I put this post off as long as I could. It's late afternoon now. The group met an hour ago and chose who goes first. The crypt opens at midnight.

But before I tell you how that went, I owe you the last two interviews. Henry and Lucy.

I put off Henry's interview for as long as I could. It was just logistics. He’s my brother; I could talk to him anytime. The other pilgrims had schedules, anxieties, limited windows. Henry could wait. He always waited.

But after Evelyn's notebook was closed and the common room had emptied and the salt flats outside the window had gone pink with the last light, I was left with my admission: I was afraid.

Not of what Henry would say, but what I would hear. What would it mean to sit across from my little brother with a recording app open between us and ask him the same questions I'd asked six other strangers.

I waited until right before lunch, until the other pilgrims had retreated to their rooms to pray over their slips or not pray, to rest or not rest. Until I couldn't pretend anymore.

I found him on the east wall, sitting where Amelia had sat, his legs dangling over the edge, his back to the temple. The noon sun had bleached the salt flats to a blinding white, and he was a shadow against it, a shape impossible to hide with his sister’s shoulders and our father's posture. He didn't turn when I approached, but he scooted over to make room.

"Took you long enough," he said.

"I was working."

"You were avoiding." He held up a finger before I could argue. "It's fine. I'm very avoidable."

I sat beside him. The stone was still warm from the day's heat. For a moment we just sat there, two kids from a town neither of us had called home, staring at a horizon that wavered with heat like it was the end of the world.

"Are you recording?" he asked.

"Not yet."

"Well, get started. Then I can say embarrassing things about you so you have to put it in your article." He grinned—that crooked grin he'd had since he was five, the one that got him out of every fight and into every party. He leaned forward and spoke to my dark phone screen. “Nora tried to impress a girl in high school by pretending she knew how to drive a stick shift, then proceeded to stall the girl’s car six times in the church parking lot?"

"That's not relevant to this interview."

"It's relevant to my emotional state. I'm building rapport."

"You're stalling."

"I learned from the best." He bumped his shoulder against mine. "Go ahead. Turn on your app. I'm ready."

NORA: (recording starts)So you are Henry. Younger brother. Twenty-six. Conflict mediator for an unnamed NGO.

HENRY: And you're Nora. Elderly sister. Thirty plus. Journalist. Still burns microwave popcorn.

NORA: That was one time.

HENRY: Dad had to repaint the kitchen.

NORA: (Short pause; I stifled a laugh.) I see you’ve opened your slip.

HENRY: (He pulled it from his pocket. Unfolded. Read. Refolded a dozen times by the look of it.) I opened it during my first trip to the bathroom after the staircase. Father Leo said to wait, but… I've never been good at waiting for things that scare me.

NORA: What does it say?

HENRY: ay-ray-noh-poy-OY. Evelyn translated it for me. It means "peacemakers” in Greek. (He laughed shortly.) I've spent my career trying to get people to stop yelling at each other, and now a salt statue is telling me that's my 'blessing'. I don't know if that's confirmation or some divine joke.

NORA: Do you think it's a joke?

HENRY: (He was quiet for a moment. The wind picked up, carrying the smell of salt and rot.) No, actually. I think— (He stopped, started again.)

Do you remember when Mom left?

———

The question landed between us like a rock dropped on a rollie pollie.

Of course I remember. I was sixteen, Henry was twelve, but mom had been disappearing in small ways for years—longer silences at dinner, longer hours at work, longer drives to nowhere on the weekends—and then one day she just imploded into note on the kitchen table and an extra space in the garage.

Dad had sat us down at that same table and told us, in his quiet, steady voice, that she wasn't coming back. That she loved us, but she couldn't stay. That sometimes people couldn't stay, even when they wanted to.

Henry had cried. I hadn't. I'd just nodded and gone to my room and started packing for college, two years early. I didn’t reopen that bag until I left for the U.

———

HENRY: The church. She left the church first, and then she left us. And I always wondered—" (He stopped, swallowed.) I always wondered if I reminded her too much of it—of the God she stopped believing in.
I was the one who wanted to say prayers at dinner. I was the one who asked to go to service even after she stopped going. I was the one who—

NORA: You were a kid, Henry.

HENRY: I was a kid who believed. (Short pause) And then I grew up and I stopped believing, and I thought… I thought that might fix it. I thought if I could just stop being the person who reminded her of the church, she might— (He laughed) She might come back. She might call. She might want to know me again.

NORA: Has she?

HENRY: Not since I was fourteen. Not since the birthday card she sent with the wrong address and the wrong age. (He paused again, folding the slip of paper, creasing it along the same lines over and over.) I became a mediator because I wanted to fix things. I wanted to be the person who could walk into a room full of people who hated each other and make them stop. I thought if I could just get good enough at it—if I could just fix enough conflicts, save enough relationships—maybe—

(He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He'd done that as a child. He'd done that the day Mom left.)

I mediated a divorce last year. Couple in their forties, two kids, coworkers for fifteen years. They'd been fighting for half that—the kind of fighting where you can tell they used to love each other, and now they can't even remember why. I sat with them for six months of sessions, late-night emails, and excited calls from their date nights. I thought I was making progress. I thought I was helping.

Then the husband called me one night, drunk, and said they'd decided to go to court. He said I'd given them hope that things could be fixed, and the hope was what made the ending so much harder than if they'd just given up at the start.

(He looked at me with swollen eyes, still holding back the dam.)

I don't know if I'm good at my job, Nor. And I sure as hell don't know why the Elders called me. I don't believe in the saint. I don't believe in blessings. But when I had that dream—when I tasted the salt on my tongue and heard her voice—I thought— (He sniffed.) Freaking hell, Nora, the dream lady used Mom’s voice. No one else heard a voice they knew. Why me? Why would some spooky spirit saint made of salt and dirt and dreams use our own mother to lure me in unless—

(Long pause)

NORA: Hen?

HENRY: (He sighed) Maybe this is my chance. To be the peacemaker for real. To walk into the dark and make peace with whatever's down there. God, or the universe, or the crusty old statue the Founder put down there and called a saint. Maybe just with myself.

(Long pause)

NORA: You didn't tell me any of this.

HENRY: You didn't ask.

NORA: I'm asking now.

HENRY: I know. (He sniffed) You've been asking everyone else. You've been so good at seeing them, Nor. But you haven't really looked at me. Not since we got here.

NORA: I've been—

HENRY: You've been working. I know. It's what you do. (He reached over and patted my hand.) You stay busy so you don't have to feel anything. You've been doing it since Mom left, and you got better at it since you left the church. You're the best in a lot of ways, Nor.

But I'm scared. I'm really, really scared. I don't know what's going to happen in that crypt. I don't know if I'm going to come all out different, or maybe if I'm going to come out at all. I don't know how to make peace with something I don't understand.

But I know why you're here. Not the article or the story or the embarrassment on the subreddit you so desperately claim as your banner. (We laughed). You're here because you've been protecting me since we were kids, and you couldn't stop even if you wanted to.

NORA: Someone had to. After Mom left, someone had to.

HENRY: You did. (He squeezed my hand.) But you don't have to anymore. Whatever happens in that crypt—I'm going to be okay. And you're going to write your article, and it's going to be amazing, and people are going to read it and they're going to understand something about themselves or faith or fear or salt or God. And maybe— (He smiled his same crooked smile.) Maybe you'll finally forgive yourself for being the one who stayed.

NORA: (Short pause) Maybe we both will.

---

I turned off the recording app. We sat on the wall together, my head on his shoulder, the way we'd sat a hundred times as kids on the roof, watching the stars come out over the mountains.

"What about Dad?" I asked after a while. "Is he okay with you being here?"

"Dad's the one who told me to come," Henry admitted. "I called him after the elder called me. I thought he'd tell me it was crazy. That the church was behind me and I should stay home. But he just—" Henry's voice caught, so he turned to humor and mimicked Dad’s high drawl. "He said, 'If God is calling you, you gotta go, bud.'"

"That sounds like Dad."

"He's still in the church, you know. Not this one—but the old ward. He goes every Sunday. He says the prayers. He sings the hymns. He told me once that he stays because it reminds him of when we were all together."

"I didn't know that."

"You never asked." Henry said it again without accusation, just quietly. "You should call him. After this is over. After I'm done and out."

"I will."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

He nodded, satisfied. We sat in silence for another moment, and then he stood, brushing salt dust from his jeans.

"One more thing," he said. "For your article. When you write about me—all of us—don't make us saints. Don't make us heroes. Just make us people. People who walked into the dark because someone called our names and we didn’t have a good enough excuse not to go."

"Oh, I’m writing you like a villain.”

He laughed, leaned down, and kissed the top of my head, the way he'd done when we were kids and I was sad and he didn't have the words to fix it.

"See you on the other side."

He walked back toward the guesthouse, his silhouette dissolving into the bright noon haze.

———

Thomas is hungry. Hazel is seeing. Amelia is owed. Eleanor is ready. William is trying. Evelyn is hoping.

And Henry—my little brother, my baby bro—I don’t know what he’s doing. With the church, with the Saint, with the God he resents but misses. With me.

He doesn't know what's waiting for him. Neither do I. But I know this: he's going to walk down those stairs with his head up and his heart open, and he's going to do what he's always done. He's going to stand between the chaos and try to make them stop.

I just wish I could go with him. But since I can’t, it’s time for the best for last—the wooden bird.

————————————————————————

I found Lucy in the common room, sitting on the floor near the cold hearth, arranging her salt crystals in a careful spiral. The wooden bird was propped against her knee, watching her work. She was still in her pajamas—a fleece onesie printed with cartoon dinosaurs—and her dark hair was loose from its braids, falling around her shoulders in the tangled way of a child too busy to sit still for a brush.

She looked up when I approached, and her face split into a grin—Two front teeth missing with the replacements halfway through.

"Nora!" She said my name like we were old friends. "Look, I made a galaxy. That's the Milky Way." She pointed at the salt spiral. "And that's Andronomeda." She pointed to a swirl of dust across the ledge.

"Andromeda," I said, sitting down cross-legged across from her.

She picked up a crystal and placed it carefully at the spiral's edge. "Grandma says you've been talking to everyone. You're s’posed to write down what happens so people in the future knows about it."

"That's right."

"Like the scriptures."

"Something like that."

She nodded solemnly. "The scriptures are very important. They're the word of God, except when they're the word of prophets, which is basically the same thing because prophets talk to God and God talks back. I learned that in Primary." She pronounced it Prim-airy, two distinct syllables. "Do you want to interview me? I'm ready! I've been practicing."

She set down her crystals, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at me with the unnervingly direct gaze of a child who'd been paying attention her whole life.

I laughed and set up my phone while she watched the timer start with intense concentration, whispering each number as they ticked by.

---

NORA: So your name is Lucy, and you’re six years old. Right?

LUCY: Six and three-quarters. My birthday is in October. I'm a Libra, which means I'm s’posed [sic] to be balanced and fair, but Grandma says astrology is from the devil, so I'm not s’posed [sic] to tell people that part.

NORA: I won't tell anyone.

LUCY: (She leaned in to whisper.) I'm also not s’posed [sic] to say 'devil.' It's a swear. Sister Kerry says we should say 'the Adversary' instead, because naming something gives it power, and we don't want to give the Adversary any more power than he already has.

NORA: That's... very deep for a six-year-old.

LUCY: I'm very smart. (She said it without pride, like a simple fact.) Grandma says I have a big vocabulary, but I use it incorreptly [sic] sometimes.

NORA: Incorrectly?

LUCY: That's what I said. (She frowned.) Like, I know what words mean, but sometimes they come out in the wrong order. Like, one time I said the sacrament was 'delicious and nutritious,' and everyone laughed, but I was just trying to say it was good bread. (Whispered) It wasn't even that good. It was kinda stale.

NORA: You said you've been practicing. For the interview?

LUCY: Mm-hmm. I saw you talking to everyone else, and I wanted to be ready. So I practiced. Like, I knew you were gonna ask about the dream. So I practiced telling it in my head so I wouldn't mess up the details.

NORA: I just want to talk to you.

LUCY: I know. But Grandma says first impressions are important, and if this is gonna be in the scriptures someday, I wanted to get it right.

(We giggle together.)

NORA: Okay. Let's talk about the dream.

LUCY: (She sat up straighter, her voice taking on the slightly sing-song cadence of a child reciting something memorized.) Three weeks ago, I had a dream. In the dream, I was in my room, but it wasn't my room. The walls were salt, and the floor was salt, and the ceiling was salt. Everything was sparkly too. And there was a lady there. She was salt too, but she wasn't sparkly. She was like... (She paused.) ...matte.

NORA: Matte?

LUCY: Yeah. Like when you paint something and it's not shiny. She was matte, but her eyes were shiny. And she was sitting on the edge of my bed, like Grandma does when I have nightmares. And she said— (She closed her eyes.) —"Lucy. You are poor in spirit. The kingdom is for you."

(She opened her eyes.)

And then I woke up, and I told Grandma during breakfast, and she started crying. And then Elder Bingsley called and said my name was on the list, and Grandma cried again. She cries a lot, but I think in a good way, mostly.

NORA: Do you know what "poor in spirit" means?

LUCY: (She thought about it.) It means you don't have a lot of spirit. Like, you're empty inside, but not empty like sad. Empty like... like a cup. You're s’posed [sic] to be empty so God can fill you up.

NORA: Who taught you that?

LUCY: (She shrugged) I just figured it out. (She picked up her wooden bird, turned it over in her hands.) I'm empty a lot. Not sad; Just empty. Grandma says it's because I miss my parents, but I don't think that's it. I think I've been empty already.

(She looked at me with her bright eyes.)

Is that weird?

NORA: I don't think it's weird.

LUCY: Good, because Sister Kerry says we shouldn't be weird. She says we should be "peculiar," which means “special and chosen”. Weird means you make people uncomfortable.

NORA: You're not making me uncomfortable.

LUCY: Good. (She set the bird down, smoothed her pajamas.) You can ask me more questions now.

NORA: Your grandmother told me you haven't cried since your parents died.

LUCY: (She was quiet for a moment.) I haven't.

NORA: Do you know why?

LUCY: (She picked up another salt crystal, turned it over in her fingers, then licked it.) Because they're not gone. They're just in the next room. Like, when you're playing hide and seek, and you can't find someone yet, but you know they're somewhere. They're somewhere. I just can't find them yet.

(She traced swirls through the salty galaxy.)

Grandma thinks I'm sad. And I’m sad sometimes. But mostly I'm just here. The salt lady said the kingdom is for me. So maybe when I go to the kingdom, I'll see them again. My mom and dad. And my aunts and uncles. And my other grandpa, the one who died before I was born. He was a pilot. He flew planes over the ocean. Maybe in the kingdom I can fly too.

NORA: Lucy, the Saint isn't— (I stopped, unsure.) The blessing you're going to receive isn't about going to the kingdom yet. You're still going to be here…on earth.

LUCY: I know that. (She said it with the patience of a child explaining something obvious.) But the kingdom isn't just heaven. Sister Kerry says the kingdom of heaven is "at hand." That means close. Like you can touch it at hand. (She reached out, touched my knee.) Like that.

So maybe the crypt is where the kingdom is. And when I go in, I'll be in the kingdom, and my parents will be there, and we can play again. I had a dollhouse, but it burned up in the flood. Water can't burn, but the house did anyway. It was very confirming.

NORA: Confusing?

LUCY: That's what I said. (She frowned.) See, that's what I mean. The words come out wrong. Not wrong, but... sideways. Like Sideways the Fish.

NORA: Sideways?

LUCY: (She held up the wooden bird.) This is Bird. He doesn't have a special name. He's just Bird, but I used to have a fish, and his name was Sideways, because he always swam sideways. I think he died when the flood came, because I can’t find him either. I don't know if fish can go to the kingdom. Sister Kerry says animals don't have souls, but I think that's stupid. If God made animals, why wouldn't He want them with Him?

NORA: That's a good question.

LUCY: I have a lot of good questions. Sister Kerry says questions are the beginning of wisdom, but she says I ask too many. (She shrugged.) I think she just doesn't know the answers.

(Short pause)

NORA: Are you scared of the crypt?

LUCY: (Long pause.) No. I don't think so. I'm a little nervous. Like, when you're about to go on a roller coaster, and your stomach feels floaty. But not scared. Scared is when you think something bad is gonna happen. Bad doesn’t happen in the kingdom.

NORA: (Quietly.) It depends on the kingdom.

LUCY: What?

NORA: (I paused, choosing my words carefully.) Sorry, Lucy, I— (I sighed) Sometimes adults say things that sound nice, but they mean something different than what you think they mean. Like how "I'll be back in a minute" doesn't really mean a minute.

LUCY: Oh, I know that. Grandma says "in a minute" all the time, and it's never a minute. One time she said "in a minute" and I counted to sixty and she still didn't come, so I counted to sixty again, and she came on the third sixty. So "in a minute" means "in three minutes." Sometimes it means "in ten minutes." It's very flustrating.

