Lost in thought

Matthew slipped his legs over the edge of the twenty-story building roof, sliding down into a seated position, his heavy armor clanking down around him as he sat. He rested the tip of his sword on the - what was the word? Concrete, that was it - beside him, resting his arm around the hilt and using it as a rest. Only a few months ago, he never would have dreamed of committing such a blasphemy, but much had changed since then. After all that time, he still didn't fully understand what had happened.

They told him that this was his same world, but Matthew had a hard time believing that. They looked at him like he was insane, but they had a hard time doubting what he could do. He felt the same way about them. These were men and women who wielded crossbows without strings, bows, or bolts. They fired hot fire in the shape of arrows. He knew what they were like. How the bolts burned, and how they sliced through your skin and muscle and bone like a knife through bread. It had punctured his armor without effort. Torn through his shoulder. It was a wound that, by all rights, should have ended with him without an arm. But those men, with their weapons like that, could heal those wounds as well. Almost instantaneously.

It was like magic. And what they could do was terrifying enough as it was. But what they had done already was scarier than anything else he could have imagined.

He could see the wonders of what must have been their world. The magnificent buildings that they had built and forged, unlike anything that was possible in his own world. The one he sat on now was small compared to the rest. Virtually nothing compared to the buildings that stretched as far and as high as the eye could see. He was but a smudge of dirt among them.

But they were broken. Shattered. Torn to pieces, threatening to fall on the people below them and crush them, forcing the lives from their breaths. But it would have to fight with the people themselves. They were the ones who had destroyed these. Who had torn those holes in the walls miles above the surface of the earth, just so that they could throw people out of them to their deaths.

These people scared Matthew. Their world scared him. They told him it had been thousands of years since he had been born. That their ancestors had talked fondly about the time and people that he had lived amongst, like they were telling fairy tales. That they looked back on his time as a starting point of sorts. But if this was what his life and his livelihood had started...

Where had he gone wrong?