Chronicles of the Eon of the Order of the Keepers of the Light: It Is I, Be Not Afraid

Part One Watch Post "Beacon"

The post "Beacon" stood at the very edge of the Nibir sector, where settled space fell away into the Zone of Rifts. Not an outpost, not a fortress — simply the Order's ear, set against the border: to listen to the ether, catch the first signs of a new Rift, and pass the alarm onward, deeper into the sector, before the anomaly's wave reached settled worlds. Garrison — nine Keepers, a relay tower taller than the station itself, and an old subspace beacon that gave the post its name.

Eleven days earlier, a fourth-class Rift had opened in a neighboring system — the largest in a decade. The anomaly's blast wave passed near the post without touching it physically, but scorched the entire subspace ether for hundreds of light-hours around. From that day, "Beacon" could reach neither the Order nor anyone else. The transmitters worked properly. The receivers worked properly. But the ether they called into was empty — as though no one remained on the other end.

Keeper Liya was responsible for communications. She was twenty-three, and this was her first independent posting.

On the eleventh day, she stopped sleeping.

Part Two A Voice in the Storm

Agathon, the senior Keeper of the post, found her in the comm room at three in the morning, station time — she sat before a dead screen, cycling through frequencies one by one by hand, like prayer beads.

"You're searching for what isn't there," he said, sitting down beside her.

"Eleven days of silence," Liya said, without turning. "A fourth-class Rift is registered automatically — outside the sector, it should have been noticed within the first hour. If they were looking for us, they'd have found us already. So either they aren't looking, or..."

"Or what?"

"Or there's no one left to look."

Agathon was silent for a moment.

"Have you read the Sunday Gospel? The day before yesterday."

"Didn't have time. I was counting frequencies."

"About the walking on water," he said. "The apostles were sailing at night across a lake, the wind was against them, the boat was being tossed by waves. Before that, Christ had gone up a mountain alone — to pray. The disciples were left in the dark, in the middle of the water, without Him. Do you know how many hours they spent alone? The Gospel says: He came to them in the fourth 

watch of the night. That means — almost till dawn. All night. In a storm. Alone.

"And what were they thinking, all that time?"

"Probably the same thing you're thinking right now," Agathon said. "That they'd been abandoned."

Liya finally turned around.

"And how is that supposed to help me?"

"By this: when He finally came — they didn't recognize Him. Took Him for a ghost. Grew even more afraid. Presence, when you don't expect it in that form, often frightens more than silence does."

"That's not an answer to my question."

"He said to them: be of good cheer, it is I, do not be afraid. Not 'sorry I'm late.' Not 'I had reasons.' He said only: it is I. The answer wasn't an explanation — the answer was His presence."

Liya was silent.

"Peter asked permission to walk out to Him on the water," Agathon continued. "He got permission. He went. He managed a few steps — while he was looking at Christ. And then he saw the wind. He didn't feel the storm anew — it had been the same the whole time. He simply shifted his gaze from the One he was walking toward, to what surrounded him. And he began to sink."

"You're saying I'm looking at the storm," Liya said.

"You've been staring into dead ether for eleven days," Agathon said. "That is the storm. And presence doesn't always announce itself loudly. Sometimes it comes in the fourth watch of the night — when you've already decided it's all over."

Part Three Stepping Out of the Boat

On the thirteenth day, the detectors caught a secondary wave — an echo of that same Rift, reflected off the gravity well of a neighboring star. The wave was heading straight for "Beacon." The relay tower wouldn't survive a direct hit, but if they could reangle the emergency transmitter on its peak into a narrow beam along the known route of trade caravans in time, there remained a chance someone would catch the signal before the tower was torn down.

Someone had to go outside and manually readjust the antenna — in a spacesuit, during the passage of a gravitational wave that, on approach, was already distorting the stars beyond the viewport, as though space had begun to ripple.

"I'll go," Liya said.

"You've been more afraid of open ether than anyone on this post for eleven days," Agathon said. "Why you?"

"Because I know this antenna better than anyone," Liya said. "And because I'm tired of being afraid and doing nothing. If this is a storm — I want to at least walk through it, not just wait for it to pass."

She went out through the airlock four minutes before the wave's calculated arrival. A tether held her to the station's hull — a thin, unreliable-looking thread in the blackness. The first minutes came easily: climbing the lattice support, familiar hand-work, familiar connectors.

Then the wave arrived.

The space around the tower didn't tear or flare — it flowed, as though the vacuum had, for a moment, remembered what water was. The stars streamed into slanted lines, the station's hull trembled with a deep, visceral shudder, the tether pulled taut and slackened, pulled taut again. Liya was torn from her support and flung sideways — the tether held, but everything before her eyes blurred, false, as though reality had decided it could be rewritten.

"Agathon," she said into the comm, her voice breaking. "I can't hold on. I'm being carried off."

"Look at the antenna," he said calmly, without pressure, and there was no trace of the panic in his voice that she'd expected to hear. "Not the wave. The antenna. Connector number three — you've almost found it already."

"Everything's swimming, I can't see..."

"It is I," Agathon said, and she didn't immediately understand that he wasn't saying this to himself, but aloud, deliberately, in those exact words. "Do not be afraid. Look at the target, not the storm. The tether holds. I'm holding the connection. Your job is three centimeters to the connector."

She didn't remember how her fingers found the connector. She remembered only that she stopped looking at the distorted stars and started looking at the small metal bracket before her — the single fixed point in a world that flowed like water. The transmitter's beam locked into position one second before the wave's peak.

Part Four The Wind Died Down

The wave passed as suddenly as it had come. The stars returned to their places. Liya hung on the tether, stunned but alive, and above her the antenna held a narrow, trembling but steady beam.

She came back inside seven minutes later — by the station's clock it was seven minutes, by her own sense of it, much longer. The whole garrison waited at the airlock.

Epilogue Of Little Faith

The rescue ship arrived on the fifth day after the signal. Until it docked, Agathon and Liya sat in the comm room — the very place where it had all begun.

"I'm not ashamed that I was afraid," Liya said. "But I'm ashamed that I decided fear was the truth."

"Those are different things," Agathon said. "Peter was afraid too — and the Lord didn't reproach him for it. Fear amid a storm isn't a sin, it's simply the body's honesty before an abyss. Sin begins where fear passes itself off as a final diagnosis: since I'm afraid, that means I've been abandoned. One monk, who experienced God-forsakenness more terrible than yours, left us counsel for such nights."

"What counsel?"

"Keep your mind in hell, and despair not," Agathon said. "That doesn't mean 'don't be afraid.' It means: even at the very bottom, even when it seems you've been finally forgotten — don't make that feeling the final word. The feeling of being forsaken by God comes even to those closest to Him. It doesn't prove a rupture. It tests where you keep your gaze, when there's no proof."

Liya was silent for a long time, looking at the screen, where now the mark of the approaching ship glowed steadily.

Be of good cheer, it is I, do not be afraid. Of little faith, why did you doubt?

The storm had been the same the whole time. Only the gaze had changed.