The past is a story that is written—there for all to see, a solid testament. When a new author takes hold of it, the details change, and in so changing, sometimes the themes change as well, old aspects becoming blurred or being surgically removed, and new ones layered in over them, but at any given point it is a monolithic, self-contained work.

The future is a story that is told—shifting with each telling, adapting to the needs of the audience and the whims of the day. The end seems to change often, but the details less. It exists nowhere but on the fleeting wind carrying it from the visionary to the rapt attendee. Someday, it may be written down and preserved, but in so preserving, it will lose some of the vitality that made it magic.

The present is the teller of these tales, picking and choosing between the myriad visions whirling about in his head, discarding a hundred to find the time to write down one. The one that survives mourns for its lost brethren, but silently, in between the pages of the tale it has become.