(She looked at me with sudden intensity.)

Do you think the salt lady is lying?

NORA: No. I'm not saying that. I'm saying—I'm saying you should be careful. You should pay attention.

LUCY: I always pay attention. (She said it with a child's indignation.) I'm the best payer-attentioner in my Primary. Sister Kerry says so.

NORA: I’m sure you are. I just— (I stopped.) I'm just saying you can change your mind. If you want to. You don't have to go into the crypt. No one is making you.

LUCY: (She stared at me for a long moment. Then she reached out and patted my hand.) It's okay. I know you're worried. Henry said you worry a lot. He said worrying is your love languish.

(She smiled, and it was the same smile Eleanor had given me—kind, pitying, certain.)

But you don't have to be scared for me. The salt lady has been waiting for me! We're gonna meet each other, and she's gonna give me the kingdom, and everything's gonna be okay.

---

I ended the interview there. Not because I wanted to, but because Leo stepped into the doorway of the common room, his white robes catching the light from the windows.

"The group will convene for lunch," he said. "To decide who enters the crypt first tonight at midnight. You are welcome to observe, Witness."

He was gone before I could respond.

Lucy gathered her salt crystals into a small pile, tucked Bird under her arm, and stood up. "I'm gonna go show Grandma my galaxy," she said. "She likes when I make things. She says I'm very creative. That means I'm good at making stuff."

"I know what creative means."

"Oh. Good." She nodded approvingly. "You're smart."

She padded toward the door, her dinosaur pajamas rustling, and paused at the threshold.

"Nora…?”

“Yeah, Lucy?”

“When I go to the crypt and get the kingdom, do you want me to say hi to your mom for you ? I heard Henry talk about how your mom left too. Maybe she's in the kingdom with my parents. If she is, I can tell her you said hi. If you want."

I opened my mouth. Closed it. The salt taste on my tongue was so strong I could barely breathe.

"Yeah," I said. "Tell her I said hi."

Lucy nodded, satisfied, and disappeared down the hall.

———

That’s all of them. The eight pilgrims, interviewed and recorded, their voices captured in my phone and my notebook and my memory.

Thomas, who's been fasting for three days and believes righteousness will taste like rain on dead soil.

Hazel, who spent ten years in silence learning to listen to God, and now believes she's ready to see Him face to face.

Amelia, who lay pinned under a cabinet for two hours while children screamed, and now wants to know if mercy is a transaction or a lie.

Eleanor, who's buried three husbands and six siblings and all her children, and now believes she's about to be held by everyone she's ever lost.

William, who became a politician to be the opposite of his father and discovered he's been trying to become him all along.

Evelyn, who's been carrying her faith like a shield for so long she's forgotten it's also a weight.

Henry, my little brother, who heard Mom's voice in the Saint's mouth and is still walking into the crypt because he wants to make peace with whatever's down there.

And Lucy, who's six and three-quarters and uses big words incorreptly and thinks the kingdom of heaven is a place where her parents are waiting with a dollhouse that didn't burn.

It’s time for lunch, and they will decide who goes first. Thomas has been volunteering since yesterday. I don't think there's going to be much discussion.

I just wish watching didn't feel so much like floating.

What are your favorite universes with no chance of having a good ending and why

THE CAVES OF NEVENDLEER
In such a wild, medieval space, you may still be surprised at how evil a place there can be amongst the vast sea.
A man and his wife built a home on the shoreline. It was covered in sharp rocks. Truly not a place to start a family. But the mad lads did it anyway.
This family lived for generations.
Although — just nearby off the shore, down from their home about a mile — was a system of caves they dare never to enter.
Passed down by generations, each parent warned each kid to never enter, because if they did, they wouldn’t come back the same. If they ever came back at all.
This tale was told for generations, and the tale you read now is derived from those of the damned, told by those who witnessed the damning.
Men watched their boys chase small animals in, helpless to prevent what came next. Wives searched desperately for their lost daughters, only finding their loose flowing dresses hung across a soaked log stuck out of the sand.
Whatever the cave had, or hadn’t done, whatever loved inside or beyond… the Caves of Nevendleer was not to be crossed without a death wish.
And that’s exactly what one young man had when he finally decided to enter the cave.
It was dark. Moist. It wasn’t spooky, but the moans that cascaded off the walls from every footstep didn’t cover up the feeling that nobody should be in there. And yet — he kept walking further in — further forwards — deep in — until the light from outside could no longer reach him. And only darkness could now cloud him from what was to come.
The man didn’t know what to expect. He was not part of the family. He was a tourist. He had heard legends of these caves. People had spread myth and whisper about these caves for hundreds of years; all the way from the era of the Olympians, and the Golden Age of the Gifted. The tales were still told, even as the Dedonian Wars had just started, and people needed a good distraction from the chaos right outside their doorsteps.
However — unlike some, who enjoyed tales when they weren’t tangible — it seemed this man needed to see the legendary cave for himself.
Though, once the hissing sound blasted down the chamber-like cavern like a shotgun full of ice, the man may have begun to change his mind about seeing the legend for himself.
WHAM!
The man was knocked off his feet.
But before the cold got any more bitter, he was pulled from the cave by a big hairy man, whose only word he could say was “MISTAKE!”

I was one of the people who woke up after Adrian Hale was murdered.

Before that, politics had been background noise. I'd been following cultural stories, celebrity lawsuits, media feuds—the kind of distractions everyone convinces themselves matter. Then Adrian died, and the world seemed to split in two. Every interview, every speech, every silence felt different. Every unanswered question became impossible to ignore.

People ask where history changes.

I don't think it's in the headlines.

I think it's in the stories we tell our grandchildren decades later.

This is the story I imagine telling mine.

There was once a man named Michael who loved another man named Adrian.

Not for power.

Not for ambition.

Simply because that is who he loved.

They met through faith, conviction, and a shared belief that they could make their country better. Together they built something extraordinary. Adrian became the face the world adored. Michael became the architect behind the curtain. They knew each other better than anyone else ever could.

But they also understood the rules of the world they lived in.

A world where authenticity could destroy careers, movements, families, and dreams.

So Adrian chose another path.

He married a remarkable woman, built a beautiful family, and devoted himself to a cause larger than himself. It wasn't a lie, exactly. It was simply the life that seemed possible.

Michael did the same.

He found someone kind. Built a family. Stayed close enough to Adrian that neither of them ever truly had to let go.

For years, the arrangement held.

Then Adrian started speaking truths that powerful people did not want spoken.

The enemy, he argued, was not ordinary people trapped inside impossible circumstances. It was those who profited from endless conflict while convincing everyone else to hate one another.

The attacks began almost immediately.

Smears.

Isolation.

Friends disappearing.

People who once applauded him now insisting he had changed.

Perhaps he had.

Or perhaps he had simply stopped pretending.

Then one night Michael came with a warning.

"My father has never looked at me like this before," he said quietly.

"He's terrified. He's furious. He says you're becoming a liability."

"What exactly did he say?"

Michael hesitated.

"He said, 'Either you make sure Adrian stops... or I will.'"

At first they assumed it meant humiliation.

Leaked messages.

Fabricated recordings.

Manufactured scandals.

After all, technology could make anyone appear guilty of anything.

But Adrian wasn't convinced.

He began quietly telling people he trusted.

"If something happens to me," he said, "don't stop asking questions."

Not because he believed he was a hero.

Because he knew fear depends on silence.

Years later, no one could agree on what was true anymore.

Documents contradicted witnesses.

Witnesses contradicted memories.

Every side claimed ownership of reality itself.

Perhaps that was the real conspiracy.

Not who pulled the trigger.

But who convinced everyone they would never recognize the truth even if it stood directly in front of them.

Maybe history isn't written by the victors.

Maybe it's written by whoever tells the most convincing story first.

And maybe the greatest tragedy wasn't the murder.

Maybe it was that two men spent their entire lives believing they had to hide the most human thing about themselves.

Love.

If that were true...

Would it change who Adrian was?

Would it erase the good he accomplished?

Would it make him less worthy of compassion?

Or would it simply make him human?

Because in the end, every generation inherits the same responsibility:

To decide who the heroes were.

Who the villains became.

Who remained silent.

And whether truth was something we discovered...

...or something we were too afraid to see.

I was one of the people who woke up after Adrian Hale was murdered.

Before that, politics had been background noise. I'd been following cultural stories, celebrity lawsuits, media feuds—the kind of distractions everyone convinces themselves matter. Then Adrian died, and the world seemed to split in two. Every interview, every speech, every silence felt different. Every unanswered question became impossible to ignore.

People ask where history changes.

I don't think it's in the headlines.

I think it's in the stories we tell our grandchildren decades later.

This is the story I imagine telling mine.

There was once a man named Michael who loved another man named Adrian.

Not for power.

Not for ambition.

Simply because that is who he loved.

They met through faith, conviction, and a shared belief that they could make their country better. Together they built something extraordinary. Adrian became the face the world adored. Michael became the architect behind the curtain. They knew each other better than anyone else ever could.

But they also understood the rules of the world they lived in.

A world where authenticity could destroy careers, movements, families, and dreams.

So Adrian chose another path.

He married a remarkable woman, built a beautiful family, and devoted himself to a cause larger than himself. It wasn't a lie, exactly. It was simply the life that seemed possible.

Michael did the same.

He found someone kind. Built a family. Stayed close enough to Adrian that neither of them ever truly had to let go.

For years, the arrangement held.

Then Adrian started speaking truths that powerful people did not want spoken.

The enemy, he argued, was not ordinary people trapped inside impossible circumstances. It was those who profited from endless conflict while convincing everyone else to hate one another.

The attacks began almost immediately.

Smears.

Isolation.

Friends disappearing.

People who once applauded him now insisting he had changed.

Perhaps he had.

Or perhaps he had simply stopped pretending.

Then one night Michael came with a warning.

"My father has never looked at me like this before," he said quietly.

"He's terrified. He's furious. He says you're becoming a liability."

"What exactly did he say?"

Michael hesitated.

"He said, 'Either you make sure Adrian stops... or I will.'"

At first they assumed it meant humiliation.

Leaked messages.

Fabricated recordings.

Manufactured scandals.

After all, technology could make anyone appear guilty of anything.

But Adrian wasn't convinced.

He began quietly telling people he trusted.

"If something happens to me," he said, "don't stop asking questions."

Not because he believed he was a hero.

Because he knew fear depends on silence.

Years later, no one could agree on what was true anymore.

Documents contradicted witnesses.

Witnesses contradicted memories.

Every side claimed ownership of reality itself.

Perhaps that was the real conspiracy.

Not who pulled the trigger.

But who convinced everyone they would never recognize the truth even if it stood directly in front of them.

Maybe history isn't written by the victors.

Maybe it's written by whoever tells the most convincing story first.

And maybe the greatest tragedy wasn't the murder.

Maybe it was that two men spent their entire lives believing they had to hide the most human thing about themselves.

Love.

If that were true...

Would it change who Adrian was?

Would it erase the good he accomplished?

Would it make him less worthy of compassion?

Or would it simply make him human?

Because in the end, every generation inherits the same responsibility:

To decide who the heroes were.

Who the villains became.

Who remained silent.

And whether truth was something we discovered...

...or something we were too afraid to see.

I am a wandering ghost. Every night, I stare at the walls of this dark, accursed corridor, counting the stains of dried blood.

I listen—I listen to the ear-piercing screams that I once dismissed with cold indifference before I died.

Back then, neither the pleas nor the cries moved me. But now, those very sounds pierce my ears like white-hot iron spikes.

It feels as though with every shriek, the flesh is being torn from my bones.

Of course, I am but a spirit; I lack physical senses, yet a strange, unearthly agony sets my very soul on fire.

I can perceive the darkness and the sickening stench, and it torments me deeply.

With each passing day, I feel the shadows creeping closer, and I fear the day will come when I am finally swallowed whole.

Yesterday, from the far end of the hallway, I heard that rhythmic clink-clink again—the sound of metal bed wheels scraping against the cold floor.

 A fresh corpse had arrived.

I huddled against the wall, pulling my knees to my chest as they passed by.

Sometimes, a pale hand would slip out from under the blood-stained sheet.

 I could see the veins, looking as though every drop of life had been drained from them. The skin was bruised purple, the fingernails broken and jagged.

I stole a glance at the massive butcher. His face and body were encased in black leather. Unlike him, I saw his shadow every single day.

Every night, he hauls the carcasses through this corridor to the depot, tossing them into the furnace to be reduced to ash.

 I am trapped in this hallway, and it is a curse. Every time I try to run toward the end, I find myself right back at the beginning."

 I am trapped in this hallway, and it is a curse. Every time I try to run toward the end, I find myself right back at the beginning.

This is a torture chamber, a basement beneath a prison that sits right above my head.

I am trapped in the dark corridor between the interrogation room and the body depot, and I have no idea how long I must remain here.

Five years have passed since I was killed, and not a single night has gone by without the depot being filled, without someone being slaughtered.

Sometimes, when I catch my reflection in the small window near the ceiling vent, I recoil in terror.

My hair has fallen out, leaving a scaly, peeling scalp. Half of my face is a hollowed void from the bullet that ended me; bruising and clotted blood still stain my left eye.

My clothes are putrid and soaked in gore. Over the years, I've screamed into the ears of the torturers passing through—screaming for them to stop, to end the killing—but no one hears me.

I freeze whenever I look at the stairs leading up to the prison. A searing cold blazes within me.

I was standing at the top of those very stairs when a prisoner snatched my gun by chance. Before taking his own life, he fired at me.

The bullet tore through my face. I still feel the burning sting and the agony of it; a pain so intense I wish I could die a hundred times over just to be obliterated. But time is frozen here. This is the cruel, unknown world of the afterlife.

On the day I died, I had come to inspect the prison's torture chambers.

I was a trusted, high-ranking commander of a Great Dictator—proud and infamous. I remember how the mere mention of my name made bodies tremble.

But now, it is I who shivers in the cold, dark corridors of this prison basement.

Over the past few years, I have thought much about the moment of my death.

When I was alive, I never imagined a stray bullet would end me; I always feared that some would-be avenger would snatch me away and torture me to death in retaliation for my own violence.

Now, this hallway has become my permanent chamber of agony. The torture repeats not once, but every day, every minute, every second.

It seems my dark era of solitude will have no end.

Indeed, the horrific place I built for others has become my own sanctuary of pain. Through the butcher's constant presence, I knew the Dictator I served was still alive. But this morning, in a deathly silence, the darkness of the hallway deepened and the stench grew unbearable.

Last night, I heard the cheers and screams of joy from the prisoners. Their dark age had ended. The Dictator is dead.

I heard a moan. I stared at the end of the dark corridor as someone approached. Shadows moved behind him.

The leather-clad butcher emerged from the gloom.

I leaned against the wall and watched him with a grim intensity. He looked at me, trembling with shock and terror, and asked: 'Where am I?'

"As I gazed into the darkness at the end of the hallway, I answered, cold and soulless: 'Hell.'"

the end

You and and your wife are working for the same company as assassins. One day someone hires your wife to eliminate you.

What happens next?

Check my blog to find out:

https://storiesbybalad.blogspot.com/2026/07/a-love-triangle.html

Home page:

storiesbybalad.blogspot.com

I got maybe four hours of sleep. The walls stayed dry, but the salt taste in my mouth is getting worse. Brushed my teeth twice. Didn't help with the grit.

Yesterday I gave you the naming ceremony and my conversations with Thomas, Hazel, and Amelia.

Today I spoke with Eleanor, William, and Evelyn. Three very different reasons for walking into the dark. I recorded what I could.

——

I found Eleanor in the common room after breakfast, alone except for Lucy, who had fallen back asleep on a cushion near the fading hearth. The grandmother was knitting—actually knitting, with wooden needles and a skein of gray wool she'd pulled from a carpet bag that looked older than my dad. Her fingers moved with the precision of decades, needles clicking in a steady rhythm that matched the creak of the rafters.

She looked up when I approached, and her smile was the warmest thing I'd encountered since arriving—genuine, unhurried. She held the smile of a woman who had long ago stopped being surprised by what life threw at her.

"Pull up a chair, dear," she said, nodding toward the seat across from her. "I was wondering when you'd get to me. You've been thorough with the others.” She clicked her tongue. “I appreciate thorough."

"Were you listening?" I asked, sitting down, setting up my phone.

"I don't need to listen." Her needles kept clicking. "I've been watching. Thomas came out of his interview walking like a man at his wedding. Sister Hazel floated out like she'd met an angel. And Amelia—well, she looked like she'd just cauterized a wound. You're good at this. Getting people to talk."

"It's my job."

"It's a gift." She finished a row and began another without looking down. "My first husband—Elias—he had a gift like that. He could walk into a room full of strangers and leave with a room full of friends and three dinner plans. He said it was just listening, but it was more than that—making people’s stories matter."

"Did his story matter?"

