Wherever God erects a house of prayer,
The Devil always builds a chapel there:
And 'twill be found, upon examination,
The latter has the largest congregation.
OneGavyn Trerovth and his wife and infant son lived in a high-rise in the bad part of Novrith. There was a bathtub in the kitchen, covered with an unfinished piece of plywood to make a counter. There was a refrigerator, outdated and rusting on the outside, and if you looked out the window to the apartment building's courtyard, and squinted through the dense smog, you would see a splash of blue - a blue tarpaulin covering the cheap stone sculpture in the center of the cloister. It had been rainy for the past few days in Novrith, and the baby was in his room, sealed tight from any particulates that might get in.
Gavyn had just got back from the night shift at a power plant. He was used to the smog, but his baby was not. He fought away his own exhaustion to watch his child lay sleeping in his crib - the mother off at one of her church's meetings, which ostensibly lasted two hours at the most but more often than not dragged on for four or five. Gavyn wasn't entirely sure what his wife did there, but he knew it involved some sort of faith healing which she credited for Arvyn's relative healthiness, considering the smoke he was being raised in.
Gavyn nodded his head in rhythm as he rocked his baby's crib, and as he drifted into a rare, beautiful sleep, an image appeared before him. He saw rolling greens and blues - but not a pea souper with a tarpaulin in it. Grasses and water - gradually he saw splashes of purple lilac and yellow dandelions, and then himself, holding his son swaddled in a blanket. Gavyn stood atop a hill, looking out at the vast expanse of land below him. Is this what his ancestors saw, as they stood on a hill above a grand plain which they would turn into a city churning in concrete and sulfur?
His eyes drifted to his baby. He pulled the blanket from his face and saw his child, purple, asthmatic, guttering, drowning. He gasped and ripped his eyes away as if in terror, only to see the green hills and purple lilac become high-rises and pigeons.
Gavyn was jolted awake, half out of terror and half from the sound of his son crying. He picked him up and, despite his terror, he looked healthy and pink, though with a bit of spit up on his cheek. He turned his head to the window and somewhere in the back of his mind expected green hills and golden grain.
