4338.211 · July 30, 2018 AD
Lois and the Deep
Greta Smith walks to the lagoon with a borrowed water bottle and a Golden Retriever she didn't ask for, expecting stillness — maybe even peace. What she finds instead is something ancient, alive, and waiting beneath the surface. The water offers visions designed to shatter her: her family turned monstrous, her temple in ruins, her God walking away without a backward glance. It nearly drowns her. Lois drags her back to the living. And then Greta runs — soaked, broken, desperate — because Charles is already here, and this place is no sanctuary.
Lois is waiting outside the supply tent as though she knew. Greta pats the dog's head with reluctant tenderness and they set off together, two unlikely companions crossing the dust toward a lagoon she has been promised will bring peace. The walk is hot, slow, and quietly healing — Lois bounding ahead and glancing back, her tail a metronome of uncomplicated joy. When the lagoon appears, tucked into a curve of the land, its still surface mirrors the sky so perfectly it looks like a wound in the earth filled with heaven.
Greta wades in. The water is cool and silken, and for a moment the noise in her mind falls silent — the doubts, the fears, the ache of displacement dissolving into something that feels almost sacred. Then the lagoon turns. A voice rises from the deep, cruel and intimate, and the water becomes a screen for visions pulled from the darkest corners of her soul: her family twisted into sneering strangers who accuse her of failing them, the Adelaide Temple shattered and desecrated, and the figure of her God walking away without turning back. The lagoon offers her an escape — surrender, and the pain ends. For one terrible moment, she wavers.
But a spark holds. Small, stubborn, unnamed — it refuses to die. Greta says no. The water surges, drags her under, and it is Lois's frantic barking that reaches her through the darkness, pulling her back to the surface and onto the shore where she lies gasping and sodden in the dust.
The terror that follows is not for herself but for Charles. If this place can do this to her — a woman of lifelong faith, armed with scripture and covenant — what will it do to a sixteen-year-old boy? She staggers to her feet and runs, Lois streaking ahead like a golden flare across the plain. She reaches camp soaked and wild-eyed, and there he is — Charles, already through the Portal, standing beside Noah, beaming with the bright oblivion of a boy who does not yet know what this world holds.
She collapses. Noah catches her. Charles clings to her side. And the voice from the lagoon whispers one final, poisonous truth: she cannot protect them. She holds her family in the dust and weeps — for the innocence already lost, and for the dark knowledge that in Clivilius, even love may not be enough.