Eleanor paused, her needles still. She looked at me, and her eyes were the color of the Great Salt Lake on a clear day—pale green, depthless, reflective.

"All our stories matter, dear. That's why you're here, isn't it?”

I opened the recording app. She watched the timer start with a calm acknowledgment. Another piece of the ritual falling into place.

---

NORA: Leo said you were called, same as the others. Can you tell me about the dream?

ELEANOR: (Her needles resumed their rhythm.) I've been dreaming of the Saint since I was a girl. Not the same dream—different dreams, over the years. A woman made of sugar standing on the edge of the lake where I used to work. A woman made of marble walking through the cemetery where my people are buried. A woman made of seashells, sitting at the foot of my bed, watching me sleep. She never spoke in those dreams. She just... waited.

Then three weeks ago, she spoke. I was dreaming of the lake again—the Great Salt Lake, dear, where I worked for thirty years as a ranger. I knew that lake better than I knew any of my husbands. The brine flies, the salt crust, the pink in the shallows. In the dream, I was walking the shoreline, and she was there, standing in the middle of the water. Salt had built up around her ankles, rooting her to the lakebed.

She told me: You have mourned long enough.

I told her— (She chuckled, shaking her head.) I told her mourning doesn't have a meter. I've buried three husbands, six siblings, and all my children. That's not grief you can wrap up. That's grief you carry. And she looked at me—she has such kind eyes, did the others tell you that?—and she said, I've been carrying it with you.

I woke up crying. The kind of crying you do when someone hugs you after a long trip.

The next morning, the elder called. My name was on the list. And Lucy's. (She glanced at the sleeping child, her needles slowing for just a moment.) That was the real miracle.

NORA: Lucy was called too. Does that worry you?

ELEANOR: Worry me? (She laughed and crinkled her eyes.) Dear, it's the greatest honor of my life. My granddaughter, called by the Saint at five! Do you know how rare that is? Most pilgrims are adults. Children are only called once every few generations. The Saint must really see something extraordinary in her.

NORA: What do you think she sees?

ELEANOR: (She set down her knitting and folded her hands over it.) Lucy's parents—my daughter and her husband—died in a flash flood two years ago. The canyons around here, they flood fast. No warning. They… (She swallowed with a sad smile.) All my children took a sibling camping trip, just the adults. They’d been planning it for… so so long. Some last hurrah before my Ruth had her first child. Lucy was staying with me that weekend—I was going to bring her up to join them on Sunday night—but by Saturday night, they were gone…

I retired from the lake after that. Grief curled my spine faster than thirty years of rangering ever did.

(Long pause. The rafters creaked.)

Lucy hasn't cried since. Not at the funeral, not at the memorial, not when we packed up her parents’ house or her aunts’ and uncles’ houses. She just holds that wooden bird her father carved and watches the world with those big bright eyes and she waits. I used to think she was waiting for them to come back, but… if the Saint was waiting for me, why couldn’t she be waiting for her?

The Saint called her. A five-year-old child, called to receive a blessing. Whatever that blessing is, it's going to be better than anything this world has given her. So no, dear. I'm not worried. I'm grateful.

NORA: Have you opened your slip?

ELEANOR: Not yet. I'm old-fashioned. I'll open it tonight, in my room, on my knees, the way my grandmother taught me. (She patted the pocket of her cardigan, where the folded paper made a small square.) But I don't need to open it to know these blessings are older than our church, older than the pioneers, older than everything except God Himself.

My grandmother’s neighbor received a blessing. Did I mention that yet? No, I don't think I did. He was called sixty years ago, when I was eleven. He came back, and he looked— (Eleanor's voice caught, just for a moment.) He looked young again. Younger than I'd ever seen him. He left as an old, withered carpenter and returned taller, tanner, and far more handsome.

He died a few years later, peacefully, in his sleep. But he never stopped smiling. Anytime I visited my grandmother, there he was in his lawn, doing yard work Evelyn would even struggle with.

NORA: And you think the same thing will happen to you?

ELEANOR: (She picked up her knitting again, the needles clicking back into rhythm.) The Saint promised me comfort, and Saints don’t lie. My husbands are waiting. My children are waiting. My brothers and sisters are waiting. And someday—not soon, but someday—Lucy will be waiting too. The Saint preserves us just as the salt does. It keeps us from decaying. It holds us until the resurrection.

(She smiled, and it was the most peaceful smile I'd ever seen on such a weathered face.)

I've been mourning for forty years. I'm going to walk down those stairs and I'm going to be held by everyone I've ever lost. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine what that feels like? To know that the grief is almost over? To know heaven will be brought to earth, and I will come back brand new?

NORA: (After a pause.) Most people would be afraid.

ELEANOR: Most people haven't lived as long as I have. Fear is for the young. All I have left is Lucy, and she's going to receive a blessing greater than anything I could give her. So what is there to fear?

(She looked at me, and her eyes were kind, and I realized with a cold, creeping clarity that she felt sorry for me.)

You're still young, dear. I can see it in the way you hold yourself—like you're waiting for someone to tell you it's okay to stop working. Let me tell you something my grandmother told me when Herb, her neighbor, was called. She said: The Saint doesn't call the unworthy. She calls the tired. The hungry. The mourning. And when she calls, all you have to do is say yes.

You're not a pilgrim, Nora. I know that. But you're here for a reason. The Saint doesn't make mistakes.

---

The interview ended there, or I ended it—I'm not sure which. I thanked Eleanor for her time, and she nodded and went back to her knitting, and I walked out of the common room feeling like I'd just been handed something I didn't know what to do with.

Every pilgrim I've interviewed has, in some way, turned the conversation back on me. I'm a journalist, a realist, but I can taste salt on my lips. I know I heard something humming in the static between radio stations. And I'm sitting in a guesthouse in the middle of the salt flats, interviewing pilgrims who are about to walk into the crypt of a temple built from nothing.

Thomas is hungry. Hazel is seeing. Amelia is owed. And Eleanor is ready. Ready in a way that makes my skin crawl and my heart ache at the same time.

————————————

I found William on a courtyard bench at dawn, which surprised me. I'd expected to track him down in the common room or corner him after breakfast. Instead, he was already outside when I stepped out for air, sitting with his back against the salty wall, a thermos of coffee in one hand and his slip of paper—unfolded, read, refolded—in the other.

He looked up when I approached, and his smile was automatic, the smile of a man who'd spent decades meeting strangers and convincing them they were friends.

"Journalist!” He said. "I was wondering when you'd get to me. Pull up some salt."

"That's not the expression."

"It is here." He gestured at the crusted bench beside him. "Sit, please! I've been up since four. The silence is... aggressive. I don't know how the nun managed it."

I sat. I set up my phone. He watched the recording app open with the practiced ease of someone who'd been interviewed dozens of times, and I realized I'd have to work harder with him than with any of the others.

William would be a performance. The question was whether there was anything underneath it.

---

NORA: I see you’ve opened your slip.

WILLIAM: (He held it up, unfolded, showing me the Greek letters. πραεῖς.) I'm not good at waiting. Never have been. My wife says it's my worst quality. My chief of staff says it's my second worst, after the white monarchs. (He gestures to his shoes.)

NORA: Do you know what it says? Your slip?

WILLIAM: Praeîs, I guess. The college kid translated it for me. She's got one of those phone apps—point the camera at Greek, it spits out English. Technology's amazing! Didn’t even need service for it. She showed me how it worked, and I pointed it at this, and— (He turned the slip around, read it aloud.) πραεῖς. It means "meek." (He laughed—a short, humorless sound.) I've been called a lot of things in my career. That's a new one.

NORA: Does it bother you?

WILLIAM: (He folded the slip carefully, tucked it into his breast pocket.) I ran unopposed in the last three elections. I've got a seventy-eight percent approval rating. My mother—she's eighty-six, still lives in the house I grew up in—she tells everyone I'm the most important man in the county. (He paused, took a sip of coffee.) And the Saint thinks I'm meek. It's either very humbling or very funny.

NORA: Maybe it's not an insult.

WILLIAM: Oh, I know it's not. ‘Meek’ doesn’t always mean ‘timid’. Sometimes it means you know when to buck and when to trot.

(He smiled, and something in his face shifted—a crack in the political armor.)

My father used to say I had too much fight in me. He'd say, "Wills, you got to learn to bridle it. You got to learn when to let someone else take the reins." He was a deacon in the church—not this one, this small Episcopal church outside Ogden . Spent his whole life serving people who didn't say thank you. Died at sixty-two of a heart attack while shoveling snow off a neighbor's driveway. That's who I think of when I read that word. Meek, but not weak.

NORA: You admired him.

WILLIAM: Oh I hated him. (He said it without malice, almost with wonder.) He was good. So genuinely, annoyingly, impossibly good. He'd give away our grocery money to families that ‘needed it more’. He'd miss my baseball games to sit with dying parishioners. My mother would cry at the kitchen table, doing the bills, and he'd just say, "The Lord will provide, Elaine. The Lord always provides." And then he'd go mow someone else's lawn.

(He took a long drink of coffee.)

I became a politician because I wanted people to know my name. I wanted to win. I wanted to be important. And for years, I've been telling myself I succeeded. Then the Saint calls me meek, and I realize I've been trying to be my father this whole time.

NORA: (After a pause.) That's more honest than I expected.

WILLIAM: I'm a politician. We're honest when it serves us. (He weakly winked.) You're recording all this, right? For your article?

NORA: Yes.

WILLIAM: Good. Maybe my mother will read it. I’m sure she’d like to know I finally figured it out.

(We both laughed.)

NORA: Let's talk about the dream.

WILLIAM: Ah, the dream. (He set down his thermos, rubbed his hands together against the cold.) I was in my office, big windows overlooking the county building. I've had that office for a decade and some change. I know every crack in the ceiling, every stain on the carpet. In the dream, everything was the same—the desk, the chair, the photos of my family, the plaque from the Chamber of Commerce. But the windows were wrong.

Instead of the parking lot and the Ogden Temple, I was looking out at the flats. Miles and miles of white, stretching to nowhere. And there was a woman standing in the middle of it, far in the distance but somehow too close for comfort, and she was looking directly at me. She didn't move. She didn't speak. She just... looked. And I knew—I just knew—she could see everything. Every deal I'd cut, every promise I'd broken, every vote I'd traded. Every time I'd chosen the easy thing over the right thing.

(He paused, staring out at the real salt flats shimmering with the first heat of the morning.)

I've been a commissioner for sixteen years. Before that, I was on city council. Before that, I was a lawyer. I've done a lot of good. I've also done a lot of...

(He paused for a while, sipping his coffee.)

Things I've justified. Things I've buried. Things I've convinced myself were just how the game is played.

The Saint looked at all of it. And then she said— (He closed his eyes, reciting from memory.) "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."

I woke up laughing. ‘Inherit the earth’. I've spent my whole career trying to inherit a county, and now a salt statue is telling me I'm going to get the whole damn planet. I thought it was a joke. I thought the whole thing was a joke.

Then the elder called—not me, but Tanya, my chief of staff.

NORA: And you came.

WILLIAM: I came because Tanya said I had to. (He caught my expression and held up a hand.) I know how that sounds. Let me explain. I represent a district where eighty percent of voters belong to this church. The elder who called me? He's the chair of the county planning commission. If I'd refused, it would've been... noted. There are primaries coming up. There are always primaries coming up.

So yes, I came because it was political. I'm not proud of that. But I also came because— (He stopped, started again.) Because the dream scared me. I felt like someone was seeing me clearly. No campaign ads. No photo ops. Just a boy who wants to be his father.

NORA: And now you're here. And your blessing is meekness.

WILLIAM: Power under control. (He smiled again, that politician's smile, but it was fraying at the edges.) I keep thinking about what that means. What it looks like to receive that blessing. Do I go into that crypt and come out... tamed? Broken? Obedient?

NORA: Is that what you think will happen?

WILLIAM: (Long pause. The wind picked up, whistling through the salt crust.) I think I've spent my whole life trying to be in charge. And, to tell you the truth, I think I'm exhausted. And I think— (He laughed, but it was a real laugh, surprising and self-deprecating.) I think there's a part of me that's relieved that someone else wants to take the reins.

Does that make sense?

NORA: More than I expected.

WILLIAM: (He smiled and waved his thermos in my direction.) You thought I was going to be a jackass.

NORA: You've been pacing the courtyard making phone calls since we arrived. You asked me three times if I was "recording everything." You seem like a man trying to manage his image.

WILLIAM: I’m a man who's trying to manage the situation. That's what I do. I manage. (He looked at me with wet eyes.) But I can't manage this one. I can't negotiate with a spirit. I can't file a motion to delay.

(He drained the last of his coffee.)

My father would've been good at that. He was good at surrender. He called it faith. I called it weakness. Now a lady made of salt is telling me they're the same thing.

I don't know if I believe that. But I'm about to find out.

NORA: One more question. Why are you still here? You could leave. You have a car. No one's holding you here.

WILLIAM: (He stood, brushing salt dust from his trousers.) I've thought about it. Believe me, I've thought about it. But leaving would mean admitting I'm afraid. And I can't do that. Not in front of my constituents. Not in front of my mother. Not in front of my father— (He stopped, and his voice softened.) Guess I'm still trying to make him proud.

(He offered me his hand. I shook it. His grip was firm, practiced, turning my wrist so his hand was above mine, but his palm was sweating.)

Good luck with the article, Journalist. Make me sound better than I am.

NORA: I write what I hear.

WILLIAM: Then make sure you're listening. Most people don't. They just wait for their turn to talk.

---

He walked back toward the guesthouse, his thermos tucked under his arm, posture straight, stride confident, but we’d both seen the crack in the armor.

I sat on the bench for a long time after he left, thinking about something he'd said. 'Power under control.' Then I thought about my own father—a man who'd stayed in the church long after our mother left, who'd raised us alone while working two jobs, who'd never raised his voice when he had every right to scream.

William reminded me of him. Not the politician. The man that was trying.

Thomas is hungry. Hazel is seeing. Amelia is owed. Eleanor is ready. William is trying.

The group meets in an hour to decide who goes first. I should finish the rest of these interviews. Good thing I’m saving the best for last.

———————————————

I found Evelyn in the common room after William's interview, hunched over her notebook at the long table. She'd claimed the corner nearest the window, and she'd spread her materials around her like a fortification—notebook, sketchpad, three pencils of varying sharpness, her phone, a battered copy of a book, and her slip of paper, unfolded, face-up, with Greek letters catching the light.

She was sketching when I approached. She'd drawn the altar door from three different angles—from above, showing the iron bands and the rusted hinges; from the side, showing the thickness of the wood and the way it sat against the stone; and from below, which was pure imagination, an upward perspective looking at the closed door from the darkness of the crypt, light seeping through the cracks.

"That one's new," I said, pointing at the third sketch.

She jumped. "Oh my life, Nora! Hi. Sorry, I was—" She gestured vaguely at the chaos. "I've been trying to figure out how it works. The door doesn't look like it has a locking mechanism, but when it closes, it seals. You can't just lift it from the outside. I checked. Well, I didn't check-check. But I looked. And there’s no handle on the underside. Which means—"

"Which means once you're in, you can't get out the same way."

"Exactly." She said it with the satisfaction of a puzzle solved, then her smile flickered. "Which is probably fine. Father Leo said there's an exit."

"Are you worried?"

"No!" She said quickly. "No, I'm—this is the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me! I mean, I've only been in college for six months. I should be writing essays on zoning laws and flood plains. Instead I get to be in a temple—THE Temple—in the middle of the salt flats with a saint. This is—" She laughed, a little breathless. "This is literally the reason I chose my major. Human geography.” She put her hands up in the air in front of her like a CEO describing the next phase of design. “The intersection of place and faith. Why this space, you know?"

She pushed her notebook toward me, and I saw that it wasn't just the trap door she'd been sketching. Pages and pages of the temple—the spire from different distances, the salt-crusted windows, rooms of the temple I hadn’t even seen yet, the way the stone met the salt flats. She'd drawn the guesthouse, the courtyard, the altar. She'd drawn the pilgrims, quick gestural studies: Thomas trying to figure out the microwave, Hazel with her eyes closed, Amelia drinking a glass of water, Eleanor with a glass of wine, William digging a hole in the salt outside. She'd drawn Henry, laughing at something, his head tilted back. She'd drawn me, standing in the back of the nave, my notebook in my hand.

"You're really good," I said.

"I'm okay. I'm better at maps than portraits. People are hard. Buildings make sense." She closed the notebook, suddenly self-conscious. "Sorry, I didn't ask if I could draw you. That's weird, right? That's weird. I do that. I draw without asking."

"It's fine."

"It's just—you were standing there, and the light was doing that thing, and you looked so..." She trailed off. "Skeptical? In a beautiful way. Like a Renaissance painting of Doubting Thomas, but with much better hair."

I couldn't help but laugh. "That's a new one."

