From a Story I'm writing

James sat by the dancing flames of the camp fire digging through the assorted supplies of his bag in search of something. His fingers strayed across the book of mostly blank pages his youngest sister had given him two years before. He felt again the loss of all he had known. The harsh truth was that his father and sisters had passed away “years beyond counting” ago. A grim smile touched his lips as he remembered Rimnik’s words about the country he had called home. He pulled out the journal and read his own words from that now distant time.

There is a balance, perhaps a simple balance, seemingly mastered by the majority of the people I of the Faith I have met. This balance is between the living out of what most would call “a normal” life and the duty to do the will of God. They go on living as if it were simply the way it is supposed to be. But what of the task left undone? The task The Almighty set: for his people to bring His message to all the world. Do we truly march toward this goal? Or do we live in blissful, sometimes willful ignorance of our duty unfulfilled?

And I do see some people, some assemblies, laboring towards this goal. But their numbers seem few. How many are idle for every one who is active? And what have I done? I have been idle! Asleep! Frozen! Mere questions about small things enough to stop me before even making tracks in the dirt just outside my door. I am paralyzed by the all the scholarly dogmas that swirl about. I am paralyzed because I would not bind myself to the minute doctrines so many believe are written in stone. So I seek a different way to further the Faith, to find my function, my use to God, but slow is the finding of it. Perhaps the texts of the ancients will be of some help.

He had written it the day that the School of Stars had begun experiments on the samples from the planet nearest their star on the day they had begun unleashing the ancient forces that took him from his home and erased it from the memory of all but the most tenacious of historians. A breed in rare supply from what he had seen of this new world. And what of the Faith? What had Lord Addamon called it…? Whatever its name now, there were only murmurings of an underground in the Empire he had escaped. James put his forehead in his hands and prayed for deliverance in the north land into which he fled. He prayed for a refuge from the hatred that seemed to nip at his heels.