Looking up at the stars that innumerably filled the sky in front of me, a sense of weightlessness slowly started to consume me. The once gentle breeze had began to increase in intensity, from a soft whisper to a deafening scream.

I opened my mouth to take a breath and was met with the burning sensation representative of a lack of oxygen. The once warm touch of the Sol fed grass that had survived its own tribulation during Sol’s longest visit to my part of the world, was gone. In its place I was greeted by the bitter bite of cold, worse than any winter freeze I have experienced up to that point in my life.

The feeling of weightlessness had continued to consume me, as I slowly began to notice the pain in the back of my neck. Not the same pain I felt from the cold, but a different kind of pain reminiscent of a wound of some kind. Slowly all of these feelings started to come into focus in my mind, each of them just as horrible and conflicting as any other I had at the time.

To begin to calm my overwhelmed mind, I began to recall the teaching of his Luminous. “If ever the cold touch of the unknown is upon you, remember the ever radiant Sol is with us even if we cant see his father like presence or feel his warming embrace. For it is his gift to us that he visits us, it is not for us to covet his presence.”

Remembering this, I had started to slowly calm myself. Lacking oxygen, which my lungs had started to scream for relief, I opened my mouth once more and was once again greeted with a void.

The wind to my back felt like the winds during the dry season, tossing me to and fro like the reflections of Sol upon the surface of freshly disturbed water. Closing my eyes, I grasp for the Solar slice around my neck, a piece of holy gem touched by Sol and given to the members of the conclave. And panicked.

It wasn’t there.

I open my eyes to see my hand grasping my chest where my Solar slice should have been. My mouth opens unconsciously in disbelief only to once again be met with a vacuum. With my mind on the edge of blacking out, I was greeted with an unexpected, very cold, but most certainly welcome, burst of air. At this, my mind began to clear and I started to look around and found… nothing.

There was nothing in front of me, nothing to the left, and nothing to the right. What I did see made me doubt what my eyes were seeing, if it was real, or if its was one of Sol’s tricks he plays on travelers who tread to close to his domain unannounced.

A blue ball, with splotches of brown and green. One of the Bright’s had something similar on her desk that always fascinated the Rays that came to her class. Terra is what she called it, but unlike what was on her desk, I could not see what held this one up.

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Remembering the Bright, and one of her many history lessons which I did not pay attention to as much as I should have. Doing so, a memory was drudged forth. A class discussion about the before times, when Sol was not worshipped as a deity, but rather as an object. A thing.

A time when there weren’t as many beliefs as there are now. When wars were waged for people and profit, rather than in the service of greater powers. A time where ideological processes brought forth change, ignoring the beings worthy of worship in front of them.

That is, until one person took a stand in a place called… Aimureeka, I think? Where one person decided to not accept the religious beliefs forced upon him by the others; and instead wanted to worship the antithesis of what was the main source of worship. Thus a law was passed stating “the freedom of religion” meant “any and all religions, past, present, and future.”

Thus, this lone person found other likeminded individuals, and the first Church of Lucifer was founded. This singular event was the catalyst for how Terra would proceed. It was not an overly strong catalyst, as the process would take almost one-hundred and fifty years for the idea of “religious freedom” to be accepted in far away lands.

These acceptances gave people the choice to follow what they wanted, rather than being forced to follow what was laid out in front of them. As religions of different types came about, those religions that were dominant started to become less and less so.

This process lead to the creation of the term “True Faith”. This term is used to describe the creation of Saints, and saint like beings, which came about after the far away lands accepted all religions. This freedom lead to the correlation of those who truly believed in their religion lead to an accumulation of faith, leading to the creation of a representative. First noted with a man called Jesus, back before religious freedom, but also before the oppression most felt from the religious infrastructure. True Faith created the saint known as Jesus, and in turn Jesus gave back the True Faith he had received in the forms of miracles. This series of actions was correlated to the finding of saints in todays religions.

“Well, crap.” A voice from my side said softly, almost like it was said next to my ear. “My brother is soooo-hohoho going to kill me for this. How the hell did I even end up with you any way?”

Turning my head to face the voice, I saw a girl to young to be a woman, but older than a child, sitting cross legged with a face of disbelief looking at me. I try to open my mouth to speak, but get cut off almost immediately. “First things first. My name is... what do you guys call me right now? oh right, Luna. I’m what you would call a manifestation. Secondly, I will save you and shortly, so don’t worry about that, but… I do have a lot of explaining to do…”

As she finished her sentence, she clapped her hands in front of her, and the view of Terra that floated in front of me disappeared. Having lost the sense of everything, the only thing I could think of were the events after I realized I was falling. From the fact that Sol’s sister had summoned me, one of opposing faith, how the Saint had apologized to me, and how there was a pain in my neck that I could only just now feel through the cold bite of the wind.

And then nothing. No sensation of falling, no bite of the cold, no burning of the void. Just… nothing.