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“In Him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of Him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of His will.”
***
Sunday has never truly felt at peace.
Some people speak of knowing peace by way of their Aeon. They put so much faith, love, adoration, and trust into the Lord their God that it calms the crashing tide of uncertainty.
Sunday has never known that peace.
When he was a child only waist-high, he asked once if it was customary not to feel that, if some people just don’t get that level of connection.
“Pray,” they always answered. “Pray about it.”
So he did. He prayed every waking moment he remembered and then asked for forgiveness for those moments he forgot. He prayed before each meal and first thing in the morning, and last thing at night.
He bowed his head against his bed and closed his eyes, his hands clasped tightly.
Oh, Xipe, divine being of Harmony, bless us all, each and every one. Bless Robin and Mr Gopher Wood, and all the people of Penacony, with health and safety so that no one will die. Amen.
And then he thought that maybe he should be grateful before he asked for anything more, and he bowed his head again.
Please disregard my last prayer. I’m very sorry for not saying thank you. Thank You, Triple-Faced Soul, for Mr Gopher Wood and for Robin and for all of the Family. Thank You for giving me the opportunity to serve You in all that I do. Thank You for keeping us embraced in Your Great Melody and for keeping watch over Penacony. Please keep Mr Gopher Wood and my sister safe and sound. Amen.
And then he thought about how he forgot to ask for forgiveness for his sins, and maybe he should have done that before he could even try to be grateful. He should have thought to make himself pure before he had the audacity to speak to his Aeon.
Whatever Sunday did, it was never enough. The serene sense of peace people talked about never came. His Aeon never spoke back. His head was silent, except for the echoes of his own intrusive thoughts.
Perhaps those thoughts were what kept his God away.
They were thoughts of a catastrophe consuming Penacony. Thoughts of Robin accidentally slumping too far in her Dreampool in the reality version of the Reverie and drowning with no one to save her. Mr Gopher Wood being attacked again. Another Stellaron disaster that killed everyone he loved.
He worried and he worried and he worried even more.
And Sunday was but a child, waist-high with wide golden eyes, when they told him these thoughts were sins in of themselves.
“You shouldn’t worry so much,” a woman scolded. He can’t remember her name, but he remembers every word. “It means you don’t trust your Aeon.”
“But I do,” Sunday argued, his fingers wringing together. “I promise I trust Them.”
“If you truly did, you wouldn’t worry,” came the reply. “You are arrogant to assume you can imagine any situation the Aeons can not solve. Your anxiety is a crisis of faith. Your fear shows that you are still too immature in your faith to put full trust in your God. The godly opposite of anxiety is peace and contentment rooted in trust.”
And Sunday nodded and walked away while turning those words over in his head.
Your anxiety is a crisis of faith.
Perhaps that is why he has never been at peace.
***
But Sunday grew a bit with each day, and so did Robin.
Yes, in time, Robin went from a little girl with tiny downy wings and a warbling voice to a young teenager with two sets of beautiful white wings like an angel and a richly melodic timbre. Sunday grew from a little boy with wide eyes and a small halo to an adolescent with a poised stature and a steadied voice of reason.
If Sunday is meant to be the cornerstone of the Oak Family in time, then surely Robin is to be its most prized jewel. Sunday can only watch as his sister finds her voice, her presence, all in the name of Harmony.
“Can I sing you a song?” Robin asks one day, the wings on her head quivering with excitement. Sunday nods, and she grabs his hands and pulls him towards the makeshift stage she’s set up—nothing more than a table without legs, because Mr Gopher Wood feared she might accidentally dance off the edge—with a tall lamp as a spotlight. Her microphone is but a broom handle, painted in white and lilac.
Sunday sits on the floor and he listens to every note that pours from her lips, his hands clapping along with each stomp of her feet. Each word she sings paints over his worries and fears, silencing that cacophony of uncertainty in his head for just a moment.
Surely this, he thinks, is peace.
Robin’s performance grinds to a halt when she spins too close to the edge of her platform, slipping off of the table too suddenly for Sunday to do anything but watch.
It’s Mr Gopher Wood that catches her by the waist, righting her and gently patting her head.
“Careful, Robin,” he says with a gentle smile. “We wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”
“Sorry, Father,” she says, looking down at her socked feet. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
“That’s quite all right,” comes the reply. A hand extends into Sunday’s line of sight, and he takes it, standing up. Gopher Wood brushes off Sunday’s shoulder, then moves his hair back over it. “I think we can put an end to the performance for the time being, yes?”
“Do we have to?” Sunday asks before he can think of stopping himself.
The expression he receives is an answer in itself—narrow eyes, pursed lips, and an unspoken reminder to honour your mother and father.
“Sorry,” he says quickly, then corrects himself before he can be scolded. “I’m sorry, Father. I didn’t mean to.”
No matter how hard he tries, he always manages to mess up.
That night, he prays for guidance and apologises for all his infinite faults.
If I had only died in the Stellaron disaster, he thinks, I could have died pure.
And he apologises for daring to think that, too, for how could he dare to presume he knows better than his God, who deemed him worthy of saving for reasons he cannot dream of understanding?
Yes, no matter how hard he tries, he always manages to get it wrong.
***
He is still so little when his sister finds a bird. Just the same as that bird, he is not yet fully grown, his wings resting awkwardly against his too-small body and flight feathers still growing in.
“Look!” Robin exclaims, her hands cupped to hold the little dove. Its feathers are something iridescent and lustrous, like a pearl in the sunlight.
Sunday cocks his head, frowning at the state of the bird.
“It’s injured,” he points out, eyes focused on its patchy feathers, not unlike his own.
“We should build it a nest,” Robin says, cradling the bird against her chest. She pets its head gently with one finger. “So it can be warm and comfortable while it recovers.”