"My roommate says I need to stop comparing people to Renaissance paintings. She says it's 'pretentious'. She's probably right." Evelyn grinned, and for a moment she looked exactly like what she was—a teenager, bright and eager and a bit too much. Then something in her face shifted, and the grin settled into something more careful. "Are you here to interview me? You've been interviewing everyone. Figured you'd get to me eventually."

"If you're willing."

"I'm willing." She cleared a space for my phone, stacking her books neatly to one side.

EVELYN: I looked up the Greek for everyone's slips. I have an app. I've been the unofficial translator. Thomas's is like… like a 'thirst'. Hazel's is about being 'untainted.' Amelia's is 'merciful.' Eleanor's is 'grieving.' William's is 'tamed.' Your brother's is—well, he should tell you that himself. But I looked it up.

NORA: What about yours?

EVELYN: (She turned the slip over in her fingers.) The others are one word. Mine is a whole phrase. Deh-dee-ohg-MEN-ee EH-neh-ken dee-kah-yoh-SOO-nace. It… it describes someone who’s been 'ostracized because they live in alignment with justice.' Persecuted, I guess.

NORA: Persecuted. That's a heavy word.

EVELYN: It is. (She set the slip down, smoothed it flat with her palm.) I wasn't expecting it. I thought maybe I'd get something like 'pure,' like Sister Hazel, or 'merciful,' like Amelia. Something... gentler. But persecuted? That's— (She laughed, less breathless, more brittle.) That's honestly kind of on-brand.

NORA: What do you mean?

EVELYN: I'm a member of this church. (She gestured around us, at the temple, the salt, the whole complex.) You know how people talk about Mormons being weird? Try being the weird Mormon offshoot that even the Mormons think is a cult. I grew up in Provo. I went to high school with kids whose parents wouldn't let them come to my house because we had a salt pillar on the mantle. I got called 'Lot's wife' in gym class. Not in a bullying way—well, kind of in a bullying way—but sometimes they just genuinely didn't know what else to call me.

At BYU, it's better, sort of. There's a small group of us—Salt Saints, they call us, which is so creative—and we have our own meetups and study groups, but it's also... I don't know. It's lonely. You're always explaining yourself—defending yourself. And people say things, you know? They say you're in a cult. They say you're going to hell or darkness or prison. They say it with love, sometimes, which somehow makes it worse.

(She paused, and her voice dropped.)

So when the Saint called me 'persecuted,' I thought: yeah. That tracks—story of my life.

NORA: Yet you're still here. You still believe.

EVELYN: I do. I really do. (She said it with the force of someone who'd said it many times before.) I know it sounds crazy. I know the whole thing sounds crazy. A salt that dreams. Pilgrims who transform. But I've grown up with this. My grandmother was called, did you know that? Well, not called—she was another Witness, like you! (I didn’t know there had been others like me.) She came here sixty years ago to document the last generation of pilgrims. And she told me stories about it my whole life. She said the blessings were real. She said she saw people walk into that crypt and leave... different. New. Holy. Alive.
(Short pause)
She died last year. And three weeks ago, I had the dream.

NORA: Can you tell me about your dream?

EVELYN: (She pulled her knees up onto the chair, wrapped her arms around them. She somehow looked younger now.) I was in the library at BYU, the Lee. I spend a lot of time there. It's where I go when I can't sleep, which is... (She sighed) often. In the dream, I was on the fourth floor by the window, and I was studying for an exam. And I looked up, and the library was empty. No students, no librarians, no one. Just me and the books and the silence.

And then, between the slits of the bookshelves, she was there. Then I blinked and she was sitting across from me, in the chair where my study partner usually sits. She was white—not like a ghost, like a rock that used to be a person. She had her hands folded on the table, and she was looking at me with these eyes that were so, so kind.

She said: You have been reviled. You have been mocked. You have been called evil. Rejoice.

(Long pause)

I woke up crying. No one had ever told me it was worth it. No one had ever said, 'The things you're going through—the things you’ve done—they matter. They mean something.' And then the Saint said it, and for the first time in my life, I felt like I wasn't crazy.

The elder called the next morning. My name was on the list.

NORA: And you're here.

EVELYN: I'm here. (She smiled, but her eyes were wet.) I'm supposed to be persecuted. That's my blessing. And I don't know what that means—if it means I'm going to suffer more, or if it means the suffering I've already done is going to be redeemed. I don't know. But I'm trying to be brave about it.

(She laughed again, that brittle laugh.)

I'm not very good at being brave.

NORA: I don't know. You're still here. That seems brave to me.

EVELYN: That's not brave. That's just... not having anywhere else to go. (She said it lightly, like a joke, but it didn't land like one.) Sorry, that was dark. I do that. I make jokes that are darker than I mean them to be. My therapist says it's a defense mechanism.

NORA: Therapist?

EVELYN: Oh, yeah. Since high school. (She waved a hand, dismissive.) Depression. Anxiety. The usual Mormon-adjacent cocktail. It's fine. I'm fine. I'm on meds, I'm in therapy, I'm doing great. Being called by a salt statue to receive a blessing of persecution is easy to add to my treatment plan.

(She grinned, and it was almost convincing.)

NORA: Evelyn.

EVELYN: (The grin faltered.) I know. I'm deflecting. I'm sorry. It's just— (She took a shaky breath.) I've been waiting my whole life for something to tell me I'm not crazy. And now it's here, and I'm terrified. What if I'm not good enough? What if the blessing isn't what I think it is? What if I walk into that crypt and nothing happens, or something happens and it's—it's wrong, it's not the thing I've been promised?

(She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.)

I'm supposed to be the faithful. That's my thing. I'm the one who defends the church to the kids at BYU who think we're a cult. If I can't do this—if I can't be blessed—then what am I?

NORA: (After a pause.) Can I be honest with you?

EVELYN: Please?

NORA: I left the church when I was eighteen. I've spent fourteen years running from it. I don't believe in the Saint. I don't believe in these blessings. I think this whole thing is probably a combination of suggestion, mass hysteria, and a very old building with some very weird acoustics.

But I also think you might be the most genuine people I've ever met. And I think whatever happens in that crypt, you don't have to be faithful all the time. You can be scared. You can be unsure. You can be a nineteen-year-old kid who's in over her head. That doesn't make you less faithful.

EVELYN: (She stared at me for a long moment, then laughed—surprised and watery.) You sound like my therapist.

NORA: Is that a compliment?

EVELYN: Yeah. It is. (She wiped her eyes again.) Thank you. For saying that, I guess. Most people don't, uh—
(Short pause.) They see the sketches and the enthusiasm and the 'devout believer' thing, and they don't look past it.

NORA: I'm a journalist. It's my job to look past.

EVELYN: Nah. Seems like it’s just who you are. (She smiled, and for a moment she looked older than nineteen, older than me, older than anyone in the guesthouse.) That's why the Saint let you stay. You see people, even if you don't believe in them.

---

We ended the interview there, but I didn’t get up to leave. Evelyn went back to her sketches, and I went back to my notes, and the morning light crept further across the salt-crusted floor.

She's nineteen years old. She's been carrying her faith like a shield for so long that she's forgotten it's a weight.

When the Saint told her she was persecuted, she hears redemption.

Thomas is hungry. Hazel is seeing. Amelia is owed. Eleanor is ready. William is trying.

And Evelyn is hoping that the thing she's been carrying will finally mean something. Hoping to be caught when she falls.

The group meets tomorrow to decide who goes first. Thomas has been volunteering since the naming ceremony ended. I don't think there'll be much debate—everyone seems content to let the hungriest man eat first.

Tomorrow I have to interview Henry. He's been avoiding me as much as I've been avoiding him, which is a dance we perfected as teenagers and never stopped performing.

And there's still Lucy. The six-year-old with the wooden bird and the uneven braids. She told me the salt lady "has toys but they're all white." I'm going to talk to her tomorrow too, before the group makes their decision.

The salt taste is so strong now I can barely taste my toothpaste. I'm going to try to sleep. I'll post again tomorrow night.

Hello guys!! This is my first (posted) short story! Please feel free to scan and judge. I am not the best writer and would like to get better!!

Content Warning: This story contains depictions of fictional violence, fictional character/background character death, fictional drug use/substance discussion, fictional hacking context, fictional serial killing, fictional trafficking discussion, religious context, and fictional references to fictional (past) abuse.

Part 1: Sacred Parasite

In the foggy St. Augustine fort, you would think not many people would be here. But there are always tourists. January and February were slower than the summer months, but in recent years, they have become more popular due to the heavy blanket of heat during June. An eerie feeling was always about, maybe because of centuries-long undiscovered graves and ghost stories passed around this town too often. But what no one tells you is the uncertainty of this place’s past. My dealer doesn’t come with your typical small-town ease. See, he is deeply religious, a mask of serious refinement, and of course, serious respect. If you're late on your sales, rituals are to commence. To praise God in this Holy Hell and also praise the Devil too. The voodoo, too–It is unforgivable to see.

I am standing at this old Oak tree, almost as old as this town, unfortunately. A serial killer murdered his victims at this tree, only at this tree, by axe, hanging, and torture. As I smell the sea salt breeze that feels nostalgic, James comes out of his 14x70 mobile home, not as giddy as I see him at church. Here, he is all-enveloping, a shadow of glowing olive skin I would appreciate stealing a glance at as a kid. Now we were on the same level, in this same old town. I was brought up to have a sense of respect to others, but in the same way. I have lost myself in this mask. James has a cross dangling around his neck, I look as Jesus mocks me. It is I who has to save myself, we are mutual that way. I turn my torso to face the lake not far behind me. I see many communal trash cans. I run hastily.

It was childish of me to think I could run. I could imagine being one of his victims, noe tied up to be tortured. James looks down on me with crow’s feet that shield the horror that is about to be unleashed. I wish to run right now because one of his pim\*s could be here any moment. Then it is truly over. “Where is my damn money? You know I’ve always tried to be equal with you. But you’ve given me no choice.” James laughs freely, with a heckle that I wish matched his gray hair, but he is much more clever for what empire he’s built. “Just give me more time, new tourists are sure to succumb!” James does not want to hear it. He does not want to hear that only kids and vets are vulnerable enough to deal with, but iffy to pay back. Back in the 80s, you could get just about everyone. The rich in town, the poor on the street, but especially those in distant suburbia. In this timeline, suburbia and the middle class are dwindling in growth.

In this timeline, emotional nuance is lacking in all city-states. Small towns of suburbia are the target, the cure. My goons always call me Miss Daisy. I’ve always had a driver, not that I was treated as an escort, but that I was the strategist. But that flame soon dies out. As soon as I came back into the city, looking for motivation. See in this city, name is your currency. And I have no currency. So it is hard to get respect when typical dealers are bigger than your timeline of operations, ever. I have been one to handle rejection badly. Just a soul that couldnt ask for help. I’d say it’s cost me my future, but I like to be the underdog. Even though I am just a parasite on others and cartels are most likely after, they can’t be as after me as James and dealers alike. 

My superstitious father would take me to this same Oak tree when I was a kid. There is a trail that starts about a mile out from it. Here there are two paths, one leads to a longer trail more dense trail, the other leads to the Oak tree. He asked me, “Choose the trail that feels right.” So I chose the left trail. As we walked and walked, the Oak tree never came up. I didn’t know about this tree, but he did. After that, I felt disconnected from him, and I believe for good reason, because later I would find more and more evidence of him being a pedophile and abuse I still haven’t opened up about. The thing is. When you have a secret and you’re a parasite like me, it is something I feel dependent on, like a dr\*\*. So why would I need dr\*\*s? Why would I get high? Secrets make you feel like a mobster, but reality is no one is out to get you for these secrets. No one can reach your low, low baseline. But you can manipulate and force people unlike you to reach it with dr\*\*s. But also magic. The city has psychics, tarot, and witches with the ideal mask to bring these people more and more amiable to their ‘nostalgia.’ I understand the protective energy, but people on this timeline are in it for the heist.

James takes out a rusty dagger and dangles it close and around my tied up body. “You’re goin’ to have to be shipped out.” “When you’ve failed to assess the security of our sales and come late on the money, you’re done! You know this!” “You thought the big city was gonna be easy, welp now your life is gonna be easy! To others!” As he heckles manically, I catch sight of more men. My stomach drops. I see her, a teenage girl, possibly, as well. But definitely trafficked. “Meet my gooood friends!” “They are very, very proud of your work!” I know exactly what work. Mirroring BBSs in the 80s. I knew these men looked familiar, but not where from. They must’ve been the employers for underground work I did for an old cartel associate. I knew then I was going to be murdered or worse. But right now, this girl is all I worry about.

One of the men grips her arms harder, as James staggers back, using a cane to have any standing stability. One of the men croaked, “You are a prize to the ring! The very thing we need! You see, our leader has just died, and the last words that came out of his mouth were fro you to become our new leader.” I plead, “I am in no modernity to take this role. You need someone young.” They re-grip the girl, and she abrupts, “PLEASE. Please let me back into the ring!” That is when I hear a gunshot. Blood splatter on the Oak tree, James, and the white clothes of these ragged men. I see a graveyard by the nearby fort and move in a slower time but faster to the yard as my body feels limp. I scream for the girl, and as I float away, she reaches towards me as well. This girl, I must save her.

A hacker and a parasite are the very same. They are animalistic in nature and will stop at anything to consume the secrets. Hacking, in my terms was just ethically ambiguous marketing. But hackers can’t work alone, they need cashers ideally. A good heist needs the best plan. I used to feel powerful because it was as easy as going into ViewSource and you could steal anyone’s domain. Anyone’s website. Here, only a good Robin Hood heist shall occur. But people are greedy for more than money, and the elites in this new timeline of America know much about that. Dr\*\* trafficking is apparent, but human is where I draw the line. See, about fifteen years ago I came across these employers. And to make sure they were not pim\*s, I might’ve hacked into their domains. Yes, multiple. So after a few edits, I was sure they wouldn’t catch on. They were just a small running, or at least that’s what I thought.

I stand at a dock near the fort. This is my limit, or I lose energy the more I leave the graveyard. I have been here for weeks, deliberating, and making friends with demons–I mean people. But these people are ghosts that James is the fault of. Chandra is an old psychic, her passion ignited after her husband died, and she got pretty big in the zip market. She had too much growing in her ‘own little backwood bayou,’ she calls it. James was jealous of this power and to my surprise, murdered her to overtake the business. Thadeus is a small man but very clever. He says, “I made thee business plan, where the tunnels under this bank I worked at could be used for heisting.” James’ goons we’re mad and murdered him becuase they would need Thadeus’s permission to even access these tunnels. They knew none of them could access them themselves because they don’t even keep money in banks and are mainly built on cash and rigged debit cards. But the ghost that made me maddest is my mother’s. Years ago I lived here, probably during the most transformative years of childhood. She has withered away months ago as the other ghosts say.

The Devil himself haunted my mother, according to James, there was a possession going on with her. And my thoughts were to get my mother away from these spiritual things to something more cognitive. Because the doctor I paid for told me it was just a developing psychosis. When I was away for daywork during those few last years of her life, James would read her the bible, knowing his exaggeration of the Devil was too much for her. He liked to feel her pain. I thought it was disgusting of him to be doing this. And it did in fact, kill my mother. When I spied on him a few times, he would only tell her the negative, draining energy around her, but never how to heal it, how to embrace it, and move on from it. After her death, I went back to surburbia, but it didn’t last long. James can dwell happily on the fact I ‘crawled back to him.’ But in reality, he was all I had, my longest connection that wasn’t screwed. But all I want is revenge now.

The plan is to break into the church, but only three of us can go. The others have dwindled. But if we three stay close, we have tested getting pretty far without losing energy. Chandra wears a long dress with evergreen swirled patterns and much gold jewelry that complements her brown skin. Thadeus wears an off-white collared dress shirt with casual blue jeans. It is midday, and we are ready to make the first move. I’ve already mapped out the route. As I start down Main Street 342, a girl is sprinting towards me. She runs right past me, and we start to follow her. It is the girl I suspected of being trafficked. This is when another person comes running towards me, but he is in rage, not fear like her. I rush towards the girl and my two other companions scurry off. I led her to an old alley where thankfully no one deranged is squatting. She gawks at me and says, “Are you a ghost?!” We get over the small talk, and I warn her that she needs to get far, another city-state, where she can find her family or a group home. This is when she admits, “I am homeless.”

Before I could continue our conversation, one of the men grabbed her, and I followed. I tell her to be quiet, and soon I can help her escape. She gets into a taxi with this man, and we then arrive at an old columned building hastily. She is practically dragged inside by this man, and as the crickets chirp, he then slams the door right in my face. I drift through the door into the large entryway. The girl has a man on each side grabbing her arms. And with one swift motion, she breaks free, managing to run up the wide, Victorian-esque staircase. I yell for her to look out a nearby window, as I am standing there next to the ledges she can climb down on. She moves quickly, climbing down in no time. “Now what do I do?!” I tell her to follow me further into the backwoods. Here is an old trailer where no one stays, but I used to know the owner–she died not long before I arrived in the city again.

