Just a Tuesday

Posted on Wed Jan 28th, 2026 @ 4:21pm by Patin

381 words; about a 2 minute read

Mission: Character Development
Location: Bajor

Patin entered the shrine the way weather does, without apology, without intent to harm, carrying consequence in her pockets.

The hour was wrong for visitors. Bajoran shrines preferred witnesses: breath, kneeling, the soft arithmetic of faith. This one had only dust motes and candle smoke doing their slow orbital dance around relics that had learned patience the hard way. The air hummed with the quiet confidence of things that believed they would never be touched again.

Patin tilted her head, listening. Not praying. Listening. There was a difference, and the room felt it.

Her fingers brushed a relic, no reverence, no desecration, just curiosity with hands, and reality flinched. Candles leaned backward into their own flames. Smoke reversed itself, threading neatly back into wicks like regret reconsidering. Prayers embedded in the stone walls loosened, whispered sideways, answered questions no one living had thought to ask.

Somewhere above, in the rafters where memory went to sulk, a long-dead Kai exhaled. Not anger. Exhaustion. The sound of someone realizing the universe had not finished editing their footnotes.

Patin smiled, small and pleased, as if she’d coaxed a clever trick out of an old machine. “Still works,” she murmured , not to the shrine, but to the idea of it. Sacred mechanisms were fascinating that way. You nudged one cog and the whole theology shuddered.

On the floor, something impossible waited for her attention: a pebble that cast no shadow, warm as a held secret. It did not belong to any river that still existed. It remembered pressure from a hand that had never been born. Patin crouched, examined it, and slipped it into her pocket with the casual theft of a god who knew the inventory would rebalance itself later.

The room settled. Candles resumed the honest direction of time. The whispers retreated, embarrassed. History lay back down and pretended not to care.

Outside, a passing acolyte would later swear the shrine felt different. Lighter. Or heavier. They would argue about it for years.

Patin kept walking, boots soft on ancient stone, leaving behind a place that would now answer prayers a fraction of a second faster , and with slightly better timing.

To everyone else, it would be called a miracle.

To Patin, it was just Tuesday.

And the echoes followed her anyway.

 

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