A year ago, Dominik Kaczmarek began purchasing building materials and trucking them north.
At first, nobody noticed anything different -- Dominik was a mason, and one of the best in town, at that. But then, travelers began to notice activity north of Lothbury but south of Oakhollow on a barren hill surrounded by dark forest. Slowly, over the summer, a more recognizable building began to take shape, an edifice of soaring arcs and native stone, a particularly Dauntless take on the church in the center of town. And, slowly, the Dauntless-born and their second-generation children left the church in town and began to commute to the place that was slowly becoming known as Istota Gora, where they started to hold services to the One God in their own language.
Everything about the new church building was Dauntless: the cold edges, the plain iconography, the stone floor, the people. And, yes, the people -- for one of the people who was there quite a bit of the time was Agnieszka Kaczmarek River. And she was doing something she was not known for, not at all.
She was praying.