A Matter of Faith

[Dogs231]

His vocabulary, on average, contained a lot of technical words. He had detailed knowledge of force and fluid, and he could, given enough time, explain every part of a plane, from the floatstick to the fuselage. But, for all that, there was one word missing from the pages of his mental dictionary, conspicuously absent: that word was "faith."

He had never been the kind to pray.

S061: ALEXANDER HAWTHORNE — CONTINUED FROM "Mediation"

Even in his youth, when his family was still whole, they had never been religious or superstitious. Ghosts and Gods alike held with the same skepticism—in a sense, considered to be of the same kind in that they were equally nonexistent. He had never gone to church on Sunday, nor had he ever thanked God, or a god of any kind, for anything.

If he had faith once, though, he could not help but feel that he would have lost it anyway.

The death of his father would have been the last straw. The one that, when piled upon all the others, ultimately broke the camel's back. No deity, Alexander thought, would have allowed such a thing. But it had happened anyway and forever enshrined his faithlessness. Their present circumstance—the island, a baneful prison—only reinforced it.

There was no ray of faith to cleanse the darkness—only fire, forged by humankind, to grant light.

Whereas some might have wallowed in the lack of a guiding hand, Alexander thought it more than suited him. As he walked across the shoreline, as shoes treaded stones across the beach, he felt it did the opposite of dissuading him. In search of answers and an antidote, that understanding bolstered him. Because, in the end, he knew something.

They didn't need Gods to turn their world upside down.

S061: ALEXANDER HAWTHORNE — CONTINUED IN "Recycle"