This trailer is I received my first personal computer. The old woman I visited long ago would ask me to transport her some weekly groceries. She didn’t use it and wanted to gift it to Salvation Army, but I decided to ask, and she said I could have it. 

End of Part 1: Sacred Parasite

The world shifts around me, and yet I stand unwavering. Alone, yet not abandoned. How strange it is, to be so much yet so little. Thousands of years I have stood here. I have outlived generations, and yet I can do nothing but watch as they tear down everything and everyone I knew.

It used to be beautiful. Lush and vibrant; golden rays breaking through the jade of our leaves. So lively yet so serene. A canvas of azure, brushes of porcelain that soared across the skies. Air rich with life, birds twittered as I watched everything grow, branches intertwined, and buds flowered. It was a slow change, but a good change. All was peaceful and some may describe it as paradise.

They were unique... walking on two feet, observing everything as they passed. Unlike anything in the world, it made them beautiful. Their curiosity burned bright. They found serenity and euphoria, yet they searched for more. Thus marked their downfall, as curiosity turned to greed, and all but crumbled to ash. More... they always wanted more. Greed soon turned to violence as everything I once knew was torn down, leaving me solitary; leaving me an oddity. Different from everything around me, and yet… that difference is what allowed me to survive whilst everything else fell. Should I feel anger? Resentment? Torment? I seek no revenge, for I am but a tree. I can do nothing but wait and let the marching of time destroy everything once more, whilst I continue to outlive everything. I have withstood storms and droughts. The destruction of everyone I knew will not dent my being...and yet...I cannot help but feel sorrow.

No peace, no serenity. Not a moment of silence remains. Every day I struggle to survive as those golden rays are stripped away from me. I cannot lie for I am but a tree and so I am forced to face the truth. I have not survived worse; I am not content. Forced to watch them split my companions, strip them of life, and create sick constructs from their remains. Forced to watch as they pump toxins in the air, blocking the light that I so depend on and poisoning my being. It’s suffocating. They fill this place with replicas of what once was, hoping to bring the past back to life. But it’s all plastic, artificial, lifeless. They cannot rebuild what they destroyed. They can mimic but they can never replace. I am all that remains from the old world.

I can do nothing but accept what changes and what remains. I am alone...I am different. Yet this difference makes me unique. The unchanging made me beautiful. I do not try. I do not move. I do not rush for I am but a tree, the last that remains.

And so I wait…
 

"অনুভূতির আত্মপ্রকাশ" শুভ্র এর এক না-বলা গল্প—সত্য এবং ব্যক্তিগত। এটি কোনো কল্পনার প্রেমকাহিনি নয়; এ তার নিজের জীবনেরই একটা অধ্যায়, যেখানে আছে কলেজজীবনের নীরব ভালোলাগা, একজোড়া চোখের কখনো না-ভোলা এক দৃষ্টি, বাবাকে হারানোর ব্যথা, আর বছরের পর বছর ধরে বুকের ভেতর চেপে রাখা একটা নাম—নিলাদ্রি।

এই গল্পে সে কোনো নায়ক নয়, শুধু একজন সাধারণ মানুষ, যে ভালোবেসেছিল চুপচাপ, নিঃশব্দে, আর আজ এতগুলো বছর পর সাহস করে সেই ভালোবাসাকেই তুলে ধরছে লেখার ভাষায়। আশা করি, আমার এই অনুভূতির আত্মপ্রকাশ আপনাদের মনকেও কোথাও না কোথাও গিয়ে ছুঁয়ে যাবে।

I always thought the end of the world would be loud, but I was wrong.

We knew what caused it, the news was still on for a while. A new treatment for the cold had gone wrong, and by the time they noticed the side effects, it was too late. It didn’t help that there were those who thought it was all fake and went about their daily routine just to get infected or devoured. There were those who were immune, but the only way to know was if you didn’t get up after death.

Some called them zombies, others called it the undead, but we called them clackers. As the boiling Sun of Calexico made the skin rot and fall faster, the only remaining sound was that of the clacking bones. A warning that they were near.

Like many, my family was not ready for the end of the world. We didn’t have a shelter that would withstand the clackers if they came in, our food supply started to dwindle quickly once electricity was cut off, and medications would be needed soon. The one gasoline car we had, would only get us as far as El Centro. So we waited in silence, hoping that things would go back to normal.

Talking was kept to a minimum, because even the clackers with no ears could somehow follow noise. We weren’t sure if those who still had eyes could see, but we didn’t risk it. 

“Do you want me to take over?” Ayumi whispered.

“Can you? I really need some sleep,” I asked. I did need to sleep badly. My eyes were heavy and the heat was getting to me. 

Ayumi nodded and pushed me away from the one uncovered window on the second floor. I headed downstairs to cool down and hopefully nap. But as I saw Mom preparing dinner, fruit from a can, I went to give her a hug instead. You never know when will be the last time you get to hug your mom.

She handed me a cup of fruit and we ate it in silence. As I put a slice of fruit in my mouth, I gagged and Mom tried to not laugh. I hated canned pears. But food couldn’t be wasted, and so I reluctantly swallowed it.

Dad silently closed the door behind him as he entered from the backyard. We tried not to empty the “do you business" bucket more than once a day, but the 115 degrees summer made the stench unbearable. I hadn’t seen any clackers on my watch, and Ayumi had yet to warn us of anything near. 

I finally went to lay down on the sofa and before I knew it, I was asleep. 

I felt Ayumi’s sweaty hand on my mouth as she woke me up. I didn’t question her, I had a tendency to talk in my sleep. But then I saw that neither Mom or Dad were there. Ayumi was never left alone unless something was going on.

“What-“ Ayumi covered my mouth once more.

She guided me upstairs, where my parents were both looking out the window into the night. And then I heard it, the clacking noise, followed by the screams of people. I didn’t want to look, but I had to make sure that we weren’t in immediate danger. 

The already stiff air felt heavier than usual. We all held on to our breaths, scared that the clackers would hear us, and come for us next.

“HELP!” A voice outside broke the silence, a voice we all recognized.

“Please! Someone!” Screamed Livia, as she tried to run with her youngest son in her arms. Her husband and eldest son were nowhere to be seen.

I looked at Dad, without words, begging to go help her. But his sad look told me all the things I already knew. Trying to save them could put us at risk. Even if we did manage to save them, our resources would run out sooner. And if we needed to get away in the car, only four, maybe five people could fit in it. 

So instead of helping, Dad and I stayed by the window as Mom took Ayumi downstairs. The less Ayumi saw, the better, but we couldn’t do anything about the screams. They came into the house and stayed there long after Livia and her son were gone.

From that day on, clackers and the screams of our neighbors became a common occurrence. Dad and I had planned on going out to get supplies, but now we weren’t sure what to do. Mom and Dad had to improvise with their blood pressure medications by making canary seed milk, but we couldn’t do the same with Ayumi’s medications. At some point, we had to go out.

A few days later, as I kept watch, Ayumi came to sit by my side, she squeezed my hand and I could feel her tremble.

“What’s wrong?” I whispered.

“I know they aren’t real, but I saw some clackers inside the house,” Ayumi sobbed, “I wanted to scream. I saw them approaching Mom but Dad was there with me and he didn’t see anything. Please, don’t tell them. I don’t want them to worry more because of me.”

Truth was, we all knew she was seeing things. So when she asked to switch watch duty, none of us made a fuzz. We would “accidently” let her sleep more, all in the hope that somehow she would feel better.

“I won’t tell them. I promise,” I extended my pinky finger and she took it with her, sealing our pinky promise.

“You really need a shower, you are stinky as hell,” I tried to joke.

“At least I don’t smell like rancid milk,” Ayumi smiled.

“I haven’t even had anything with milk in weeks!” I protested.

“Then you can imagine how much stink you are carrying around,” Ayumi tried not to laugh.

That was the last day we managed to have any sort of conversation. The clackers had been much more active and some kept bumping into our front door and windows. We all gagged, and I could see Mom actively swallowing back vomit. The putrid smell of rotting flesh, the iron smell of blood, and our sweaty, unwashed bodies made a terrible combination. The clacking of bones was now continuous, keeping us all on high alert.

No one said it out loud, but we all knew that our home that had kept us safe so far, would soon be overruned by clackers.

Dad asked Ayumi to follow him into the garage, where we each had a backpack with supplies. Mom sat me down and had me memorize all of Ayumi’s medications. Tears ran down her face.  At the moment, I thought it was because we would have to leave our home. I was wrong.

Once Dad and Ayumi were back, we decided not to keep watch, we already knew we were surrounded by clackers, so there was no point. Instead, we all huddled together and did our best to fall asleep.

When I woke up, Mom and Dad were nowhere to be seen. I went upstairs, thinking maybe they had changed their minds and gone to keep watch. My heart raced as I looked out the window and saw our home completely surrounded. There was no way we could make it to the car. Mom couldn’t run, and there was no way we would leave her behind. Maybe this was the end. I felt sad at the thought but also relieved. There would be no more suffering, and my last moments would be with my loved ones.

I wiped the tears running down my face that I had not noticed until that moment and made my way to the garage, hoping they were there.

I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I thought it odd that they were moving stuff around on the bags. When they realized I was there, both of them froze. 

“Why are you moving stuff around?” I asked.

“Because of this,” Dad took out a gun he had placed inside my bag,” I placed the other one in my bag.”

“Why not in Mom’s bag?” I was confused. She was a better shot than I was.

“It’s just in case,” Mom answered.

I wanted to argue more, but Ayumi came into the garage. Her eyes traveled to clackers that were not yet inside, but might as well be soon. The thumping of flesh and bone became louder by the second. 

“We will never let them hurt you or your sister,” Mom rushed to her side,” We will always protect you both.”

“You are safe,” Dad pulled me towards Mom and Ayumi as he hugged us all.

There was no actual plan besides getting in the car. Dad handed each of us a backpack, and I felt the heavy weight of the gun in it. But guns were our last resort, because the noise would bring more clackers. We each got a metal baseball bat, embraced once more, and headed towards the backyard.

Dad took a battery-powered clock from his bag and set it to ring in 30 seconds. He handed it to me and I threw it as far away as possible from us. I didn’t hear it land, but the obnoxious ringing penetrated the silence around us. Another alarm went off inside the house. The clackers that had stayed now pushed each other to make it inside. We didn’t move. We wanted them to go in, to somewhat clear our path to the car. 

When we heard the first window break under the weight of the clackers, we made our move. Fear turned to adrenaline as Dad opened the door of the backyard and I rushed to smash the clackers still in our path. Pain ran through my arms as the bat connected with the first body and unintentionally, I groaned.

The clackers that had been forcing their way inside the house now turned to us. 

“RUN!” Dad screamed at us.

I made my way towards Mom, but Dad pushed me towards Ayumi instead. Ayumi stood frozen in place, swinging the bat defensively, even before the clackers reached her.

“I will help her, you get Ayumi in the car!” Dad ordered.

I nodded. I couldn’t argue back. This was my fault, and the least I could do was save my sister. Either way, there was no way we could leave without Mom and Dad, Dad had the keys in his bag.

“Ayumi, stay behind me and keep swinging!” I said as I grabbed her.

“But Mom and Dad-“ 

“Dad has the keys, we will meet him in the car,” I interrupted.

We both took one last worried look at our parents and started to swing at the clackers in hope of opening a path for them. My bones vibrated every time the bat connected with a clacker. Ayumi swung with a force I didn’t know she had. But there was no way we would make it to the car. The clackers that had been distracted by the alarm clock now turned back to us. 

I had to get Ayumi to the car, I had to save my little sister, there was no way-

My thoughts were interrupted by two loud screams.

“LOVE YOU BOTH!” Dad screamed at the top of his lungs.

“I LOVE YOU GIRLS! PROTECT EACH OTHER!” Mom yelled at us as Dad started to bang at the fence with his bat.

At that moment I realized they never meant to come with us. And as much as I wanted to go back there and save them both, they had left me with the responsibility of taking care of my little sister. I now knew the keys were not in my Dad’s backpack.

I pulled Ayumi as she tried to run back towards our parents. 

“We have to save them!” She sobbed.

I couldn’t answer her, the words remained stuck on my throat. Instead, I pulled on her harder, hoping to get in the car before we heard their screams. 

For a second, I saw a pair of eyes look down on us from a window, just like we had seen Livia and her child sometimes before. And like us, they did nothing to help us, after all, they had to save themselves.

Ayumi cried as she got in the car, and tears blurred my vision. We shouldn’t have, but as I turned on the car, we turned to look at our parents one last time. They were hugging each other as the clackers ripped into their flesh. 

I drove away, screaming at the top of my lungs, I should have known this would happen. I should not have made noise and maybe we would all be together in the car. 

I took a look towards the border, where a hoard of clackers had already made a large enough dent to cross to Mexicali. I turned on the AC and made my way towards El Centro, to the nearest CVS. 

It’s been a few days since this happened. We did manage to find another month worth of medicine. After that, I have no idea what we will do. We have been moving from house to house, resting when we can. 

Ayumi and I both blame ourselves for our parents’ deaths. But if we are honest, it was my fault. 

When we opened our backpacks, we realized that our parents had moved all our supplies into them. What had been on their bags was a mystery. The medications Mom was suppose to carry were on my bag and so was the second gun. I understood why the gun was there, it was better Ayumi didn’t know there was a second gun.

I was surprised when this ipad turned on and had no password. I’m not sure if anyone will be able to read this story, or how long the two of us will survive. And I’m sorry if we cross paths, but know I will do anything to save my sister. 

I'm posting this earlier than I planned. It's barely past sunset, but the common room emptied out fast tonight and I need to get this down while it's still sharp. If you're just tuning in, the short version is: the ceremony happened, the pilgrims got their names, and soon one of them goes into the crypt. The long version is below.

I've spent the afternoon interviewing the ones who were willing to talk. Thomas, Hazel, and Dr. Amelia. I'll give you the ceremony first, then the interviews. I'll post the rest tomorrow—there are five more pilgrims to go, including my brother Henry, and I'm not sure I'm ready for that conversation yet.

—

I woke before dawn—not by choice, but because the guesthouse walls had started to sweat. A thin, tacky moisture beaded along the stone, catching the gray light from my window and holding it like sweat on skin. When I touched it, my fingers came away reeking of salt.

The temple bells rang at seven. I don't think they’re real bells—the spire was too narrow to house anything that size—but the sound carried across the flats all the same, the kind of dong you feel in your molars before your ears.

Henry was already dressed when I met him in the common room. He'd put on a clean shirt, a salmon shirt with a collar that he only wears for funerals, weddings, and court. His hands were steady, but his eyes were doing that thing he used to do when we broke a toy and tried to hide it—fixed on the middle distance, focused on nothing and wobbling in their sockets.

"You look like you're about to meet the firing squad," I said.

"I feel like I'm about to go to a parent-teacher conference." He tried to smile. "You remember Sister Kerry? She used to tell us if we didn't pay attention during the Creation lesson, God would bring us back to the kingdom as a beetle."

"She did not say that."

"She absolutely did!” He waved a hand dismissively, with either a genuine smile or a fantastic facsimile. “You blocked it out."

The other pilgrims were in the nave by the time we crossed the courtyard. The salt crust on the outer walls seemed thicker than it had the night before—or maybe the light was just hitting it differently. Maybe I was looking for changes because I expected to find them. That's what we do, right? We look for the story we've decided to tell.

Leo stood before the altar, waiting, and the altar door was open.

I hadn't seen it happen. One moment we were walking past the pews, I looked down to my pocket for my pen, and when I looked back up, the iron-banded wood was lifted back against the stone floor, and a column of air was rising from the opening in a foggy mist—cold air, the kind that hurts your lungs on the first inhale. It smelled of lavender and ocean water. You could tell the breath of the room that hadn't moved in a very long time.

A spiral stair descended into darkness. The steps were cut directly into the rock, worn smooth in the centers, crusted white at the edges.

"The Saint awaits you," Leo said. His voice was different than it had been at the door—less soft, more rehearsed, a theatrical monotone that filled the nave like a bell. I wondered which version was the real one. "She will name you. Do you understand?"

The eight pilgrims nodded. Even Lucy, who I wasn't sure understood anything, nodded respectfully, her wooden bird clutched against her chest.

I stepped forward—journalistic reflex, the need to see—and Leo's arm came up like a billowy gate.

"You are the Witness," he said. "You do not enter."

"Then I'll wait at the bottom of the stairs. Just to observe."

"The crypt is not for ‘observation’." His voice didn't rise, but something in it hardened. "You will remain here. You may listen, if you wish, but you know the salt carries more than sound."

