caughtinanetwork | Sermon Two

[Signless has chosen his location carefully; when he turns on the video function, there's a wall of water behind him, and a school of brightly colored tropical fish swimming past. He's very clearly in the bubble again.]

My friends, today I want to talk to you about fear.

[His voice is low and soothing, his story-telling voice.]

I have known great fear in my time. In my world, the color of my blood was a source of fear, something that drove me into hiding for a long time. Then, when I dreamed of the world that could be, rather than the world that was, I was afraid again... afraid that I would never see what I knew we were capable of come to pass. I was afraid to speak out, afraid to make a ripple in the still, stagnant waters of our society, and tried instead to live my meager little life underneath the notice of the highbloods.

But then I saw what my silence was doing, what those in similar positions were suffering, and I knew I could not stay silent. I could not sit idly by while our world rotted away from its very core, while its corruption bled away the talents and very lives of so many trolls who had done nothing beyond being hatched the wrong color. I could not wait for another to come along and demand change, or I would wait the rest of my life. I needed to cast aside my fear, to find a reserve of strength within me, and rise to what my world needed me to be.

[His voice falls, becoming hushed and soft, almost painfully honest, and he looks down, his cloak hiding his eyes.]

I was terrified. Casting off fear is one of the most difficult things I have ever done. Fear is something I knew, its cold comfort as familiar to me as my guardian's face. It would have been... easy to live my entire life in fear, I thought.

[He looks up then, and his eyes are burning, his voice strong once more.]

I thought that fear was a cloak to hide me, but it was a chain I wore around my neck. When the fear was gone, when I made the decision to cast it aside, I have never felt so free in my entire life. It was how I imagine it must feel to wake up one morning with wings, and look out the window into an endless sky. When the fear was gone, I could breathe a deep breath for the first time in my life, and look to the future not as an ominous, foreboding thing, but as a path bathed in light and redemption.

I am not afraid any longer, Vatheon. This is my home now, and it is worth fighting for. I will not be driven out of my home again. I will not let fear control me.