected novelty. He offered a hand and she took it, escorted on uncertain legs that learned with each step the process of putting one foot in front of another to his cabin.

There came a round of questions she could answer only through silence and bewildered stares. He cared about things such as what her name was, if she had any family, and how she had come to those woods, not suspecting that the answers would be as outside the capacity of his mind to comprehend as it was for her how things in this world consisted of distinct, distinguishable objects, delineated neatly from one another as a matter of course.

The progression of time