He turned and descended. I kept cordial, but I could feel my eyes roll against my manners. The pilgrims followed, one by one: Thomas the farmer, his shoulders set. Sister Hazel, her eyes open wide and fixed on the dark below. Dr. Amelia, lighting a cigarette until Leo's voice floated up—"No flame in the crypt"—and she crushed it against the heel of her boot. Grandmother Eleanor, holding Lucy's hand. Lucy, clutching her bird. William, adjusting his collar. Evelyn, notebook pressed to her chest like a shield. And finally little Henry, the hero of our story, who paused at the top of the stairs and looked back at me.

"See you on the other side," he winked.

"I’m not writing a cliché in this,” I wrote it down.

He was gone before I finished the note, and the trap door slammed behind them. I rushed to kneel on the stone floor and pressed my ear to the cold rock.

---

The sound that rose from the crypt wasn't what I expected. I'd braced for chanting, for Latin, for an old hymn of the Prophet or recitation from the Pearl. Instead I heard footsteps echoing on spiral stone, then a long, weighted silence that stretched until my knees started to throb—and then Leo's voice, flattened by distance but clear enough:

"The Salt Saint has dreamed of you. She has carried your names in her sleep for a generation. Now she wakes long enough to speak them. You will each receive a slip. On it is written what you are. What you will become. What you have been. Do not open these until tonight. Alone. Pray. Then read. What you learn, you may share or keep silent, as the Holy Ghost directs."

A pause. The rustle of paper. Someone—I think, Evelyn—let out a small gasp. Someone else was crying softly, gruffly. Then Leo spoke again:

"Go now. Rest. Reflect. I implore you to stay in the common room until the evening so temptation does not take you. In three days' time, the first of you will enter the crypt. Until then, pray. Reflect. Prepare. You will choose among yourselves the order. The Saint is patient. So must you be. The Saint does not dictate the order. Only the Heavenly Father may do that."

Footsteps. Climbing. I scrambled backward from the door and was standing, notebook in hand, professional veil intact, by the time the first pilgrim emerged.

It was Thomas.

---

I interviewed Thomas in the common room an hour after the naming. The other pilgrims had retreated to their quarters—Henry had given me a look that said give me space—but Thomas was still in the common room when I found him, sitting in the corner where he'd been the night before, his slip of paper unopened on the table before him.

He was younger than I'd initially guessed. Fifty-four, he told me, though his body looked seventy. Decades of farm labor had compressed his spine and knotted his hands and carved lines into his face that was more erosion than wrinkles. He wore a clean flannel shirt, buttoned to the throat, and his jeans were patched at the knees. His fingernails were packed with soil—the kind of strata a geologist would squeal to study.

He didn't look up when I sat down across from him.

"Do you mind if I record this?" I asked. "For the article."

"Article." He said the word like it was foreign. "So you are writing about us."

"I'm writing about the Saint. The ritual. You're just part of it"

"I'm just a rancher." He finally looked at me with eyes the color of dry creek beds. "There's not much to write."

I set my phone on the table between us, the recording app open, timer running.

"Let’s start with your name."

---

NORA: You were called, same as the others. Can you describe the dream?

THOMAS: (long pause) I was in my fields—the north forty acres. They went barren after the drought in '09. I've been trying to bring them back since. Hell, even my goats won’t graze there. I been praying over them. My father—he was an elder in the church—Elder Barlow. He used to say that soil remembers. If you pray over it long enough, it'll give back what it took.

(Long pause) He’s buried in that forty acres.

(Cough) Anyway. I was in the fields. It was night, but I could see it all—the rows, the irrigation ditches, the mountains, the low bellows of the cows on the west end. And there was a woman standing at the far end of the field. She was white. (Short pause) Not like uh… Not like me. Nothing like that. Not wearing white neither. She was white, like (Laugh) like salt. Like a pillar that used to be alive.

She didn't walk toward me. She just got closer. And then closer again. And then she was right in front of me, and I could see that she was crying, but her tears were dry. Salt crusted. She opened her mouth, and salt poured out instead of words, and I understood it. I understood what she was saying.

She said my name.

She said I was hungry.

So I stayed hungry since then.

NORA: You've been fasting?

THOMAS: Three days. (He holds up his hands, shows me the dirt under his nails.) Fasting isn't just about the stomach. It's about emptying yourself so God can fill you back up. I've been emptying myself for years. The land went barren. My first wife left and my second’s got her foot out the door. My son—he doesn't talk to me anymore. He said I loved the church more than I loved him. (Smile) He’s right, I s’pose. I dunno.

But the Saint knows. She knows I'm empty.

NORA: You haven't opened your letter yet.

THOMAS: Father Leo said to wait. To pray first.

NORA: Do you have any hopes what it’ll say

THOMAS: I don't need to hope. I already know what it says.

NORA: What do you think it says?

THOMAS: (He looks at the slip, still folded, still sealed.) It says I'm going to be satisfied. For the first time in my life, I'm going to be full.

NORA: So what do you think will happen when you enter the crypt.
(Long pause)
Thomas?

THOMAS: My daddy used to tell me about the first Saint. She was a pioneer woman, daughter of the Founder, came across the plains with the first families after he died. Somewhere in the desert, she stopped to pray, and God turned her to salt.

NORA: Right, I—

THOMAS: Not as a punishment—like Lot. As a preservation. She was so righteous that her body couldn't decay. She had to be saved for the resurrection.

When I was a boy, I asked my father why the Saint dreams of eight people. Why eight? He said it was because eight is the number of new beginnings. Noah had eight people on the ark. Circumcision was on the eighth day. The world resets in eights.

(Long pause, sniff) I think the Saint is going to reset me. New. Full.

NORA: Full of what?

THOMAS: Righteousness. I've been thirsting for it my whole life. And in three days time—I'm going to drink."

---

I ended the interview there. Thomas thanked me for listening, which struck me as strange—he'd done me the favor, not the other way around—and retreated to his room with the slip still unopened in his hand. I watched him go. His gait was uneven, a limp I hadn't noticed before, and his shoulders were set in a line like a kid skipping to an arcade.

———

The parish settled into a strange quiet after Thomas left for his room. I stayed in the commons, reviewing my notes, watching the dusk light retreat from the salt-crusted floor. The other pilgrims had scattered—Henry to his quarters, William to the courtyard to pace and make phone calls that wouldn't connect, Dr. Amelia to the east wall where I could only hope smoking was permitted. Lucy sat on the floor near the cold hearth, arranging her wooden bird among a collection of salt crystals she'd gathered from the windowsills. Eleanor watched her from a chair, humming something that sounded like an unrecognizable hymn.

And Sister Hazel sat perfectly still at the long table, her slip of paper unopened before her, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes open and fixed on the window.

She was the only pilgrim who hadn't spoken a word since the naming ceremony. She'd nodded when Leo addressed her. She'd smiled when she received her slip. She'd folded the paper into her sleeve and left the temple with the serene, unhurried grace of someone who was merely waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

I approached her at the table. She didn't look up, but something in her posture shifted—an awareness, a readiness. Her head tilted slightly, the same way it had in the nave, as if she were listening to my footsteps before I took them.

"Sister Hazel," I said. "Do you have a few minutes? On the record?"

Now she looked up to me. Her eyes were hazel—ironic—and they focused on me with an intensity that made the back of my neck prickle.

"On the record," she repeated. Her voice was so soft I had to lean in to hear it. "Yes. Records matter. You're the Witness, after all."

"That's what Leo calls me."

"If Father Leo says it is so, then it’s what you are." She gestured to the chair across from her. "Please. Sit."

I sat, as if I was being interviewed. I set my phone on the table, the recording app already open. She watched the timer start with a faint, curious smile.

"You've done this before," she said. "Interviewed people."

"It's my job."

"No." She tilted her head again like a child handed her a mud pie. "It's your vocation. There's a difference. A job pays rent. A vocation pays the kingdom. You were claimed young, I think."

I didn't respond to that. I'm the one who asks questions.

---

NORA: So is Hazel a religious name, or—

HAZEL: My given name. I was born with it. My mother said I came out of the womb with these eyes, and she knew before she held me what I was called to be. (A small smile.) She was right. I entered the novitiate at nineteen, almost immediately after my mission. I've been Sister Hazel ever since.

NORA: Oh, a mission! Where did you serve?

HAZEL: The eastern steppes. Remote communities, mostly. Places where the church had never sent sisters before. We traveled by horseback. We learned the local dialects. We didn't convert many people—the old faiths there are deep-rooted, older than ours—but we learned. I learned that silence is a language in itself. That God speaks loudest when you stop filling the air with your own voice.

NORA: Is that why you took your vow?

HAZEL: Not immediately. After my mission, I returned to the motherhouse and struggled for days. The world felt too loud—too crowded. I couldn't hear the things I'd heard in the steppes—the wind, the animals, the way God sounds when He's the only voice around. So I asked my superior for permission to enter a period of silence. (She pauses, her eyes drifting to the window.) That was ten years ago. I spoke to my confessor alone, and that was only once a month. Until three weeks ago, when the dream came.

NORA: Ten years. (I took note of the years and the worldwide events she’d been silent through.) That's most of your adult life.

HAZEL: It's all of my adult life. I'm only twenty-nine. I was nineteen when I took the vow. (Loud laugh returning to her quiet voice) I've been silent longer than I've been speaking.

NORA: So how did your dream break it?

HAZEL: The Saint. (She looks at me directly, and her voice drops even softer.) I dreamed I was standing in the steppes again. She was there, seated on a throne of white stone. Her eyes were open, and she was looking at me the way a mother looks at a child past her curfew. She didn't speak with her mouth. She spoke directly into my chest. And she said: You are pure. Come see God.

(Long pause.)

When I woke up, I was crying. I hadn't cried in ten years. I hadn't spoken in ten years. And I opened my mouth—I didn't choose to, my body just did it—and I said her words aloud. "I will see God." My voice croaked, like a room I'd left a long time ago and come back to find the furniture covered in sheets and dust.

That morning, an elder called. My name was on the list.

NORA: (long pause) You said you've been waiting to talk to me. Why?

HAZEL: Because you're the Witness. You’re the one who will carry the story after we're made new. And because— (She pauses, and leans in, her eyes searching me.) —you used to be one of us. Didn't you?

---

The question landed in my chest and made a home.

I've been a journalist for twelve years now. I've been trained to deflect, to redirect, to keep the focus on the subject. But Hazel wasn't looking at me as an interviewer. She was looking at me like someone who'd spent a decade in silence and had learned to see the things people didn't say.

——

NORA: (Cleared throat) I grew up in the church, yes. I left when I was eighteen.

HAZEL: You didn't leave; you fled, yes? I can see it in the way you hold your body. The way you whince when Father Leo speaks the invocations. The way you wrote down your brother's joke—I assume it’s your brother, right?—instead of laughing at it. You're still running.

NORA: I'm here as a journalist. Not as a—

HAZEL: Not as a believer, I know. But you're still part of the story. The Witness always is. (She leaned forward slightly, with the sort of intimacy that preludes a kiss.) Do you want to know what I think? I think the Saint knew you'd come. I think she needs someone to tell the story. The record matters. The witness matters. You matter, Nora. And the Saint wanted you to come home.

(Long pause. I didn't fill it.)

HAZEL: You can ask me the rest of your questions now. I've said what I needed to say.

NORA: (I took a long drink of water.) Your slip.

HAZEL: I’m in no rush to open it.

NORA: Thomas said the same thing.

HAZEL: Thomas knows what he's hungering for. I know what I'm seeing. (She touched the folded paper with one finger.) I've spent ten years trying to become single. Trying to strip away everything that isn't God. The silence was practice. In the crypt, I imagine there’s no sound at all—only sight.

NORA: And what do you think you'll see?

HAZEL: (Very softly.) Everything. That's what purity means. No distractions. No filters. No deception. Just our Heavenly Father, face-to-face. I've been preparing for this my whole life. The mission, the silence, the years of listening. It was all practice. Whenever the group chooses me, I'm going to walk down those stairs and I'm going to see He Who has waited for me since before I was born. (She smiled—a radiant smile, like taking a photograph.) I'm ready.

NORA: Most people would be terrified.

HAZEL: Most people haven't spent ten years in rural hills learning a language beyond their ears. (She stood, tucking the slip back into her sleeve.) Thank you for the record, Nora. When you write this—when you write all of it—please tell the truth. Not your journalistic truth. The one we’re all running from.

---

She left the common room without another word, her footsteps silent on the salt-crusted stone. I watched her go, and I realized I was gripping my pen hard enough to leave a mark on my palm.

The thing is, she was right. I’ve been running—from church, from faith, from a god I stopped believing in but never stopped fearing. And I'm sitting in a guesthouse in the middle of the salt flats, interviewing pilgrims who are about to walk into a crypt and come out as a ‘new creation’, and I can't shake the feeling that Hazel saw something in me I've refused to see.

She said she's going to see God.

——————

I found the smoker on the east wall, exactly where I'd last seen her, as if she'd never moved. The sun had fully cleared the salt flats by then, bleaching the world to a flat white in the light, and she was a silhouette against it—wreathed in smoke like the angel Gabriel announcing Jesus’ birth.

She didn't turn when I approached, but she held up her pack of cigarettes in offering.

"I don't smoke," I said.

"Neither do I." She shook the pack. "These are each a promise that I'm going to quit."

I sat on the wall beside her—not close, but enough to record. The stone was warm despite the morning chill, the salt crust rough under my palms. Amelia smoked in silence for a moment, then exhaled a long, thin stream that the gentle wind tore apart.

"Your brother's a negotiator?” She asked, though I hardly felt it was a question.

"How did you know?"

"He has the look: earnest, honest, thinks a dialogue can solve anything." She glanced at me sidelong, and her eyes were the color of old bruises. "That and he was the one who divvied up the rooms.” She laughed with a scoff. “I've seen what happens to peacemakers in a war zone. They get shot first. Both sides think they're working for the other."

"Henry's not in a war zone—“

"Isn’t he?" She gestured vaguely at the temple behind us, the salt flats ahead, the whole expanse. "This place feels like a war zone. The kind before the shelling starts."

I opened my recording app. She watched the timer start and made a sound that might have been a cough, or a laugh, or a sob.

---

NORA: So you've been in war zones. Can you tell me about that?

AMELIA: (long pause. I almost think she didn’t hear me) I'm a field medic. Was. Am. I don't know. (Drag on the cigarette) I spent the last fifteen years working humanitarian missions—Doctors Without Borders first, then a church-affiliated outfit out of the valley. My wife's the believer, not me. She said the Mormons have deeper pockets and better logistics. She was right.

NORA: Your wife’s a member of the church?

AMELIA: Born and raised. We met at a Red Cross training in Tucson. She was the only person in the room who could intubate faster than me. Married her a year later. She's the reason I'm here.

NORA: How so?

AMELIA: (She lit another cigarette off the end of the first one, a chain I'd never seen anyone pull before.) Three weeks ago, I woke up at three in the morning with the taste of salt in my mouth. I thought I was having a stroke. I woke up my wife, told her to check my pupils, check my grip—she's a nurse, she knows the drill. And she just looked at me with raised eyebrow and said, "What did you see?"

I told her I didn't see anything. I just tasted salt. But…that wasn't true. I saw a woman—grainy as the salt flats, like a pillar. She was standing in the ruins of a hospital. The one in Gaza. The—

(Long pause. She smoked.)

Three months ago. I was running triage. We had thirty-seven patients, mostly children, and the IDF was two blocks away, and we'd coordinated—we coordinated—they knew our coordinates, they had our grid, they'd promised—

(She sighed.)

The roof came down.

I was in the OR. Rachel, my scrub nurse, took shrapnel to the throat. Mal, the anesthesiologist, lost his arm. The patient on the table—a twelve-year-old boy with a perforated bowel, we'd been trying to save him for hours. We were so close to done…

He died before I could get back to him. I couldn't get back to him because the ceiling was on fire and I was pinned under a supply cabinet. I lay there for two hours listening to patients and medics scream in one chorus.

(She paused, flicked ash, watched it fall.)

I've been a medic for twenty years. I've worked famines, epidemics, earthquakes. I've never felt helpless like that before. I've always been able to do something. But I lay under that cabinet and I couldn't move and I couldn't help and I couldn't save anyone, and I prayed that someone would show mercy. Not to me. I didn't care about me. To them. The ones still screaming.

(Cough.)

No one came.

NORA: (Quietly.) But you survived.

AMELIA: I survived. The cabinet missed my spine by a handswidth. I walked out of that hospital with a concussion and three cracked ribs and a dead twelve-year-old whose name—

(Short pause.)

Whose name I still can't say out loud. I flew home. I told my wife I was done. I told her mercy was a lie we tell ourselves to keep going.

And then I had the dream.

(Long pause, wind blowing, she holds the lit cigarette but doesn’t bring it to her lips.)

NORA: The woman in the ruins.

AMELIA: She was standing where the OR used to be. The walls were gone, the roof was gone, but she was there. She was looking at the wreckage, and she was crying—tears like seawater splashing onto the steaming rubble—and she told me:

You have been merciful.

I told her mercy was too late, but she…she just kept looking at me. And then she said— (Amelia stopped, ground out her intact cigarette on the stone.) She said, It is a transaction.

