In a forgotten land ringed by mountains and deserts, there stood a city built upon stone and light, and it was called Eleutheria. The old poets said that the founders of Eleutheria had come from the stars that blazed across the sky. Children born beneath the banners of this city were taught that within each of them burned a fragment of one of those celestial fires: a Will unique and sacred.

Each citizen of Eleutheria bore a sigil within them, invisible to the naked eye but radiant to those who knew how to see. This sigil was not assigned, nor designed, but discovered, and it revealed itself only after long wanderings in the desert of silence, where a person confronted their fears, their longings, and their illusions.

In Eleutheria, it was not birth that gave honor, but the clarity of one’s sigil. Artisans, rulers, warriors, and mystics each followed the path revealed to them, orbiting in harmonious solitude like stars whose courses never collided.

But over the years, a shadow crept into the city. It began with the whispers: that wandering was wasteful, that silence was dangerous, that it was better to wear the sigils of others than to risk never discovering one’s own. Some said the desert was cruel and unnecessary. Others mocked the old myths of celestial fire.

A new figure rose among them, called Vox, whose voice was like a storm in the valley. Vox preached that freedom was an illusion and that unity, true unity, could only come when all cast off their solitary sigils and bore the same mark. “You are not stars,” he said, “but flames of one fire. You are not meant to wander but to march in unison.”

Many rejoiced. The desert emptied. Silence became taboo. They extinguished their sigils and began to wear livery coats emblazoned with the symbol of their common cause. Those who refused were exiled as “dividers,” “individualists,” or “enemies of the people.”

Temples once devoted to the unveiling of the Will were converted into great amphitheaters wherein the masses gathered to chant and weep. They burned effigies of those who still walked the old path. The city’s light dimmed, not all at once, but imperceptibly, the stars being veiled by a slowly gathering mist.

Only a few remained who were faithful to old ways. Silent, distant, and often misunderstood, they still bore their original sigils beneath cloaks of obscurity. They were the Watchers of the Stars, and they alone remembered that the city’s name, Eleutheria, meant freedom.

They did not resist with swords. They simply lit fires in the wilderness and waited.

One day, it is said, a child born in the city would follow one of those flickering fires back to the desert. And in the silence, their sigil would awaken. And the stars above Eleutheria, long hidden behind smoke and chant, would begin to blaze again.

+ Fr. Omega B.