[b]Бала, Якутская область, Сиби́рь
(Bala, Yakutsk Oblast, Siberia)
23:00, 12 August 1960[/b]

Despite the late hour, the sun still hung low in the sky, casting long shadows from the scattered buildings on the bank of the Sartang. Nearly all the villagers were asleep by now, but grey smoke still lazily curled skyward from a few of the chimneys. It was warm, unusually so even for this time of year, enough that the priest had opted to leave the heavy black wool cloak typical of his profession back at the chapel in Batagay. The palm-sized gold cross that hung from his neck would have to be proof enough of who he was.

He emerged from the rough track he had been following through the larch-forested mountainsides for the last week into the clearing that held the small town.

[i]’Town’ may be too generous,[/i] he thought, pausing to take in the scenery. A few clusters of old, wooden houses with stone chimneys and opaque windows. Some shops, clustered around a larger structure in the middle of the clearing that may have once been a cultural center. Fields of indeterminate crops. A small mill on the edge of the water, wheels spinning slowly in the current. All in all, there couldn’t be more than 300 souls here. He noted with some disdain that they didn’t even have a church.

He pulled a sheet of paper out of his trouser pocket and double-checked his orders. If nothing had changed in the seven months it had been since one of his order had visited this town, the man he was looking for would be found in a one-story stone hut, about 5 miles East of the village on the other side of the Sartang. In theory, it was his duty to attend to the town’s religious needs while he was passing through, but the priest felt he had wasted enough time doing so for the dozen other hamlets he had passed through on his way here. He briefly wondered if that made him a bad clergyman, but he quickly shoved that thought down. He didn’t want to alert his target to his presence by passing through the village, he reasoned, trying to justify his decision. And besides, he could give a sermon and bless whatever the locals wanted blessed on his way out.

Satisfied that he wasn’t [i]really[/i] shirking his duties, at least not in spirit, the priest began picking his way around the fields on the edge of the clearing, trying to avoid being spotted by anyone still awake on this side of the river. He tucked his cross into his shirt as he walked, just to be on the safe side.

About half an hour later, he came up on the bank of the river, fairly confident his presence had not been noticed. The Sartang was about 600 feet across here, and would be too deep to stand for most of the crossing, but he was a reasonably strong swimmer. Halting at the water’s edge, the priest took his pack off his back and put his cross, his orders and his bible inside. He then rolled the top back down, tied it, said a brief prayer that the waterproofing would hold, and waded in.

[i]“Ебать меня”,[/i] he spat under his breath. The water was freezing. Nevertheless, he began his crossing, cursing all the while.

It was almost midnight when the priest trudged out of the shallows on the heavily-forested far side of the river, his swearing now interrupted by violent bursts of shivering. As soon as he reached dry ground, he sat down and started wringing the water out of his clothing. While he was dumping his waterlogged boots, the priest privately wondered who this man he’d been sent to find actually was, that it was worth making him do all this dumb shit. Eventually, he decided he was as dry as he was ever going to be, and set off again through the trees.

It took him nearly three hours to find the damn place. After stumbling through the forest blindly for an hour without any luck, he’d decided to retrace his steps back to a lake he’d seen earlier, just half a mile east of the river. [i]Surely,[/i] he’d reasoned, [i]this man still needs to drink, so maybe he can be found by finding his water source.[/i] He felt very clever when, lo and behold, a half-hour of searching around the edge of the lake yielded a narrow dirt track that led eastward into the forest. He quickly stopped feeling clever when the track ended at a small glade with no other path in sight and he had to go back to randomly walking through the forest at night. Eventually, though, he found the place. It was another glade, this one with a small, windowless stone hovel in the center that still emanated wisps of smoke from the chimney.

As he broke from the edge of the clearing, the priest straightened the chain from which his cross hung, and tried to smooth out the collar of his shirt. He was starting to feel uncharacteristically anxious about meeting this man, and couldn’t pin down why. He turned the thought over in his head a few times as he walked, but was as a loss when he reached the wooden door of the hut. The priest checked his appearance over one last time, took a deep breath and knocked.

A dark-spectacled hermit instantly opened the door, making the priest wonder if his arrival had somehow been anticipated. He opened his mouth to speak, but the hermit beat him to the punch.

“The Presbyter sent you?” He asked. His tone suggested he already knew the answer, but fervently hoped he was wrong.

The priest nodded. He again drew breath, but again the hermit cut him off.

“You’d better come in. We step at first light.”

The hermit turned and walked back inside, leaving the door open. The priest looked around wide-eyed for a moment, still off-guard from the exchange, before following him inside and shutting the door.

The hut was a single small, dirt-floored room. A wood-burning stove of black iron, with an American maker’s imprint sat in the back-right corner of the room, the dying embers dimly illuminating the interior. An unvarnished wooden table with a massive black leather-bound bible, with two chairs of similar make neatly pushed in, dominated the remainder of the right side of the space. Some shelves with containers of what in the faint light he could only guess were food were on the walls above it. The left half of the interior was completely bare. The priest could see no bed, couch or any other obvious place to sleep.

The dark-spectacled hermit was standing in the empty half of the room, looking expectantly at him, though the priest was unsure what he wanted from him.

“Do you have a name?” the hermit asked.

“Er, yes-“ the priest immediately cut himself off, feeling foolish for answering like that. The hermit seemed amused. He stopped for a second, composed himself, and said,

“I am Father Grigoriy Gennadiyevich Sherstov, [i]рясофор.[/i]”

“I figured as much,” the hermit said, though it wasn’t clear to Grigoriy which part he had figured.

The hermit sat down, and gestured to a spot a few feet away from him. Grigoriy noticed, then, that the hermit was sitting in the center of a rectangular depression in the dirt floor roughly the same size as him. He sat down where he’d indicated, by the long side of the depression, and waited for a few seconds, expecting the hermit to say something. When he did not, Grigoriy began smoothing out his own patch of dirt to sleep on. He considered getting his bedroll out, but something told him it would be improper.

“You may call me Kirill,” the hermit said with that same uncanny timing as Grigoriy finished his work, and took off his dark glasses for the first time. Grigoriy utterly failed to hide his shock. He had heard rumors of what those most devoted to Dawn’s light had done to become closer to God, but he’d thought it was another one of his order’s strange metaphors.

Kirill’s eyes burned in the last moments of firelight. They were gold.