This looks like a job for inadvisably applied magic if ever I saw one.
People needed to believe in gods, if only because it was so hard to believe in people.
I don't read an awful lot of fiction and when I do, it tends to be lightweight stuff.
A bad hunter chases. A good hunter waits.
Don't stick your nose where someone can pull it off and eat it.
It was a backwards memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline.