Mister Nedry of the Panoptic Order spent his mornings the same way he spent his life: people-watching. You could learn a lot about someone, Nedry believed, from how they carried themself through the opening scenes of their day, and today he was observing one of his favorites: Cassady Jaunt, Vice Mayor of Barker Meadow. Cassady was good programming. His down-to-business demeanor almost entirely concealed his exhaustion as he sat nursing a mug of hot brown from the percolator and perusing a sheaf of documents he’d brought in carefully tucked under his dead arm, but the lines on his face and dark circles beneath his eyes told the true story. A Sainthood’s Sainthood: always the burdened, never the burden. One day it would break him, and Nedry would be there for that too.

But this morning, as luck would have it, the plot was to thicken in another direction entirely, as a Jaunt Deputy named Bristol hurried in through the big double doors to whisper something in Cassady’s ear. First his eyes widened in surprise, then he turned to her and asked, “He’s alive?” She nodded, and the two hurriedly collected Cassady’s things and left. Nedry quietly picked up his own mug and followed.

When Cassady Jaunt pushed aside the cloth flap covering the doorway to his new office (a comical name for the hastily-built shack in which his desk and cot now resided), he saw exactly what Bristol had told him he’d see, and he still had trouble believing it. Sprawled out on the floor, seeping engine grease into a Jaunt heirloom rug, was Pontifex Pinto, head of the Barker Meadow Final Knight congregation, who had been assumed dead for almost a year. He laid on his back, staring up at the lantern which hung in the center of the room, and did not acknowledge Cassady’s entrance.

“You’re back,” Cassady finally choked out. Pinto raised one hand in a finger gun and clicked his tongue, and then fell entirely limp again. When Cassady’s composure finally caught up with him, his voice caught up along with it.

“Pinto, where have you BEEN? What happened? Have you been alive this whole time? Why didn’t you TELL anyone?”

“Do you, uh… that’s a lot of questions. Do you have a certain order you want me to answer those in, or…?”

“Let’s start with what happened,” Cassady finally decided. “From the beginning. And please, sit in a chair.” Pinto groaned but obliged, peeling himself off the rug and dragging over a chair as Cassady situated himself behind his desk.

“Well,” Pinto began, “obviously something got all trifuckulated with the ritual we were doing. I remember praying. And then the air in there just got… wrong. I remember Dispute diving out the window. I remember Sarah Baker shoving you out the doors. And then I remember Chuck screaming and… digging his own heart outta his chest.” Pinto squirmed in his seat a little at this, and muttered, “Fuck that fuckin’ scream. Still hear that shit.” Cassady waited patiently, giving Pinto time to gather himself, and eventually the Diesel Jock continued.

“So… then it all went dark. Dark and quiet. The Abyss, I guess. That shit was like…” Pinto glanced up at Cassady’s dead arm, then at the blue veins spiderwebbing across that side of Cassady’s face. Then he looked away. “Well, you already kinda know that part, maybe. But be glad you weren’t IN it, man. That old saying, about staring into the abyss and the abyss staring into you? It doesn’t. That’s the worst part. You look in and absolutely nothing looks back. You’re just alone.” Pinto’s eyes grew distant and harrowed, and his next words escaped his lips as a choked whisper. “I saw what waits beyond the Grave, Cass. What waits for us all. It’s a great empty chasm, and you fall in, and as you fall you get smaller and smaller and so does everything you ever did and ever were, and in the end you’re so tiny and so alone that you just disappear, and there was never anything out there that cared who you were or what you did in the first place.”

Cassady and Pinto had talked sometimes, when the burdens of leadership had weighed heavy on Cassady, and Pinto had been an unflappable advisor in those times, with his Final Knight doctrine of leaning into the suffering to become stronger. He had also, more often than not, functioned as a rubber duck of sorts, with Cassady talking himself through his own problems while Pinto sat nearby, delirious from hallucinogens and the poisons he routinely consumed. But Cassady couldn’t ever recall a conversation with the other priest that had felt so real. These were uncharted waters.

Finally, Pinto seemed to return to the here and now. “So, uh. At a certain point I woke up in the ditch by the road outta town. Maybe I passed through the Grave, maybe not. I honestly don’t know. But, uh. It shook me, man. I didn’t know if I could still believe anything I had before, and I didn’t know who around here would even, like, get it. So I snuck into town, and I got my bike, and I left.”

“And went where, Pinto?”

