Seeking the Nomad Francis

When Murmur sought an answer to a pitiable need, and dove the dark depths to find the pain of another - that he might carry it into that light - she [Hannah] suffered as he suffered, also.

He would often wear the disease or discomfort he divined, and transfuse it with the very charity lying deep within his being.

These things she came to know firsthand, and secondhand, through his experience - and for all of his strange ways, she loved him all the more.

And so Hannah also was to depart from the familiar, to go and find her brother, that she might live near him as before.

Yet he, unlike her, could never see the world through her eyes.

He did not comply with her thoughts or feelings, and although he did love her as a brother might, his view was always turned outward to others and beyond.

Finding him would be difficult. There were so many small communities in the state, and the people of her town perceived the far reaching Holy Orders to be one and the same wherever one travelled.

Every community was so similar to the local villagers, that when Hannah had asked their advice as to what direction to go, they had pointed to the woods to the south, where the pilgrims were seeking the nomad Francis.

However Murmur had settled far from this area; and was being cared for by the Brethren of the Bells - a farming community that lay west of the village.


-Gabriel Brunsdon, AZLANDER: NEVER ENDINGS: Second Chances