I hold her gaze unflinchingly. “The future is unwritten.” I pause, choosing my words with care. “Neither the person who wrote this, your Order, your leaders, nor I know how the fate of this world will unfold. Not entirely. I know the most probable course. I know my foretold path. You determine yours. Each soul on Earth will do the same. These are two possible paths that vary greatly. Are they the only path that exists? No. Is one more likely than the other? Yes. Could something happen that sways how this will all unfold?”
I nod once.
“Quite possibly.”
I lower the papers to my side and chance a step closer.
“God can and does reevaluate His decisions. He always has. Creation is not static—it is responsive. A great many things could yet happen between now and the final weighing that would shift the balance or alter the outcome of the final days. These are possibilities, and as far as I am concerned, nothing more. These passages differ in what comes after because belief shapes outcome. Humanity possesses free will. Free will can be influenced. Faith in humanity—humanity’s faith—may yet alter everything.”
Silence stretches between us, heavy with implication. Her fingers flex against the edge of the bed.
She exhales slowly through her nose, gaze dropping to the papers in my hand before lifting back to me. “Belief shapes outcome,” she repeats quietly. “Free will. Faith.”
There’s something bitter in the way she says it.
She shifts on the mattress, lantern light sliding across the planes of her face. Up close, the exhaustion she carries is impossible to miss—the faint shadows beneath her eyes, the tension carved into her jaw. This is a woman who learned early how to endure.
“You speak like someone who doesn’t care about the innumerable lives at stake,” she says. “Like each one lost doesn’t weigh on your soul.”
I don’t answer right away.
“I speak like someone who has watched civilizations rise and fall beneath the weight of their own decisions,” I finally say. “I speak as one who knows that every soul chooses its path—and bears the consequence of that choice.”
Her gaze doesn’t waver.
“And that makes it easier for you?”
“No.” My answer is resolute, though something tightens behind my ribs. It has never been easy.
Once, I listened to forests breathe. I learned the language of roots and rain, of rivers carving patience into stone. I followed the migration of stars through forest canopies and believed my purpose was to tend to life, not harvest it. Those instincts do not vanish simply because Heaven rewrites what you are.
That part of me never truly died.
Every fragment of life that passes through me leaves its imprint. Every soul I draw into myself leaves an echo, even when I return it all to Him. The exchange is never clean. Never unfeeling. There is always a reckoning in the space between breath and absence.
I carry all of it.
But I also carry knowledge she does not.
I have seen what waits beyond this horizon. I have stood in the quiet places where futures gather. I understand what collapses if this covenant fails. It was not forged in cruelty—it was born of necessity. I was shown what unravels if mercy comes too soon. Creation is not preserved by sentiment.
It is preserved by balance.
By sacrifice.
So I do not tell her how the ache sometimes coils in my chest like an old wound that never learned to close. I do not confess how memory rises when I touch soil, or how instinct still reaches for green things even as my hands are tasked with ending them.
Those truths change nothing.
What must be done will be done. I understand the cost of hesitation. The consequences if I don’t do what I was remade for and tasked with.
So I meet her eyes and hold them.
Duty does not erase grief. It simply demands that I walk beside it.
“In my Order,” she says after a moment, “scripture was law. There was no choice. Certainty was reserved for the faithful. Survival was promised only to those who followed the path laid before us.” She gestures to the first page. Her gaze bores into the paper as if in accusation. “We knew only what we were taught. And we were taught to believe in this.”
Her eyes flick up and meet mine. “Only later was I made aware of the path offered to a select few. Of how the God I held in such reverence could turn on His creations without warning. That I wasn’t meant to follow Him blindly, but to work against His decree. To believe in humanity above Him.”
