Daega's Pilgrimage

    How did it even come to this? What am I even doing? Why...? For what...? Vengeance sounded so sweet, but... was it even worth it? Everyone was gone. He lost everything. His home. Fellow comrades and friends he used to know. There seemed to be no point in continuing forward when he could turn around from this to try to start a new, calm life somewhere. The days of then are gone, his faith, all of it. Yet, he could not let them go.

    He knew he was determined to fight for them. For his country, his home, his family, everything that made him who he was today. Was he going to abandon them?

    For the longest time he was told what to do. What was correct, what was a written rule. Follow the laws, the expectations of Nimatism. This second insurgence, was it really even for the faith at all, just a violent retaliation in the name of the messiah to spread the faith, exacting revenge on his traitors, or was it something else? A way to go home again? To have the power not for conquest but to by force take your home back?

    Bleed, sweat, starve. So many times he could have given up. Daega earlier laid in the broiling sun and felt cold. It was a comforting cold. Frozen and peaceful in the desert to let go. But the sacred strings, the Salet, they did not let him die. They spread, dragged him across the sand as he lay lifeless. There, the strings had wrapped him into a cocoon beside an oasis. When he came to, he was lost. Why? Why did they choose him? Wouldn't the Salet and the strings deem him unworthy? And most important, what did the messiah say through them?

    There was no choice left for Daega. He had to go to the temple or die. There, his questions of faith, himself, his home and country, would be tested.

    The temple of Arkon lay north in the mountains at the edge of the desert and jungle. For now, he had to rest at the oasis. The crumbled ruins of a Nimatist missionary lies here. Daega looked into it with deep regret. This history of his people. Decades of prosperity and suffering in the stones and artifacts. But this longest period of suffering... he was not alone. They too hurt like him.