Come All Ye Faithful
And never shall the church close its doors upon the faithful.
Or, so the saying went.
In practice, there were some circumstances in which high minded ideals did not seem to fully translate into practice. The church spoke for the gods and opened its doors to persons from all walks of life so long as they sought counsel with the same heavens; the church would never turn away the sick, the hungry, the homeless; the church’s doors were always open. Except when they were not. Except when it would not. Except when open doors or too-generous hands would mean less-full plates for the gods’ chosen or missing goblets stolen away in the night by seeking fingers looking either to fill their pockets or simply their stomachs.
As he grew, Zekiel struggled ever more to understand the balancing act of True Faith and what some liked to call ‘practicality’ or the real world. He had never understood the differentiating line and he had hoped years would make the distinction clearer, but they seemed only to blur it further and disappoint him, the more he saw where his superiors chose to draw the line.
But who was he to judge?
Just an acolyte. Still young. Still naive. Surely, as he had been told, he just did not understand. One day, the fact that in the bitterest hours of winter when the snows fell deep and white on the cobblestones of Pajore’s streets and being locked out in it was a death sentence to those with nowhere to turn the Sanctum still barred its doors from ten nocks on the clock until dawn—one day, that would make sense to him. One day, the fact that they had food to spare for him if he wandered to the kitchens and plead hungry but if he did so with someone with half as much meat on their bones as he in tow, he would be scolded for dragging stragglers into the kitchens—that too, would make sense to him. One day he would understand that it was the gods will, no fault of the church, that after the longest nights, part of the morning ritual would be to have the grounds outside the Sanctum checked for bodies which had huddled against it and breathed their last breath there, not to survive until morning.
One day he would understand.
Until that day, on every day in between and after, he supposed, he would still rise to pray before dawn. Before the Sanctum’s doors opened to the public, when the candles in the long halls had not all yet been lit, and when the spaces of the church were filled only with quiet and promise for a new day not yet birthed. He enjoyed those moments.
Moments like this one—or, like it until he heard a foreign sound from the main prayer hall, where the public would be open to pray within.
But was it not too early…?
Distracted from his own path, Zekiel moved forward that way instead, his curiosity — as it was oft prone to do — getting the better of him.