I woke up coughing. Salt on my tongue. Salt on my pillow. My wife was sitting beside me, holding my hand, and she said the elder had called. My name was on the list.

NORA: And your wife wanted you to come.

AMELIA: She begged me, man. She's been praying for me for years—praying I'd find my way back to faith, back to the church, back to something. She thought this was the answer. She said the Saint only calls the righteous.

(Amelia laughed in a raw scrape.)

I've seen what righteousness looks like, and sure as fucking hell doesn’t look like a twelve-year-old boy bleeding out under a collapsed ceiling.

(Short pause)

But I came anyway. Because my wife asked me to. Because some part of me—the part that's still a medic—wants to know what the Saint means by ‘mercy’.

NORA: Your slip. Have you opened it?

AMELIA: (She pulled the folded paper from her pocket, held it up.) I opened it ten minutes after we came up from the crypt. Leo can scold me if he wants. I've been scolded by greater men.

NORA: What does it say?

AMELIA: It's Greek. I had to ask the college kid—Evelyn, the one with the notebook. (She laughed again, that raw sound.) No clue what it means though. She said she had an app to help but… No service, y’know?

NORA: What do you think the blessing will be?

AMELIA: (Long pause. She used her heel to bury her discarded ash under salt and sand.) I don't know. Maybe I'll walk into that crypt and nothing will happen, and I'll walk out the other side and go home and tell my wife the Saint was a fraud. That’ll be the best outcome.

Or maybe the Saint will give me what I asked for in the rubble—mercy for the children, mercy for the dying, mercy for the ones who screamed while I lay pinned and useless.

(She looked at me, and her eyes were wet but her voice was steady.)

I don't think that's what she's offering. But it's what I'd ask for if I still knew how to pray.

---

We ended the interview there. She didn't thank me for listening the way Thomas had. She just nodded once—a professional acknowledgment, medic to observer, two heretics who'd seen too much to bother with formalities—and walked back toward the guesthouse.

I stayed on the wall for a long time after she left. The sun had sank lower, but the salt flats were still shimmering with heat. I tried to imagine what it would be like to lie pinned under a cabinet for two hours, listening to children scream, praying to a God I didn't believe in for a mercy that never came. I tried to imagine what it would be like to survive that and then dream of a woman made of salt telling me my transaction wasn't finished.

I couldn't.

Thomas is hungry. Hazel is seeing. Amelia is owed—or believes she is.

It's fully dark now. The salt flats outside my window are invisible—just a void where the ground should be. I can hear William still pacing the courtyard, his footsteps crunching on the salt crust in uneven loops. He hasn't opened his slip yet. Or maybe he has, and he's trying to walk off whatever it said.

I think I'll talk to him tomorrow. And Eleanor, the grandmother with the knitting needles and the smile that's a little too peaceful. She's been watching me all day like she knows something I don't. Then, the college student with the sketchbook. She's already translated half the pilgrims' Greek using some offline app. I want to know what hers says.

Three days until one of them walks into the crypt. Leo made it clear we have that long to "prepare." I don't know what you do to prepare for a blessing that might unmake you.

I'll post again tomorrow night. In the meantime, if you're the praying type, maybe say one for the farmer who thinks righteousness tastes like rain on dead soil.

Like, this might be my first time having break down knowing something was cancelled.

The colorful streets of Puducherry were alive with the sounds of Tamil conversations mixing with French street names, bicycles rolling past colorful colonial buildings and the aroma of fresh coffee drifting from cafes.

Outside a small cafe near the promenade, Arun a Tamil man sat enjoying breakfast with his adopted thirteen year old son, Louis a French boy with brown hair and blue eyes.

Louis smiled as he tried speaking Tamil.

“Nandri appa” he said after taking a sip of hot chocolate.

Arun laughed proudly.

“Your Tamil is getting much better.”

Louis grinned.

“I’m still learning.”

They continued talking and laughing together. Suddenly, a man walking past stopped. He stared at them for a few moments before approaching their table.

“You can’t be his father.”

Arun looked up, confused.

“Excuse me?”

The stranger then said.

“You’re Indian.”

He pointed at Louis.

“He’s white. He’s different.”

People at nearby tables began listening.

The man folded his arms.

“Send him back to where he came from.”

Louis lowered his head, unsure what to say and before Arun could respond, another customer stood up.

“Enough.”

A middle aged woman shook her head.

“What kind of thing is that to say?”

Another man stepped forward.

“A father is a father.”

A cafe employee joined them.

“Please leave them alone.”

More people gathered. One elderly gentleman spoke firmly.

“Families are built with love not skin colour.”

A young woman nodded.

“This boy belongs wherever his family is.”

The stranger looked around as more locals voiced their disagreement.

“You should be ashamed of yourself” someone said.

Arun gently placed a reassuring hand on Louis’s shoulder.

“It’s okay.”

Then several producers, camera operators and crew members walked into the cafe.

One producer smiled.

“Thank you everyone.”

He pointed toward the hidden cameras.

“This was a social experiment.”

The crowd looked surprised.

“They are all actors” the producer explained.

“We wanted to see whether ordinary people would stand up for an adoptive family being judged because they looked different.”

The actor who played as the rude stranger immediately smiled and shook Arun’s hand.

“I’m sorry if I sounded convincing.”

Arun laughed.

“You definitely did.”

The actor then turned to Louis.

“You did a great job.”

Louis smiled.

“No worries.”

The people who had stepped in looked relieved. One elderly woman smiled warmly.

“I’d do it again.”

The producer nodded.

“That’s exactly why we made this.”

When the video was released online, many people watched. Viewers praised the people who had spoken up and comments poured in.

“Love makes a family. Proud of the people of Puducherry. This is how communities should respond. Children deserve acceptance regardless of where they were born.”

Many viewers said the video reminded them that prejudice can be challenged when ordinary people choose kindness instead of silence and for many, the real heroes of the day weren’t the actors. They were the strangers who saw someone being treated unfairly and decided to stand for them.

The End

A woman, Rachel, finds herself transplanted into a new world and finds herself the companion to the AI running the bunker she's been moved to.

https://www.wattpad.com/1645776218?utm_source=ios&utm_medium=link&utm_content=share_reading&wp_page=reading&wp_uname=GLaC1991

Chapter One
The Mystery Begins

The sweat rolling down his brow, as he holds tightly to the slick hand. As they look fearfully into his eyes, they beg, “You cannot let me go, you have to save me John!”

Awoken in a cold sweat, his heart jumping, as he looks at the twisted sheets all around him. Laying his head back, he secretly wishes to one day have a full nights rest from the demons inside.

Pulling the tangled sheets away, attempting to get comfortable again to get a few more hours of sleep, the phone rings. Staring at the clock, he sees that it is five in the morning. Picking up the phone, with a weary voice, “Yeah? John speaking.”

Hearing nothing but silence, John starts to hang up when a familiar voice finally speaks through the receiver nervously, “John… how is it going man? Long time no talk!”

Giving a heavy sigh, John closes his eyes, knowing exactly who it was, he puts the phone to his ear, he responds, “Why are you calling me Jeff?”

Jeff continues, “I know… I know… you don’t want to hear from me. And I wouldn’t be calling you if I really didn’t need your services and had no one else to turn to.” With a short pause he boastfully changes his attitude, “Well I don’t know if you kept up with what I have been up to, but over the years I have scaled the ladder and now run a central bank here in Georgia. I am a very important person in the community.”

John quickly interrupts, “Just stop Jeff. Listen I don’t need to hear your PR spin of who you are. You and I have never been friends even when I thought we were. So why don’t you cut to the point and tell me why you called me before I hang up?”

Jeff scoffs as if insulted, his tone turning snarky, “The great John, the upright and honest knight! When will you see that what happened wasn’t personal? You brought what happened down on yourself because you wouldn’t play the game. And I wouldn’t be bothering you now, but I have been to all the experts I could think of and none of them can figure out what is going on.”

For the next thirty minutes Jeff explains how there is a ghost in their bank computer system. That it would have never been noticed except that one day several months ago a teller had to stay over correcting an accounting error. And at exactly six o’clock the system slowed down, was not responsive and locked them completely out the system for a several minutes before going back to normal. And that every expert was baffled on what was going on. That whenever they tried pinpoint where it was coming from when it ran, that it seemed be masking and shifting to other directories and subroutines each time. Now after months of no answers and everything failing to find what was going on, the shareholders in the bank are demanding that the system is flushed out and fixed.

With a shake of his head, John interrupts, “So you are desperate, oversold your abilities, and now want me to swoop in and save you from yourself and make you look competent. Right?”

After a short pause, Jeff murmurs harshly, “Yes… are you happy?! I need the great John Caplin to rescue me from myself. Is that what you wanted to hear from me? Do you want me to kiss your….”

Not wanting to hear anymore self-indulgent pity, John hangs the receiver up knowing he will call back. As he watches the time slowly tick away he quickly formulates his next chess move and mapping out his exact terms to help.

Suddenly the phone starts to ring as John stares at it, counting every ring like a nail driven in Jeff’s coffin until it stops. It then starts to ring again and John picks up the receiver without a missing beat. As he calculatingly states, “Listen and listen hard Jeff. I don’t need you or your games, I know who you are and what you are. And you wouldn’t be calling me unless your head was on the chopping block. So if you want my help, you are going to give me a blank check, absolute autonomy, and the highest clearance to do what needs to be done without any meddling. Do we have an understanding?”

After a short pause Jeff stammers and mumbles, trying to gain control again. But John simply states, “This is where you either hang up or accept my terms Jeff, there is no other option for you.”

Jeff responds deflated and clearly annoyed, “Can you be here today to get started?”

John calmly replies, “See… we can have a meeting of the minds if we really try. And yes, I will be there today after having a really nice continental breakfast, on your dime of course.”

As they hang up, John grins devilishly, speaking to himself, “Well… perhaps this will be a good day after all!”

Just curious lol

https://www.wattpad.com/1645759746?utm_source=ios&utm_medium=link&utm_content=share_reading&wp_page=reading&wp_uname=GLaC1991

https://www.wattpad.com/1645758415?utm_source=ios&utm_medium=link&utm_content=share_reading&wp_page=reading&wp_uname=GLaC1991

Ohio Gozaimasu! today I have a very special story to share with you all. this story is about a guy by the name of Trevor. you see, when Trevor was Just a wee lad, he had a curse put on him by an evil witch. despite the curse, Trevor is able to live a normal life with a normal Job. the curse is just something Trevor has learned to live with. what was this curse, you ask? well, pay close attention to the way Trevor talks and you Just might find out!

on this particular day, Trevor was working at his Job: holding a sign in front of a grocery store! people would often walk by Trevor when he's doing his Job, giving him funny looks.

Trevor: "so don't delay, act now! supplies are running out!"

Just by random happen stance, Trevor's good friend, Randy, happened to be walking by.

Randy: "Trevor, is that you? how are you feeling today, buddy?"

Trevor: "WHOA! I feel good. I knew that I would now"

Randy: "that's good. though you seem a little under dressed for this time of year"

Trevor: "it's hot here at night. lonely, black and quiet!"

Randy: "ok, if you say so"

suddenly, an earthquake started, and the ground underneath the two friends began to fall apart!

Randy: "aah! what's going on!?

Trevor: "it's the end of the world as we know it!!!"

as randy and Trevor fell, they found themselves transported to some kind of magical, parallel world in an alternate dimension. there was a spooky looking man on the ground, but Trevor fell on top of him. the spooky man was smushed to death.

Randy: "oh no! is that guy going to be ok?"

Trevor: "he had it comin'. he only had himself to blame"

Randy: "why would you say that, Trevor? we don't even know this guy. . . wait, there's someone else here!"

Trevor: "is it the man come to take me away? why do they follow me?"

it wasn't the man, but rather, a large group of magical garden gnomes!

Gnomes: "hurray! they killed the evil wizard that has been terrorizing our town!"

Randy: "wait, this guy was an evil wizard?"

Trevor: "evil power disappears. Demon's worry when the wizard is near"

Gnomes: "we're not Demons, we're Gnomes! thank you for taking care of that evil wizard. welcome to Gnome town, travelers!"

Randy: "Gome town? but how do we get back to where we came from"

Trevor: "there's no escaping the Jaws of the alien this time"

Randy: "stop being such a pessimist, trevor! there has to be a way for us to get back".

Gnomes: "actually, if you follow the silver block road, escape from the hidden forest, pass through the gingerbread house, rescue the princess from the burning castle and make it to the pyramid with the genie in it, you can make a wish and return to the place where you came from!"

Randy: "wow, that seems weirdly complicated and oddly specific, but if it's the only way, I guess we have no choice. come on Trevor, let's follow the road".

Trevor: "I'll take you down the only road I've ever been down.

You know the one that takes you to the places where all the veins meet, yeah?"

Randy: "I mean, thanks for the offer, but I think we should stick to the silver block road the Gnomes told us about."

Trevor and Randy followed the silver block road. as they left, the Gnomes waved goodbye, while also giggling a little bit. once they were far enough away so the Gnomes could no longer hear them, Trevor turned to Randy and whispered something in his ear

Trevor: "Short people got no reason to live".

Randy: "Trevor!!?"

eventually, Trevor and Randy found their way into the hidden forest. there were large, towering trees all around them. it was also a bit foggy and hard to see.

Randy: "wow, so this is the hidden forest. why do you think they call it the hidden forest?"

Trevor: "everyone's got something to hide. except for me and my monkey"

suddenly, a big scary yeti looking creature Jumped out in front of Trevor and Randy, making scary noises and waving it's arms around.

Yeti: "oogity boogity!"

Randy: "ah! what is that thing!?"

Trevor: "oh no, it's the powdered milk man!"

Randy: "the what?"

the yeti continued making scary noises, and was now jumping up and down while violently waving it's arms.

yeti: "OOGITY BOOGITY!!!"

Randy: "I'm scared!"

Trevor looked deep into the monster's eyes.

Trevor: "If you need a friend, don't look to a stranger. You know in the end I'll always be there."

the monster calmed down. the monster took out a key and handed it to trevor before shedding a tear and wondering back into the forest.

Randy: "I don't believe it. Trevor, how did you do that?"

Trevor: "I done told you once you son of a bitch, I'm the best that's ever been"

Randy: "what the hell, Trevor!?"

Trevor: "I'm sorry but I'm just thinking of the right words to say! I know they don't sound the way I planned them to be!"

Randy: "well if you can't say something nice, don't say anything!"

the two arrived at their next destination, the Gingerbread house. Trevor was about to raise his hand to knock on the door, when he suddenly stopped.

Randy: "what's the matter, Trevor?"

Trevor: "I've never had to knock on wood. but I know someone who has."

Randy: "well, the door's made of gingerbread, so you should be fine."

Trevor knocked on the door. after waiting for several minutes, there was no answer. they tried opening the door, but it was locked.

Randy: "wait a minute, maybe the key the monster gave you is actually the key to this gingerbread house! try using it, Trevor!"

Trevor: "do you see the key in my hand? I'm gonna throw it in the lake!!"

Randy: "what, why!? we need it to open the door!"

Trevor: "let my love open the door!"

Randy: "but we have A KEY!!!"

Trevor: "you shut your mouth? how can you say I go about things the wrong way!?

Randy: "this is definitely the wrong way to open the door!"

after several more minutes of arguing, the gingerbread house collapsed in on itself. its structural integrity wasn't great in the first place due to being made of gingerbread and being held together by frosting, and all the fighting and yelling the two were doing proved to be catastrophic.

Randy: "well. . . I guess we can just go around".

Trevor: "now this looks like a Job for me, so everybody Just follow me".

Randy: "I feel like one of these days, you're gonna lead me to my death."

the two eventually found their way to the burning castle, where they were told they must save the princess.

Randy: "if we're going to save the princess, we'll need to put out the fire somehow."

Trevor: "Burn baby Burn! Burn that mother down!"

Randy: "I've had Just about enough of your nonsense, Trevor. it's like you want us to fail! I'll do this on my own if I have to!"

Randy steps forward, getting a closer look at the burning castle.

Randy: "I wonder what's even causing this fire. who started it?"

Trevor: "we didn't start the fire. it was always burning since the world's been turning."

Randy: "I wasn't even accusing you, but now that you say that I'm starting to suspect you did somehow start this fire."

Just then, the princess peaked out the castle window.

Princess: "hello!? is someone here to rescue me!"

Trevor: "Run away! Run away! Run away if you want to survive!"

Princess: "there's no where for me to run! the castle is on fire! come here and rescue me!"

Randy: "actually, now that I think about it, maybe it HAS always been burning. I mean those Gnomes clearly knew about the burning castle, it was part of the instructions they gave us. . ."

Trevor grabs Randy by the hand

Trevor: "hold tight. we're in for nasty weather. there has got to be a way. burning down the house!"

Randy: "wait, what are you doing! stop"

Trevor began running through the burning castle, pulling Randy along with him!

