Work Text:
It wasn't supposed to happen like this (or so he thought) but the device stopped working. Out of gas, he supposed.
He finished the mission (alas) so they won't even know he's missing. He knows he turns up tomorrow, 40 years older. He can't hope for an earlier rescue when they don't expect him back otherwise. He can't repair the device, either, because he's stuck 43527 years in the past and they don't understand the tech.
Pirma understands him, though. For a total barbarian, Pirma's been pretty great, and he's sweet, and he's handsome. It'll be an okay 40 years.
==
You took a risk to go back in time and be a figurehead for people you didn't understand, didn't know, didn't even like that much. For them to have chosen you, idolised you. You shaped them so strongly.
Is that fair? That their changes didn't come from within their group but from an outside, future, interloper? That their whole culture was your invention?
True, you invented nothing: future-you put together the ideas from what came before, what past-you decided, who past-you was. You were because you are, and you have always been like this.
But where did you come from?
==
Truefire is an ancient weapon of unimaginable devastation. As we knew it, it burned many times hotter than regular fire, rained radiation, incinerated utterly. Its shockwave cannot be outrun. The sole scroll we found (in the great library at Alexandria) advised: two parts white ethesia from 64 BC, dissolved in three parts third century aqua regia, simmered in Theosebia's crystal retort at Panopolis in the fourth century.
We temporally hopped around for ingredients. We made truefire. And then we returned to destroy the library, for such a weapon cannot be allowed. But we failed, and it persists, and it destroys.