The Veil was a prison of silence. For Enki, now a ghost in the long, dark corridor of the Middle Ages, it meant watching the key he had seen in the humble villages be systematically locked inside a man-made box.
He saw it in the Council of Nicaea, where the simple, terrifying truth of Yeshua was debated and codified by men in fine robes, their minds sharp with Julian's love for legalistic precision. The messy, personal relationship was being formatted into dogma.
He saw it in the opulent churches that rose over Europe, their spires scratching at the sky in Kur's gesture of dominance, their interiors glittering with Chloe's sterile, perfect art designed to awe and suppress, not to inspire and free. The faith of the heart was being caged in stone and gold.
He saw it as the Church, now an empire itself, absorbed pagan festivals and local deities, rebranding them as saints and holy days. It was Isabelle's method: taking the wild, untamed life of human spirituality and preserving it, controlling it, stripping it of its danger and its power. The "Cage of Faith" was not built with bars of iron, but with the slow, heavy bricks of tradition, hierarchy, and political compromise.
Enki, living as a anonymous copyist in a secluded Irish monastery, meticulously recorded it all. He copied the Church Fathers, his hand moving as steadily as a machine, while in his mind, he added a private entry to his Scrapbook.
Scrapbook Entry: "They have taken the song of the shepherd and written it as a marching tune for an army. They have traded the key for a scepter. The door is still there, but they have built a palace around it and now worship the palace walls."
It was not a loss, he told himself. It was data. Evidence of a persistent pattern: the human tendency to choose the safety of the cage over the terrifying freedom of the key. It was the Finkelstein Paradox, playing out over centuries. They were arguing about the gilding on the lock, forgetting that it was meant to be opened.