“I rode to the ocean.”

Cassady cocked an eyebrow at this. Pinto’s bike was not a guzzoline-chugging GOAT Cycle. It was a bicycle, with pedals and a little bell. Pinto had often described it as a keystone of his “Grand Pree of self-inflicted suffering”. But at Cassady’s expression, Pinto leaned in.

“I’m not kidding. I followed the road all the way up the Big Rocks, and all the way down the other side. Then that long ride through the desert. Then over some other mountains. And then I was at the ocean. It took me a hundred and sixty-one days.”

“Pinto… why?”

“Because it fuckin sucked, that’s why. The sun burned my back. My handlebars burned my hands. I drank fuckin poison the whole way. It took everything I had. I had to do it. ‘Cause when I came outta that dark, dark hole, all I could think was that all of it, all the poison, all the pain… it was pointless. It accomplished nothing. I did that shit to myself for no reason. And I thought maybe going harder than I’d ever gone, I could find it again. The strength from suffering. And then, there I was standing on a cliff above the sea, and I could still see that emptiness waiting just behind it all… and all I could think was…” and here his voice dropped to a whisper, “maybe people just weren’t made to hurt like this.”

He was looking Cassady dead in the eyes, and Cassady could see the tears lingering at the edges. He blinked away a few of his own, then said, “And what did you do then?”

“I came back.”

Just like that. A thousand miles there, and he just… came back. Cassady’s mind drifted across images of the pilgrimage; he himself had always wanted to see the ocean, but he had never made the journey. He imagined it was beautiful. Someone had told him once that it made a hushing sound like wind through the trees.

Pinto continued, “I need you to know… I ain’t stayin’. I came back to talk to you, and to talk to the Knights in town. And then I’m goin’.” Here he paused, then leaned across the desk, eyes intense, “And I think you should too.”

The idea was ridiculous; Cassady had always lived his life with his obligations at the forefront, and in the midst of the present upheaval his work was more important than ever. But he knew Pinto knew this, and clearly had a reason to say something so bold. So he waited for his friend to proceed.

“We’re both Nomads, man. Diesel Jock, Rover. Me, I stayed in Barker because being rooted in place was part of the suffering. It was fuckin agony, and I did it because the agony was the point. So… why do you do it?”

The question pierced Cassady like a bullet. In an instant, his mind flashed through years of toil, of scraping and clawing to put down roots, of everything this place had put him through. Finally he blinked. Pinto repeated.

“Why do you do it? Why do both your families do it, the Jaunts and the Graces? And what else are you doing to yourselves BY doing it?”

Cassady gathered his stack of papers and briefly looked at them. He didn’t have the answers for those questions, and a deep mournful feeling had rushed in through the hole they had torn in him. Filling him up and weighing him down. Like seawater. He sighed again, tapped the stack of papers on the table, and moved to stand. “It doesn’t really matter how it all started. I’m here now and there are folks I need to take care of. This town needs me. I can’t just leave, Pinto.” Cassady was fighting hard to keep the wave of sorrow and resignation from showing on his face. But Pinto leaned in, glancing back toward the doorway, now intense.

“You gotta get outta this All Faiths shit, man. It’s poison, and I KNOW fuckin poison. It took you and me and two whole families of Rovers and it kept us penned in this little valley for twelve fuckin years; what do you think it’s been doing to everyone else?”

Cassady stood, pushing the chair out from behind him as he did. Then it happened, as it had so many times before now: his left hand just… stopped. This was how it was these days. Sometimes the arm worked; most of the time it was totally dead, without feeling or function. And it went from one to the other without reason or warning. His papers fell to the desk. He sighed audibly and glanced back at Pinto, who continued emphatically.

“Ain’t you given enough?” Pinto pressed. “It ain’t always gotta be your job. Maybe that was all our mistake. Thinkin’ that people were sheep and they needed shepherds just to survive. But the truth, man? They’ll still make it if you go. Or they won’t, but that won’t be your fault either. Some piece of your life is yours, Cassady. You should take it.”

The two lingered in that position for a long moment, and then Pinto finally withdrew across the desk. “That’s what I came here to say. I’m gonna go eat breakfast. Like… real food. I’ll, uh, catch you around.”

And just like that, he was gone, the flap over the door rustling in his wake.

Cassady didn’t move to pick up the papers immediately. He stood there, very still, for a very long time, and thought about the ocean.