The church on the hill.

The church on the hill.

Postby channe » Thu Sep 04, 2014 6:35 am

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.
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channe
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Re: The church on the hill.

Postby channe » Wed Oct 08, 2014 4:19 am

And here is the problem about being cast aside --

For all her talent, her meteoric rise, her sacrifice to the Tower, her terrific, desperate commitment -- she had been, and was always going to be, a kitchen girl with a knife, a serf's daughter. A nobody. Even in Myrken, where a man or a woman could make something of themselves even without a title, it was always going to end this way. She'd known that. None of it mattered. None of it. Not the deaths of her family members, not all of the training she'd done. Even Glenn, now, even his world she'd helped support, all of that was gone with the wave of the Kestrel's hand. She was nothing, now.

And the fact that she hadn't even been acknowledged, not a single letter back from her gracious accession -- It was as if the last seven years had been one long, terrible dream --

-- mostly.

Agnieszka River spends this particular afternoon sitting on the small picnic table set up on the top of the dirt path leading to Istota Gora; she greets those who are coming and says goodbye to those who are leaving. Very few are curious about what she's doing, but -- she's studying, reading books, illuminated books, books of arcane pages, murmuring their contents as she goes. They are copies of Aleksei River's books, meant for her to write in, to use. She is no one's, now, no one has anything to hold to her but Aleksei, Aleksei and the One God.

And she intends on doing them both proud.
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