Compassion

The forest milked the moon as I collected the Religions around my fire. The Big Three gave me their symbols first, followed by the East and West, the Nones and the Nothings, the Materialists and the Skeptics. I sewed them onto The Great Blanket, and sat down, utterly spent.

Stars hooded the moon, frost barbed the ground, and the Religions tended their own fires, arguing over placement and spacing of the symbols, and why certain symbols should be there at at all.

Amidst it all, from the periphery, a small set of hands tended my fire, which was losing its fight to the cold. I asked her which symbol on The Great Blanket was hers and she pointed at the lines between them all. I asked her what her message was; she put another stick on my fire and gave me water.

"But how can we find you?", I asked as she disappeared into the bone-white path of the forest, looking for the next fire to tend.

"Exactly", she offered, and was gone.