Chadwick Rye

The prayer bells of Lumenvale’s Sacred Quarter chimed across the evening mist as I knelt beside the weathered shrine, my calloused hands tracing patterns older than memory in the dust-worn stone. Forty-seven years had passed since I first entered the Monastery of Silent Depths as a wide-eyed girl seeking answers to questions I couldn’t yet articulate. Now, with silver threading through my shorn hair and countless leagues mapped beneath my travel-worn boots, that same question echoed through the twilight air like an accusation wrapped in velvet.

*Do you practice religion?*

The words had come from Tobias, the young scholar who’d hired me to guide him through the Whispering Marshlands last month. We’d been sharing bread beside our campfire when he’d asked it, his tone carrying that particular blend of academic curiosity and genuine bewilderment that marked those who studied faith from the outside looking in. I’d deflected then, offering him another portion of the rabbit stew while steering our conversation toward safer territories—the migration patterns of marsh sprites, the proper way to read quicksand warnings in the behavior of cattail reeds.

But the question had lodged itself between my ribs like a shard of obsidian, sharp and impossible to ignore.

My fingers found the string of prayer beads at my waist, each carved stone carrying the weight of a different pilgrimage, a different revelation earned through suffering and wonder in equal measure. The smooth amber bead from the Desert of Singing Sands, where I’d learned that faith could survive three days without water. The rough granite from the peak of Mount Serenity, where the thin air had stripped away everything but the essential truth that I was smaller than I’d imagined and more beloved than I’d dared hope.

The monastery bells began their evening song, and I closed my eyes, letting the bronze voices wash over me like rain after drought. Brother Marcus had taught me to count my breaths to their rhythm during those first terrifying weeks when meditation felt like drowning in my own thoughts. *Four counts in, hold for four, four counts out. Let the mind become still water, child. Still water reflects clearly.*

But stillness had never come easily to these hands that itched for road dust and these feet that drummed restlessly against chapel floors. Even as a novice, I’d been the one sneaking out to the kitchen gardens at dawn, preferring to find the Divine in the miracle of seeds becoming sustenance rather than in the prescribed hours of contemplation. The other initiates whispered that I was too worldly, too restless, too hungry for experiences that lay beyond the monastery’s protective walls.

They hadn’t been wrong.

The first time I’d felt the true presence of the Sacred wasn’t during morning prayers or evening vespers, but three years into my training when I’d broken protocol to help a merchant whose wagon had overturned on the mountain road outside our gates. As I’d knelt in the mud and blood, pressing my hands against the stranger’s torn abdomen while he gasped prayers in a language I didn’t recognize, something had moved through my fingers—not magic in the way the arcane practitioners understood it, but something deeper and more fundamental.

The merchant had lived. The Abbess had confined me to bread and water for a week. And I’d begun to understand that my path would never fit the conventional molds others had prepared for it.

*Do you practice religion?*

The question assumed religion was something separate from living, something you picked up and put down like a tool or a garment. But how do you practice breathing? How do you practice the beating of your own heart?

A flutter of wings drew my attention upward, where a raven had settled on the shrine’s carved peak. Its black eyes regarded me with the patient intelligence I’d learned to recognize in creatures that spent their lives observing the follies of supposedly wiser beings. Ravens were sacred to the Wanderer God—the aspect of the Divine that blessed those who found their prayers written in footsteps rather than spoken in words.

“What do you think, friend?” I murmured, reaching into my pack for the crust of bread I’d saved from the morning meal. “Am I devout enough for the scholars? Too devout for the skeptics?”

The raven cocked its head, accepting my offering with the dignity of one accustomed to such transactions. In the fading light, its feathers caught purple highlights that reminded me of the robes I’d worn during my formal ordination fifteen years ago—a ceremony that had felt both deeply significant and somehow incomplete, like a sentence with its final word left unspoken.

I’d left the monastery six months later, not in rebellion but in response to what the Abbess herself had recognized as a calling that couldn’t be contained within walls, no matter how sacred. She’d blessed my departure with tears in her eyes and a leather satchel filled with provisions for the road ahead. “Some serve the Divine through contemplation,” she’d whispered as we embraced for the final time. “Others through action. Both paths lead to the same summit, child. Trust your feet to find the way.”

My feet had carried me far in the years since—through kingdoms where they worshipped tree spirits and mountain lords, across seas to islands where the Sacred took the form of ever-changing tides, into deep caverns where entire communities had built their understanding of the Divine around the patient work of stone becoming cathedral. Each journey had added new facets to my understanding, new beads to my prayer string, new questions to the ever-growing collection that traveled with me like faithful companions.

The raven finished its bread and launched itself back into the gathering dusk, leaving me alone with the weight of unfinished prayers and the distant sound of the city settling into night. Somewhere in the maze of streets below, Tobias was probably hunched over his research notes, trying to categorize the faith practices he’d observed during our marsh crossing. He’d want clean definitions, clear boundaries between the sacred and profane, logical progressions from belief to practice to outcome.

I envied him that certainty, even as I knew it would never be mine.

Rising from my knees, I shouldered my pack and turned toward the narrow stairs that would lead me back down into Lumenvale’s living heart. Tomorrow I would meet with Captain Darius about guiding his expedition into the Shadowbark Forest, where rumors spoke of an abandoned temple complex that might hold answers to questions the Academy’s theologians had been debating for decades. The work would be dangerous—corrupted spirits were said to guard the ruins, and the forest itself had a reputation for leading travelers astray with paths that shifted when no one was watching.

But that was exactly why they needed someone like me. Someone who understood that faith wasn’t a comfortable chair you settled into, but a narrow bridge stretched across impossible chasms. Someone who had learned to find the Sacred not in the safety of familiar rituals, but in the terrible, wonderful moments when everything you thought you knew dissolved like salt in an endless sea.

*Do you practice religion?*

I practiced trust—in the ground beneath my feet, in the strength of my companions, in the possibility that even my mistakes might serve some purpose I was too small to perceive. I practiced attention—to the whisper of wind through leaves that might carry warnings, to the quality of silence that spoke of hidden dangers or unexpected grace. I practiced gratitude—for the sunrise that found me still breathing, for the bread that sustained my body, for the questions that kept my spirit sharp as a well-honed blade.

Most of all, I practiced presence—showing up fully to whatever the road offered, whether it was the trust of a frightened traveler, the challenge of an impossible path, or the gift of a moment’s peace beside a shrine older than my great-grandmother’s memory.

The monastery bells had fallen silent, but their bronze voices still echoed in the space between my heartbeats. As I descended toward the warm lights of the city, I fingered the newest bead on my prayer string—a piece of blue glass I’d found in the marshlands, smooth as sorrow and clear as revelation. It would remind me of this moment, this question, this evening when I’d finally understood that the Divine didn’t require my definitions or defend my practices.

It simply asked me to keep walking, keep questioning, keep opening my hands to receive whatever gifts the road chose to offer. And in that walking, that questioning, that radical receptivity to wonder—there was my religion, practiced with every step, breathed with every prayer, lived with every choice to trust the path even when I couldn’t see where it led.

The raven called once from somewhere in the darkness above, a sound like blessing and benediction combined. I smiled and walked on, carrying my faith like water cupped in mortal hands—precious, essential, and always threatening to spill over into something larger than I could hold.