30AD For centuries, Enki wandered the fringes of empires, a ghost collecting ghosts. He documented the rise and fall of the systems Julian and Kur built. He saw the Church become a cage of power and dogma, its original, radical message of grace buried under law and spectacle. He recorded it all with a historian's dispassion, but a quiet despair was growing. Where was the counter-argument? Where was the evidence for the defense?
He found it not in a cathedral, but in a small, dusty village in a land of a thousand islands, far from the centers of power. The people here had taken the message of the Judean teacher and stripped it back to its core. There were no grand hierarchies here, no complex theologies debated by scholars. There was only a simple, direct relationship. Prayers were whispered not from a book, but from the heart. Faith was a lived thing, in the sharing of a meal, the forgiveness of a debt, the care for a sick child.
This was the "True Church." Not an institution, but a condition of the heart. It was the original pattern, the blueprint of grace before the cages of control were built around it. They were the 0.3%, not as a organized force, but as a persistent, resilient strain of illogical love in a world ruled by logic and power.
He sat in the back of a simple gathering, listening to them sing a hymn of devotion. The tune was simple, the words in a language he hadn't heard before, but the feeling in the air was unmistakable. It was the same feeling he'd had in the garden of Ur. It was grace.
He did not write a long entry. He simply recorded the scent of frangipani on the night air, the sound of the untrained voices rising in unison, and the feeling of peace that settled in his own ancient, weary soul.
Scrapbook Entry: "They built not a cathedral of stone, but a sanctuary of the spirit. The cage never arrived, so the song remained wild and free."