Firsts among servants (Vatican City) [Closed]

[Patricus I]

“Evidence of God leaves the faithful wasted of faith. It supports the findings of fact, which is a distant lens from that of reality. Only emotion creates reality; one that needs no evidence.” Evidence of God did not define Philip’s faith. His own emotion dictated the decision to believe in an entity purposefully obscured. Philip would be gravely disappointed if God proved himself on demand. What evidence Regus intended to share would do little to sway his belief as little as his faith in God.

The subterranean air was stagnant and musty: a sharp contrast to the temperature-controlled archives that swallowed the twin vicars of light and dark. Philip was American. He was not impressed by old things. The room was full of it. He paused when Regus specifically highlighted some trinket or another, but the calmness of his expression was neither impressed nor underwhelmed. While a finnicky dresser who reinstated numerous medieval habits, the priest who banished electric lights after sunset was not drawn to the basement treasures. He lingered not at all upon the evidence collecting dust like bones buried in the earth.

Little was known of the man that was Sylvester I despite the legendary gains of his Papacy on behalf of the church. He was the son of a Roman and occupied the position during the reign of Constantine the Great, with whom he was supposedly close. Apocryphal accounts steeped Sylvester I with legendary stories, but the curiosity of the present prince successor was stirred enough to ponder these tales with new angle. 

The second chamber was a place of haunting memorialization. He was drawn to a case displaying the articulated remains of something he thought first to be that of a child. The faintest pinch lined his eyes as he perched a pair of reading glasses upon his nose. He himself presided over more funeral masses than he could remember. Tears were for the faithless, he usually said. Grief denied evidence of God. He was hardly scandalized by viewing the remains of something formerly alive. This was no human child, he quickly surmised: the eye sockets were wider than they ought; the breastbone curved in a way that suggested deformity. It was the hands, though, that drew his gaze. His own reached out to touch the fingers: the Ring of the Fisherman glinting fearlessly in the arc. The claws remained. Still sharp, he thought, withdrawing his hand.

A more ominous shadow stretched from a place of proud display like a hunter who anchored the head of a stag above the fireplace: a preserved beastly thing of blue pallor and glassy eyes. It was in that moment that the air was disturbed by death clinging to their walls, but the intrusion of the Holy Father was its undoing. Be banished, he spoke to the darkness that watched between the bricks that held up the ceiling. The prayers of his demands intensified in his own mind. He demanded no proof. Emotion was the need; to sway belief by emotion. Some minutes passed in silence as Philip challenged the creator. Let emotion prove evidence. Let emotion define me. Reality is as I say it is. My reality. My heart.

When he returned his attention to the world of the flesh, it was without any emotion at all. A penetrant gaze found the host of the archives. “The past is a funny place, Regus, full of all sorts of things. The present is merely a narrow opening, full of only one pair of eyes. Mine. Here, God does not illume me. I illume only myself, and I await enlightenment.”