#prayer tw

[asirensrage]

I meant my prayers in good faith but I have to do homework now. I have blocked your posts so I don't get upset by your pervertness.

Why couldn't you have done that earlier like I asked?

no one asked for your prayers, anon, and I'm not sharing them when you're back to dragging in people who have nothing to do with this conversation.

[the-roanoke-society]

Is there any way you could tell us about Former Technical Officer Drake? (The one that uses Tom Holland as a face claim?) Like what happened to him that made him become a Former officer?

let’s talk about jude shepard.

and note, that i can’t talk about jude shepard without also speaking of where he died.

it isn’t often i get to tell a story that begins in one decade and ends over a century earlier.

details of violence, sci-fi-induced stressful situations and implied gore and body horror below the cut. proceed with caution.

turn back the clock to 1996.

jude—that is, drake, at the time—was one of the youngest people ever to be brought onto the basement crew. our watchers pinged him at just 14 for showing exceptional aptitude to what i would best describe as technomancy. the phrase ‘wiz kid’ was used often, and seriously. but, the then-wyvern—justine—knew that lilith wouldn’t bend on recruitment rules. she waited patiently until jude was old enough and immediately “adopted” him as a mentee.

our gate had been completely built by this time. at least, an early version of it.

but we knew way less then, than we do now.

and what we know now, we’re realizing, is still precious little.

i wish that i could tell you what happened to jude was significant. i wish i could say that it was meaningful, that it happened for a just cause. i wish i could say that for the handful of officers our homemade portal has swallowed over the decades.

but—well.

a year and a month. that was how long jude had existed fully in his role, fully as drake. justine trusted him completely, why wouldn’t she? he passed training with flying colors, of course he did, that genius born out of the bronx, maybe he’d graduate to her title someday, of course, why not, he’d make a great leader—

so of course he could do routine maintenance by himself.

of course, his hands would never slip and puncture the wrong wire, triggering an instantaneous opening that would have felt like stepping into a sauna turned way too high.

of course, he would never be snapped up, as though raptured.

but they did. and he was.

now, the good news, what slivers of it were to be found, were that we did trace his landing point.

the bad news—he wasn’t in north america in the 1990s.

he was in 19th century prussia.

and the worse news—which everyone knew was the worse news as soon as they saw lilith’s expression shift when she realized the coordinates—was where exactly in prussia he’d been spat out. it was why we couldn’t pull him back, even after repairing the gate’s puncture. why we couldn’t get a push signal to re-generate to the same point.

brennenburg castle.

she recognized it, of course she did.

alexander.

“lady,” lilith began. her eyes didn’t leave the screen, didn’t leave the green dot blinking in russia. “will you please get brosnya on the phone.”

when was it that she’d last spoken to yekatarina, the head of the order of snow and sun? a year ago? two? five?

because of the atrocities committed in that castle, the order is very—protective, of that particular parcel of land. today, as it was then, it’s heavily warded, and regularly observed. the structure itself still stands, condemned and rotting.

lilith had always run on the assumption that, surely, they’d sent field agents down into the castle’s interior to clear it. to make sure that nothing was left behind that shouldn’t be, like say—a proverbial open door.

an exquisitely, ridiculously dangerous open door.

but she still had a sense of decorum, and wasn’t about to point blank ask for some kind of verification as if it was owed to her. after all, the heaviest parts of that investigation would have been years and years earlier.

surely, they had.

surely.

but the unfortunate truth was that there wasn’t much to be done. alexander’s property was cursed, and that curse was powered by something far bigger, and far older, than us. jude was doomed as soon as he hit the ground.

the gate is our homemade doorway. we made it ourselves.

the orb that lilith desperately hoped was in the order’s protective custody, the entire reason behind the castle’s ruin? was built by something like a god. or gods. we’re—we’re not sure.

but it’s not our fault that research is limited.

remember another time we had someone try his hand at technomancy?

remember the time we hit a wall?

turns out that there is a way behind it after all.

remember, there was never any doubt that it wasn’t a wall, and a wall is not a wall without the other side.

if what had happened at brennenburg castle was anything like the world beyond the wall, lilith had zero desire for us, or any other agency, to go there.

more recently, dohbar has been sending her updates. there are seven orbs. “it’s all set up like spokes on a wheel, diana. spokes on a wheel. are we turning? where we are going? how many spokes? and where is the hub, you think? what could possibly lie at the center of something so vast? so ancient? what do you think, diana?” he was getting worse every month. she could see it in his writing. she knew ness was watching him, but not in the role of distant, mournful witness, not like she was watching him.

