The river has claimed the church. A few walls rise from a small island in its center; the rest of the jumbled white stones jut from the waters or lie scattered on the bank. From the state of decay, I think it must have been abandoned long before the world was. How many years did it stand here, stones falling one by one, as the river shifted and wriggled across the landscape like a restless serpent? Was it drowned before or after humanity’s end? And why did they leave it in the first place?

A cluster of low bushes dotted with tiny white flowers grow beside the river. I push my way through them and cross to the island, hopping from stone to stone. Some shift under my weight, but my balance is good and by the time they move I am already leaping to the next. I splash into the shallows in the shadow of a still-standing wall and shake water from my feet as I step out onto the island, into what was once the church.

Most churches here were made of wood, not stone, and I wonder at the story of this one. The love and effort put into its construction. The circumstances that forced its abandonment. To work so hard to create a thing, one intended for such an important purpose, only to abandon it to the wind and rain.

The spire has toppled, plants grow through the cracked floor, and what would have been the altar now lies under several feet of swift, clear water. The elements long ago washed away every trace of the beliefs this building was dedicated to. Papers and pews, statues and stained glass, all long gone now. The empty arch of the doorway opens before me, the sparkling water of the river and rolling green hills visible through it. Among piled stones, three broken walls are all that remain. The crystal blue dome of the sky replaces the long-gone roof, and under it, the church has become dedicated to something else entirely. It could be a temple to any religion, to all of them, or to nature itself; the sky is a big enough ceiling to contain all of that and more.

A heap of stones in the open doorway could be a new altar. The setting sun that shines on them, and the yellow flowers around their base are a golden offering. The water calls out its sermon to the audience of droning insects. And to me, strange interloper in their sanctuary.

But I search my memories and murmur a prayer or praise to every god I know. One set of memories comes from a professor of theology, who collected religions like precious treasures, a dragon’s hoard of conflicting truths. There were so many gods. So many ways to worship each one. It’s all pointless now, their temples broken, their books turned to dust, their followers gone. Still, I won’t let the river take them.

My voice is quiet amid the sound of summer. The babbling river all but drowns it out, and the words do not spread beyond these broken walls, do not reach the green hills, the blue sky, the wild, uncaring vastness of the world. But they are not meaningless. I won’t let them become meaningless.