The Vaster Wilds

by Lauren Groff

While he lived alone in his stock of a tree, he spoke to himself in a latin that in time lost all of its declensions and tenses and moods and participles and, like his sanity, became a fabric of tatters and holes.

And this meant that when the godliest of the ministers in the city and in this awful place, back in the fort, spoke on god’s behalf they were only speaking a mote of the far greater truth. They were only speaking the part of god that they themselves could glimpse. And this truth was only as small as they themselves were small.