The touch-stone temple sat alone atop a wide green hill flanked by ancient groves of shade-giving fruit trees. The temple was hewn from large black stones which fit together so immaculately that the seams between them could scarcely be felt with the tips of one’s fingers. Inside the temple was a dark room; no more than twelve feet to a side, in which a small stone altar with four fat, waxen candles softly warming the space, if offering very little light. The entrance to the temple is a low, three-pointed arch. The keystone of the arch is worn smooth from the momentary touches of ten thousand hands. It is the ritual of the temple that each pilgrim must lay their hand upon the stone as they enter; at once submitting their own memories to the vast pool of consciousness held within its mineral depths even as they draw from those same experiences.
The domain of the temple is memory; that is the gift and the currency it accepts. Within each stone is a library. Innumerable moments of precious inhuman experience rest secure beneath their unyielding exteriors; at once as close as the next gentle touch and confined to the impossible distance their alien natures demand. The humans do not understand why the smooth black stones of the temple capture memories this way, nor can they comprehend the true scope of experience held within them. Needless to say, the Kowo’ki tribe did not build the temple. Indeed, the first ones to tentatively step foot onto the fitted floor of the sanctuary nearly lost themselves to the psychedelic experience of physical contact. It is in the nature of humans to take, and it took many months and many attempts until the tribe discovered the fragile process of exchange with the stones, submitting fragments of their own perception to the Earth in trade for slivers of their distant past. It was in this way that the Kowo’ki came to learn of the first stonemasons who crafted the temple. Each memory began with the fleeting sense of warm reaching fingers grazing cool stone; a revelation which taught them of the touch-stone ritual, and permitted pilgrims entry into its quiet chamber for the first time.
It was a grand day for the wise men of the Kowo’ki when they learned that specific memories could be gifted to the Earth. It was not easy. Memories swam and spiraled from the stone to one’s psyche and back again like intertwined threads that tangled and writhed and abhorred the control of a finite mind. Even so, the will of the tribe was great, and in time they proved that certain memories could indeed be accessed or stored away in stone. It was these most precious memories, the fabric of their own history, that the wise men stored safely away in the altar. Other members of the tribe selected different stones. Precious places to store their own personal memories; tender moments with lovers, celebrations and festivities, and the bitter-sweet losses that remind them that they lived. In precious little time, a hundred unique souls invested the world as they knew it into the infinite expanse of the touch-stone temple. The temple was surely not a living thing, yet it lived a thousand vibrant lives through their mortal eyes. In turn, the Kowo’ki lived on in the shared moments held within the aged stones.
Time has no choice in its passing, drawing the world from one precious past to an ever-present now. In their own time, the Kowo’ki passed on with the world and became that strange New Thing which does not know itself. That New Thing which the Kowo’ki became struck out from the jungles of their ancestors and built concrete palaces among glass towers which scraped the sky and glittered like fine jewels. The New Things bound their stories – their myths and histories and desires – in small wooden tomes in vast temples of knowledge. They neglected these new temples, and were content in their own inadequate perceptions. Some among the New Things were entranced by the promise of lost knowledge and returned to their ancient jungles and vast oceans to recover what once their people knew.
The touch-stone temple did not wait for them. It had no more choice in its continued existence than time in its perpetual march. When the archaeologists, geologists, and surveyors at last came upon the dark structure, it offered up its gift of recollections as easily and as chaotically as with the first ancient Kowo’ki to lay skin to stone. Much like the temple itself, the treasures of the stones were murky at first; buried beneath millennia of creeping vines and the embrace of verdant moss, yet they remained. The New Things were not used to the unfamiliar magic of stones, and were slow to embrace its simple trade, but the promise of answers to questions even yet unknown proved far too enticing. After much debate, they elected to preserve most of the temple, removing only two of the smallest stones from the facade to be shipped across open water and through open air to their new homes in marble strongholds where they might be seen and touched by others.
The New Things never did unravel the mystery of the stones. Their unknowable depths eluded the best applications of science, and resisted all attempts to fit them into the otherwise reasonably ordered universe. The touch-stone temple was an inexorable and unique mystery, yet even it could not hold the scientists’ fascination forever. It remains where it has always been, visited often by strangers who touch the stones and accept its ancient trade, yet left well enough alone to preserve an air of peace. Likely it will remain long after the New Things pass on and whatever mortals next rise to dominate the world. The broad scope of time is a near infinite expanse, and the stones will stand to see it all.