Experience
Slowly we climbed into our mechanical chariot, a far cry from the glorious vessels of old, and made our way outside the modern urban wasteland. As we left the city behind us, we began to climb a sylvan hill with grazing cattle and streams twixt us and the forest. At the pinnacle of this tiny mount, we reached the domain of our master - a man of great knowledge in ancient ways, as formidable as any druid of yore. From there, we moved further beyond the bonds of the modern into a land seemingly unchanged in a century. But a century was the most minute of timescales which we were to encounter on our journey. Our leader brought us to the site, where gazed 'pon the risen stones from the outside. Amazing in their engineering but little more. Soon, though, they would loom larger in our minds than any monument of the current era. As he brought us into the circle, the world outside seemed to fade. The agrarian society outside diminished to a rustic life of husbandmen and the paved way receded into naught more than a donkey path. We were entering a place of greatest power, having been revered for nigh on four millennia. Our modern-day druid began our ritual, kindling a small fire - but a shadow of the bonfires of the ancients yet imbued with the same spirit and life as any fire lit in this place. The goddess blew forth with a sweet breeze, tinged with a joy in its cool breathe that welcomed revelers back to her domain. Slowly we circled the fire, three times always keeping our right side to the hand of the sun. Soon the goddess of summer would burn, dying into ashes as the leaves fell around us. The power of the gods and goddesses and of the ancestors of many eras imbued us with an otherworldly strength. As the ashes blew into the wind, so thus our spirits took flight with the energy of this place. Our communion had taken place and our connection to the earth and the fundamental divinity of ages long past was almost tangible. It pained us to take our leave of that otherworld portal but we returned to the land of pavement and twenty first century society - always retaining in our souls the images of the universe we had just glimpsed.