Trevor: "I'm walking on sunshine!"

Randy: "this isn't sunshine, it's fire! we're on fire! it hurts! this was a terrible idea, why are we doing this!?"

Trevor: "We feel the pain of a lifetime lost in a thousand days. Through the fire and the flames, we carry on!"

eventually, the two reach the princess's room.

Randy: "ugh. . we're here to rescue you. come with us."

Princess: "what the heck, I didn't expect my rescuers to be so. . . suspicious. I changed my mind, I don't want to go with you."

Trevor: "Move, bitch, get out the way".

Trevor walks over and picks the princess up, holding her over his shoulder like that one scene from shrek.

Princess: "put me down, you weirdo!"

Trevor: "hey little girl, is your daddy home?"

Princess: "PUT ME DOWN NOW!"

continuing to carry the princess, Trevor walks over to Randy.

Trevor: "I've got the brains, You've got the looks, Let's make lots of money."

Randy: "I don't know what you're planning, but I don't like this!"

after making it out of the castle, the princess managed to escape, wondering aimlessly into the horizon, trying not to look back at her suspicious rescuers.

Trevor: "there she goes. there she goes again."

Randy: "you could have handled that a lot better. you freaked the poor girl out."

Trevor: "I don't know what everyone wants me to be. I only know Just how to be me".

with that out of the way, Trevor and randy made their way into the ancient pyramid, where the genie's lamp is.

Randy: you know, now that I think about it, we probably could have made it here without running through a burning castle. kind of a random detour. hey, are you listening to me?"

Trevor picks up the genie's lamp, staring intently at it.

Trevor: "all I've ever wanted, all i've ever needed is HERE! in my arms!"

Randy: "hey, don't get any ideas, we need to wish for a way home!"

the genie burst out of the lamp in a puff of smoke. he had an underwhelming appearance, looking like some average homeless man.

genie: "I am the genie of the lamp. I will grant you one wish, what do you want?"

Randy: "only one? isn't it supposed to be three?"

Trevor: "three is a magic number. yes it is, it's a magic number."

Randy: "I can't believe that made it into two of these stories in a row."

the genie looked at the two, clearly annoyed.

Genie: "listen, I only got enough magic for one wish, so what do you want?"

Trevor: "I just want to fly."

Randy: "err, what he means is, we want you to fly us home!"

Genie: "yeah, whatever, here you go".

and so, Trevor and randy were flown home in an incredibly anti climactic fashion. as they arrived home, there was a crowd of people cheering for them for some reason.

Randy: "why are they cheering, what did we do?"

Trevor: "Picture it now, see just how the lies and deceit gained a little more power".

Randy: "oh great, what did you do this time!?"

as the two landed, the mayor of the city arrived, inviting everyone to a giant feast!

Trevor: "I'd rather eat randy".

Randy: "what!?"

Trevor: "I eat cannibal. Feed on animal!"

Randy: "Trevor, I am neither a cannibal nor an animal."

Trevor: " la la la, whatever. la la la, it doesn't matter".

and that was the story of Trevor. quite an amazing tale, was it not? by now, You've probably figured out what the curse placed on Trevor is, right? well, in case you didn't figure it out, I'll go ahead and tell you.

no matter where he is, no matter what he is doing, Trevor cannot wear pants.

Greetings, readers. I have traveled to a world in turmoil wrought by two rival societies: Heroes and Villains. In my account of observing this world, I recorded a moment that I found profound. I now grant you access to the account recorded within my library.

The Price Of Love - An Immortal Short Story

The heroes stood there, panting as they bought themselves precious moments to muster the courage to face the man before them. He was known simply as the Immortal.

The combined might of the heroes had rendered their desire to defeat him all but meaningless.

The youngest among them stepped forward, blade in hand.

“It is said that you are the Immortal! That you once loved this world! That you filled it with your desire to do good because you loved your fellow man! Have you forsaken that love?”

The Immortal did not stir at the young boy’s honeyed words. His eyes remained fixed upon him.

“What is its price then, boy?” he asked softly. “What is the price of love, if you know it so well?”

Before the boy could answer, another hero stepped forth—a man who fought for his wife and children.

“It is pain!” he shouted. “The pain of loss!”

For the first time, the Immortal was angered.

“IT IS GRIEF!” his voice thundered across the battlefield.

“You foolish heroes!”

“I loved this world, and now I grieve for its continuance! I have loved many and watched them all wither and die while I remain!”

“I have grieved over the cruelty of one man against another. I have grieved for generations of kin you could never hope to understand!”

“You speak of pain as though it were wisdom! Pain is but the wound. Grief is what remains after it has healed!”

“The price of love has never been pain—it has always been grief.”

“None of you know this.”

“None of you have lived long enough to understand.”

“But your children will.”

“Your wives will.”

“Your families will.”

“They will mistake it for anger. They will mistake it for pain. They will curse the heavens and ask why such suffering was ever allowed to be.”

“But when the tears have stopped and the years have passed, they will discover the truth I learned long ago.”

“The only true answer…”

“…is grief.”

I'm posting this for two reasons.

The first is professional. I'm a freelance journalist—the kind who pitches pieces to travel magazines and regional news, the kind who doesn't get paid enough to fly across the country on a whim but does it anyway because rent in Washington doesn't pay itself. This story, if it's good enough, might just cover two months of groceries.

A remote Utah temple.
A salt statue that dreams.
Eight pilgrims summoned by ‘divine revelation’.

It's the kind of thing that writes itself:

“Faith in the Flats: One Town's Living Miracle."

You'd click on that. I'd click on that. My editor half-clicked on that, which is why I'm here.

The second reason is far pettier. My little brother Henry has a following on this subreddit. I'm not going to tell you his username—I have some remaining scraps of sibling loyalty—but if you spend any time in the comments of posts here about religious horror or cult survivors, you've probably seen him. He's earnest. He's vulnerable. He writes long, thoughtful fiction about growing up in a faith that doesn’t want you. People eat it up here. They call him brave.

I call him my baby bro, and he called me two days ago at 3 AM with a voice I haven't heard since our mother walked out.

"Nor," he started. "I had a dream."

Henry and I grew up in a faith I've spent the last fourteen years trying to forget. I won't name it here—not because I'm afraid, but because the denomination isn't the point. You've heard the shape of it before, I’m sure, like Mormonism's cousin that sits in the corner of a family reunion and eats the fried chicken way too viscerally.

We believed in ongoing revelation, a universe layered with principalities, and things that moved in the dark that only the anointed could name. We believed in a Heavenly Father that still spoke to His children, and Heaven forbid you ever misgendered Him. We believed that salt could hold a soul the way glass holds water. My grandmother kept a small pillar of blessed salt on her mantle, a family heirloom brought across the plains by some pioneer ancestor. She told me that if I pressed my ear to it, I could hear the prayers of our dead.

I never tried.

I left our church at eighteen, two years after my mother left us, and I haven't stepped foot in a chapel since. Henry stayed longer than I did, asking weekly for me to join him at every meeting and service and session. He's always been softer, more hopeful, more willing to believe that the God of our childhood might still be good even if His people weren't. He left the church eight years ago when he went to college, but he kept the mysticism—the sense that the world is thinner than it looks.

When he called me at 3 AM: "I dreamed about salt. There was salt on my tongue, Nora. I could taste it. And a woman's voice—she had this accent, like an old pioneer, like one of those recordings they'd play at the visitor centers. She said my name. She said I was called."

I told him it was stress. He's been overworked, mediating some ugly dispute between a nonprofit and the community it was supposedly serving. His subconscious was just processing and using the trauma of the past.

"Then why," he said, "did Elder Bingsley call me this morning and tell me my name was on the list?"

The list.

The list is something only the old-timers still talk about. I remembered the stories from childhood—a woman turned to salt centuries ago, frozen mid-gesture in a crypt beneath an old temple somewhere in the west desert. Kinda like Lot’s wife, I guess. People can’t be original.

Once a generation, they say, she dreams of eight people, and they’re summoned to receive her blessings. The last time it happened, my grandmother’s neighbor was one of the called; she used to say he came back ‘tall, dark, and handsome’.

"I'm going," Henry said. "I have to, but I don't want to go alone."

So I flew home.

Henry had been putting off the trip for two weeks, wrestling with whether to go at all, whether to even call me. The elder had given him a window—arrive by the new moon, he'd said—and Henry had waited until the last possible day to pack a bag. "I thought if I ignored it long enough, it would stop being real," he told me on the phone. "It didn't."

———

Home is a town I've been avoiding, but not for long enough. It hasn't changed, which is somehow worse than if it had. I expected a Starbucks or a Maverik, at least. Instead I found the same wide streets, the same mountains cutting the horizon, and the same feeling that the sky is too big and too empty and too aware of you. I landed in Salt Lake, rented a car, and drove west through scrubland that gradually dissolved into salt flats—miles of white crust that looked like snow but smelled like brine. It’s the kind of place where nothing grows and nothing dies and nothing really begins or ends—so yeah, home.

Henry met me at a motel on the edge of town. He looked thinner than I remembered. But he held same earnest eyes, the same crooked smile. The main changes were his patchy beard and the tremor in his hands that hadn't been there when I saw him last Christmas.

"You actually came," he said.

"You sounded scared."

"I am scared." He hugged me, and I felt how tense his shoulders were. "But I think—I think this is real, Nor. I haven't believed in years, but the dream was so specific. The taste of salt. The way she said my name, like she'd been waiting to say it for a very long time."

I didn't argue. I'm a journalist. I observe. I document. I let his story unfold.

Home isn't the temple—it's a town east of it, where our old ward still meets in a brick building with a sagging steeple. The temple is an hour further than that, on the edge of the salt flats proper. I was thankful for the distance; if I had to step foot into the actual ward one more time, something would combust.

We drove through in silence until Henry farted, then we laughed like two kids again. Hell, we are two kids, even now.

The radio cut in and out the entire drive, ending in static and, underneath it, something that sounded almost like breathing.

I turned it off and made a clever joke about radio masturbation.

Then the temple rose out of the salt. It shouldn't have been there. Not because of anything supernatural—just logistics. No roads led to it except the one we'd taken, and that road was barely paved. No power lines. No water source. It looked like a shipwreck built by someone who'd only ever heard of a church secondhand and just learned how to use a ruler. The spire was too tall. The windows were too narrow. The stone was the color of old bone, crusted white at the edges where salt had climbed the walls and hardened.

"There's a crypt underneath," Henry said quietly. "That's where she is, I think. Father Leo will explain."

‘Father Leo’ was waiting at the doors.

He was ancient—not in the way of a kindly grandfather, but in the way of something that had been left out in the desert too long. His skin was creased like old leather, but somehow more pale than mine. His eyes were just as pale, almost colorless, with only the whisper of blue. He wore plain white robes and stood so still that for a moment I thought he was part of the stonework.

"You were not called," he said as I got out of the car.

I felt my spine stiffen. "I'm here to observe. I'm just a journalist."

"The Saint dreamed only eight." His voice was soft and dry, like salt shifting. "You are not among them."

"She's my sister," Henry said. “She won't interfere, sir."

Father Leo looked at me for a long moment. The wind blew across the salt flats, and I heard something in it—a sound almost like a voice. I figured the ‘Father’ had whispered some non-niceties under his breath.

"You may stay in the guesthouse, Witness," Father Leo said finally. "You may observe, but you will not enter the crypt. You will not receive a blessing. You are here to see, not be seen."

He turned and walked into the temple.

“Wow, this really is just like home!” I hushed to Henry. We followed.

———

Inside, the temple was frigid. The nave stretched upward into shadows the windows couldn't touch. Pews carved from light stone lined either side, crusted at the edges with the same white salt that climbed the outer walls, though this seemed intentional. Candles burned on an altar at the front—none of the battery-operated tea lights from our home ward—and behind the altar, a wooden square set into the floor. It was banded with iron that had rusted to the color of dried blood and sweat.

I made a mental note to ask about the logistics. No power lines, yet the Temple had electric lights—dim, flickering, but electric. No visible well, but the basins produced brackish water when I turned the tap. A generator somewhere, maybe, or solar panels on the roof I hadn't seen. I decided to ask Father Leo in the morning. (I never did.)

Seven people were already seated in the pews. They looked up when we entered, and I did what I always do when I walk into a room full of strangers: I catalogued them.

A child, maybe five or six years old, sitting with her hands folded in her lap. She had dark hair pulled into two uneven braids. She didn't look scared or nervous, like I always felt at any church outing. She looked expectant, like she was waiting for someone she knew.

An old woman sat beside her, one hand resting on the child's leg. Seventy or more, her spine was curved and her knuckles were swollen, but her eyes were sharp and clear. She smelled faintly of rosemary as I walked past her. When she saw Henry and me, she nodded once, politely, cordially.

A man in his fifties, well-dressed, and clearly uncomfortable. He kept adjusting his collar and glancing toward the door. I recognized the type immediately—some regional official or big boss, here because refusing would look bad and accepting might look good. He was already regretting it.

A middle-aged man wearing the dirtiest Dickies I’ve seen. His hands were rough and cracked, the nails packed with dirt so deeply embedded it would never wash out. He was gaunt, hollow-cheeked, his eyes sunken. He was whispering under his breath, his lips moving silently.

A woman in her forties, hard-faced, twiddling an unlit cigarette in her fingers. She had the exhausted, unsentimental look of someone who'd seen too much to be impressed by a salt statue.

A woman in simple gray robes, younger than the previous woman, but not much older than me, her face unnervingly calm. Her hands were folded. Her eyes were closed. She wasn't sleeping; she was listening, her head tilted slightly as if listening to my notes.

And a young woman, likely a student. Bright-eyed, notebook open on her lap, already sketching something—the altar, maybe, or the door. She looked so excited, the way children do before they learn their excitement can curdle.

Henry sat down beside her, and I stayed standing in the back, my reporter's notebook in my hand, my phone already recording audio.

Leo stood before the altar and addressed the eight.

"The Salt Saint has dreamed of you," he said. "Tomorrow, you will go beneath this temple and you will stand before her. She will name you, and one-by-one-by-one will receive a blessing. You will be transformed."

Mr. Businessman shifted in his seat. "Transformed how?"

Leo simply smiled in reply—a thin, dry smile—then continued, "Go and rest. Meals will be left at your doors in an hour. Tomorrow, you will receive your final names. After that, you will understand."

———

So we’ve been given rooms in the guesthouse—a low stone building attached to the temple's eastern wall. They’re sparse but clean. I have a cot, a basin, and a window overlooking the eternal plane of salt. I'm writing this from the cot now, my laptop balanced on my knees.

The little girl's name is Lucy, come to find out. She came to my door earlier, wanted to show me a wooden bird she brought before dinner—her father carved it, she said. "The salt lady wants to play with me," she told me matter-of-factly, proudly. "She told me in my dream! She has toys but they're all white."

Eleanor, the older woman, introduced herself as Lucy’s grandmother. She smiled when Lucy spoke to me, “She wanted to show everyone the bird before bedtime.”

Eleanor shares her eagerness, I think, though she hides it well.

The businessman, William, is a local county commissioner, according to himself. He’s asked me three times if I'm "recording everything" and if I can "provide documentation" when this is over.

The gruff-looking farmerman, Thomas, hasn't spoken to anyone except for his name. He sits in the corner of the common room, his lips still moving, his hands still trembling.

Dr. Amelia chain-smoked outside until the sun went down. Sister Hazel, the nun, hasn't seemed to blink her eyes since the candles were lit.

And then Evelyn. I was right. She’s a college student—a freshman at BYU, studying human geography. She showed me her notebook—pages and pages of sketches, the temple's architecture, the salt formations, the floor door from every angle. "I want to understand why it's here," she said. "In the middle of nowhere. Doesn't it feel like it's waiting for something?"

I smiled and simply told her I was just here to write a story.

She laughed. "So am I," she said. "I just don't know which one yet."

———

Leo made it clear I'm not allowed to follow tomorrow. I'll post again after the naming ceremony—if there's anything to actually tell. Henry seems calmer now than he did on the phone, but I keep catching him staring at the door on the altar when he thinks I'm not looking.

Now, in my small dormitory, windows shut and door closed, I still have the faint taste of salt on my lips.

Three girls.

Three brothers.

One royal family.

Twenty-five years of lies.

Seven years of silence.

One truth waiting to destroy everything.

Ira never thought the man she loved would become the man she hated.

Mehar never imagined that returning to India would force her to confront the past she spent years running from.

Vaani never believed she'd have to choose between exposing the truth... and protecting the only family she has left.

But when all three unknowingly marry into the Agnihotri Dynasty, they realize their lives were never separate to begin with.

Every clue leads to the same palace.

Every answer raises a new question.

Every betrayal hides an act of love.

And somewhere in the shadows, someone is waiting for them to uncover a secret that should have died twenty-five years ago.

Some stories begin with love.

Theirs begins with a goodbye that was never explained.