Chapter 73: Priest’s Doubt
Father Drost had served the Rootmother for forty years.
He remembered when the blessings were warm. Not the mechanical warmth of divine energy passing through soil and into crop-root — the *actual* warmth. The personal kind. The feeling that settled into his chest when he knelt at the shrine and spoke the spiral prayer and meant every word of it with the uncomplicated faith of a man who’d never had a reason to doubt.
Forty years ago, the wheat had grown golden. Not the standard gold of mature grain but a luminous, almost translucent gold that caught the morning light and turned the fields into something that looked painted. The Rootmother’s Growth domain at full expression — concentrated, attentive, personal. Every seed Drost planted, the goddess touched. Every field he blessed, the goddess blessed back. The relationship was bilateral. He gave faith. She gave grain. The grain fed the village. The village’s faith fed the goddess. A cycle, clean and eternal.
Twenty years ago, the gold had dimmed. He still prayed. She still blessed. But the blessings arrived the way messages arrived from a distant relative — correct, reliable, but no longer intimate. The Growth domain still functioned. The fields still produced. But the fields produced in the way a machine produces — efficiently, predictably, without the attention that transforms function into grace.
Ten years ago, the war had started. Demeterra’s attention — her conscious, active, directed divine focus — shifted south. The border villages kept receiving blessings. But the blessings were automated. Residual energy flowing through established networks rather than directed intention. The difference was subtle enough that most believers couldn’t articulate it. But Drost was a priest. Priests were trained to feel the texture of divine attention the way sailors were trained to feel changes in wind.
The wind had shifted. And it hadn’t come back.
He served a border village called Mossdeep — a hundred and eighty people, mostly farming families, positioned on the northern edge of Demeterra’s territory. He’d been born there. He’d been ordained there. He’d buried his parents, his wife, and thirty years’ worth of parishioners in the village cemetery, each body laid in consecrated soil with the appropriate rites. The spiral prayer spoken over each grave. The earth accepting each body. The cycle continuing.
Now the cycle was straining.
***
She came to his door on a market day.
Thirty years old, maybe. Human. Limping. Her right ankle was swollen to the size of a melon — a fall, she said. Three days ago. She’d been hauling water from the well and the bucket’s rope had snapped and she’d gone down on the stone lip and the ankle had made a sound that wasn’t supposed to come from bones.
Drost looked at the ankle. He could feel the injury through his blessing-sense — the priest’s ability to detect physical damage through the Rootmother’s Growth domain. A fracture. Not clean. Splintered bone, partially displaced, the body’s healing response creating inflammation that was itself becoming a problem.
He could bless her. The Growth domain priestly blessing accelerated natural healing — knitting bone faster, reducing inflammation, encouraging the body’s own recovery. It wasn’t instantaneous. A blessing like this would take the fracture from six weeks to ten days. Good. Helpful. Not miraculous. Not the way it would have been thirty years ago, when the goddess’s attention was close enough that a priest’s healing blessing felt like the Rootmother’s hands on the wound.
"Sit," Drost said. He placed his palms on her ankle. He concentrated. The blessing flowed — warm, functional, steady. The woman’s face relaxed as the pain dimmed. The inflammation would begin receding within an hour. The bone would stabilize within a day. Ten days until full recovery.
"Thank you, Father," she said.
"Rest it. Stay off the foot. Come back in three days and I’ll bless it again."
She nodded. Then she said: "Father, when I was in Oakridge — my sister’s village, twenty kilometers east — a man healed my cousin’s broken arm. In one day. Not ten."
Drost looked at her. "What man?"
"He said he was a priest. Not a Rootist priest. Something else. He put his hands on the break and spoke words I didn’t recognize and the arm was set by nightfall. Straight. Strong. Like it had never been broken."
"What words?"
"Something about iron and fire. A forge." She paused. "He was kind. He didn’t ask for anything. He just... healed her. And then he talked to her. Not about gods. About... how things could be better. How there was a settlement up north where people were healed for free and everyone had a role and the god answered when you prayed."
The silence between them was heavy.
"He talked to her," the woman said again. The emphasis was on *talked.* Not preached. Not lectured. Not delivered a prepared sermon from a script written by a divine bureaucracy. Talked. Like a person to a person. Like someone who cared whether the listener was comfortable enough to hear.
Drost felt the weight of it.
When was the last time I talked to someone? Not prayed over them. Not blessed them. Not performed a rite or delivered a sermon or led a ceremony. When did I last talk to someone about what they felt?
He couldn’t remember.
***
That evening, Drost knelt at the shrine. Both knees. Hands flat. Head bowed. The standard Rootist posture he’d assumed ten thousand times.
By root and branch, I return to the earth. The Mother grows, and I grow with her.
He waited. The shrine’s consecrated energy hummed — low, distant, the automated pulse of a blessing network running on inertia rather than intention. He felt it the way you feel the heat of a campfire that’s burned down to embers. Present. Diminishing. No longer enough to warm the space.
Are you there?
Not a prayer. A question. The kind that priests weren’t supposed to ask because the answer was supposed to be self-evident.
Nothing came back. Not silence — silence implied an awareness choosing not to respond. This was absence. The shrine functioned. The blessings flowed. The goddess’s divine architecture operated exactly as designed. But the goddess herself — the conscious, attentive, personal presence that had once made every prayer feel like a conversation — was somewhere else. Focused on something else. Coming back to the border when the important things were done.
Drost was sixty-three years old. He had served the Rootmother for forty years. He had no intention of leaving. He had no capacity for conversion — his faith was too old, too structural, too woven into the architecture of his identity. Removing it would be like removing his spine.
But.
He stood. He walked to his desk. He opened the reporting ledger — the leather-bound book where priests documented observations for the Root Speaker network.
The latest entry was his report on northern trade goods. Three weeks ago. Unanswered. Below it, a blank page where his next report should go — another observation, another data point, another drop in the river of information that fed Demeterra’s intelligence apparatus.
He should write about the healing priest. The woman’s testimony. The northern agent operating in Demeterra’s territory, performing healing miracles and having conversations that eroded the Rootmother’s spiritual monopoly one human interaction at a time.
He should report it.
He closed the book.
Maybe the goddess is right, he thought, walking back to the shrine room. But I can’t remember the last time she felt close.
He extinguished the shrine lantern and went to bed.