we have evidence that alexander managed to secure at least a beginning signal, an initial push, to this other plane.

we have no evidence that it was successfully destroyed—beyond the order’s word.

but lilith wondered.

justine was heart-broken, which is why the handle was retired for fifteen years, even as her title passed to jeremy, who followed protocol out of respect—up until he actually met drake and it felt a little too much like a ‘stars aligning’ moment.

a clever cover story was crafted for the benefit of jude’s parents. one that made his ending quick, easy. pure accident. pure fate. pure whatever would bring them peace.

lilith didn’t know it. she wept, god, how she cried, for nights, praying for the first time in what seemed like lifetimes to anybody, please let it have been quick. please let it have been easy. please let him be in peace. please let it have been quick— a never-ending mental prayer chain, timed with her heartbeats, with her jagged breaths. because she knew it had been none of those things. she knew this for a fact. but she whispered into her hands anyway, cupping her own pleas like water to offer to the universe for just this one thing.

at least... as much peace as they could offer at the price of a body. there was nothing to bury. nothing to burn. “we’re sorry. he is gone.”

they bought a plot anyway. they upturned the soil, (”ned--neddy? honey, is this--are we breaking the law?” “oh they wouldn’t dare touch this flower bed, analiese. it’s--it’s the principle of the thing!”) planting begonias. jude’s favorite flower. and yes, he has a tombstone, calling him by his names: jude levi shepard. beloved son. beloved friend. beloved, beloved, beloved.

jude was “buried” in between his paternal and maternal grandparents in a cemetery in long island.

annabelle has a saved photo on her phone from drake of the view from jude’s garden, looking at the city’s skyline.

[templepriest-motherfucker]

you ever just casually have a conversation on the best way to cut off and preserve a dead hawk’s feet then suddenly you’re having a much less casual conversation and someone’s telling a detailed story about how in college they used to pick up roadkill and bury it and say a prayer over it and now they’re talking about the time they saw a man channel an apparition of an angel called Jonah and now there’s a lot of religious horror to unpack here but we’re just gonna throw away the whole suitcase and also that dead hawk

[fishing-mlm]

A little prayer I found in a (very) old fishing manual!

[ID: An old book is open with a close up of the right hand page. There’s brown spots on the paper from ageing. A prayer has been written in cursive in the top half of the page, it reads:

An Angler’s Prayer:

God grant that I may live to fish

until my dying day,

And when I come to my last cast

I then must humbly pray.

When, in the Lord’s safe landing net,

I’m peacefully asleep,

That in His mercy I be judged

as good enough to keep.

End ID]

[rootcanal-brainstem]

[resignedseraph]

Not me getting blindsided by looking out the window and seeing a local Christian school displaying “need prayer?” on their sign out front hfsjedtfefuefyg

[resignedseraph]

“You can measure someone’s relationship to God by how much they love to pray”

then I hate him, thank you very much

[mormonhoneypot]

Says a brother, “I pray in my family sometimes, and sometimes I do not feel like it, and I do not pray in my family. Sometimes I am in a hurry, my work is driving me, my cattle are in mischief, and I do not feel like praying.” If I did not feel like praying, and asking my Father in heaven to give me a morning blessing, and to preserve me and my family and the good upon the earth through the day, I should say, “Brigham, get down here, on your knees, bow your body down before the throne of Him who rules in the heavens, and stay there until you can feel to supplicate at that throne of grace erected for sinners.” “Well, but I am in a hurry, and my cattle, perhaps, are in mischief and my work is driving me.” I should say, if the cattle are in the corn, “Eat away;” if they are in the wheat, “Eat away, eat the wheat, we have more than we can use any how;” and if the children are in mischief and this wants seeing to, and that wants seeing to, I say, “Kneel down before the Lord and there stay until this body learns obedience, until my tongue learns to praise his name, and to ask for the blessings I need.” “Well, but are you not afraid you will come to want?” Bless me, if I had all the gold and silver on the earth and no prayers, I should be in greater want than I should be with the prayers and without the gold and silver. I will make an application of this with regard to the feelings of the people. It is true that you and I cannot learn everything at once, but we can learn one thing at once and the one thing above all others that we should make it our business to learn is to yield strict obedience to the requirements of heaven, and we can learn that today just as well as any other time, and just as well as to spend a lifetime in doing it.

Brigham Young, JD 16:23