Sunday pauses, looking around the garden.
Surely this bird will not survive. The winter air is frigid, already piercing through his clothes and making him shiver as he hugs his body with his arms. There’s no shortage of insects—some of which he thinks are poisonous or venomous, others he knows are.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” he says. “Maybe it would be better to let it recover inside.”
“But it’s a bird!” Robin exclaims, looking affronted by the very idea. She turns her body away like she’s worried Sunday will snatch the bird from her and lock it up in a dark prison. “It’s meant to be free!”
“It’s not worth having freedom if it doesn’t live to enjoy it,” Sunday reasons. “I don’t mean to keep it caged forever—only until it recovers and can fly on its own. Then we’ll free it.”
Robin ponders this for a moment, her brow furrowed and lips pursed. Finally, she nods, following Sunday back inside, but he can tell she still finds the idea distasteful.
He finds a staff member and asks them to find a cage for the bird. The cage is small, made of beautiful gold that reflects the sunlight onto the bird’s pearlescent wings, and the perches are made of rich wood.
He and Robin nurse the little bird back to health, taking turns dressing its wounds and cleaning its temporary home. Sunday researches what to feed it, while Robin gives it fresh water and pets its downy head.
The day Robin is scheduled to leave Penacony for her first tour, they release the bird together, letting it hop from Robin’s cupped hands to the grassy ground.
Robin leaves, and Sunday sits at the window all day, watching the bird struggle to take to the skies, only to fall to the ground over and over. There’s something to be said for the dove’s tenacity, he’s sure, but it’s discouraging nonetheless to watch it fail.
He holds his breath when the bird finally, after hundreds of attempts, manages to make it into the air. But his relief is short-lived, and he gasps as the bird crashes to the ground.
Sunday throws open the door and picks the little bird up, cradling it the way his sister has done so many times before. The Charmony dove’s wing is bent at an awkward angle, its weak cries piercing his heart as it rests its head against his palm. He sits on the grass, uncaring about the dirt, and prays over that bird like it will make a difference.
In the end, nature is cruel and uncaring. The dove succumbs to its injuries in a couple of hours, dying in Sunday’s cupped palms as he silently weeps for it.
He buries it in the garden, marking the grave with a little cross made of sticks and a half-bloomed flower that will never finish growing, reciting a passage he knows by heart.
“In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died,” he says, his head bowed and wings folded tight, “and their departure was thought to be an affliction, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace.”
His choice never mattered. The bird’s fate was sealed.
He can only hope his sister—graceful bird that she is—has a kinder one in the wild.
***
Sometimes, he remembers a conversation he had once when he was just a child who had yet to grow into his wings.
“You look very sad, sir,” Sunday said, his head tilting. “Why are you so sad?”
The man wasn’t looking at him when he said, “Hell, if I know. Do you believe in the Aeons, tiny boy?”
“Yes, sir. Yes, I believe in the Harmony,” Sunday told him. “Why don’t you?”
“Because—” There was a moment where he could tell the man didn’t know what to say.
Sunday waited patiently, but he couldn’t help but try to fill in the blanks with things he’d heard people say before. The unfinished sentence made him more uneasy than any other possible answer. He had overheard it all.
“My wife is buying vodka for a recovering alcoholic.” “Kids are starving in their mothers’ arms.” “Babies are dying; adults are crying.” “My boy is fighting in a war he doesn’t understand,” and “I know a girl who can’t fight her father’s hands on her.”
But how could anyone ever know goodness if they did not first know evil?
“Because I don’t believe in anything that asks me to believe in it,” the man eventually answered. “And the world keeps asking me to, little one. But I don’t know whether They like me or not.”
“Xipe?”
“Yeah.”
“They are lovely, sir,” Sunday replied, still standing tall, with his wings wrapped tight, so tight, around his body. “The Harmony is so very lovely.”
“Do you think They like me?”
Sunday nodded. “Of course, sir. The Harmony welcomes everyone.”
“Apart from me. Apart from me, child, because I’m not very well. But welcoming someone and liking them are two very different things, boy.”
And Sunday couldn’t ever figure out what that meant, to be not very well, and how welcoming someone and liking them are two very different things, but as he’s gotten older, he has come to understand it perhaps too well.
After all, it is easy to believe in God when everything is going well. That’s what Mr Gopher Wood always says, and as the Oak Family’s head, he knows these things better than anyone. It is when things are difficult that faith is tested, and it is then that people genuinely come to understand their shortcomings. People are not perfect. They can never be perfect on their own. That is why the Harmony is so important—only when people work together can they be whole, compensating for each other’s flaws.
It is only through unification that all things work as they should.
***
He pierces his wing one day.
He isn’t sure why he does it. The impulse comes on a particularly difficult day in his adolescence, and he stands there in the mirror staring at his white feathered wings.
Sunday extends his wing, shifting his feathers until he reveals pale skin. He lines the needle up with where he wants, and pushes it through.
It hurts so much more than he expects. His golden eyes immediately well with tears, his hands shaking fiercely as he sticks the thin silver hoop through. He looks in the mirror.
Not even.
He’s marred his body and it’s not even. It’s too far to the left.
He grinds his teeth together and lines the needle up with his wing again, just next to his last one, and pushes it through. The pain is enough to have him seeing black spots, but he still pushes the jewelry through and secures it.
There. Better. Now it’s symmetrical.
Sunday stares at his reflection for a long moment, a feeling of satisfaction welling in him. There is certainly something to be said for individuality, for doing something just for him.
Everything comes crashing in all at once.
He’s done this for himself, not for his Aeon. This was a selfish act; that is why it feels so good. The most wicked actions feel the best, or else no one would commit them. That is what he’s been taught. He should have known better.
Sunday’s hands are trembling violently as he reaches up to unclasp one of the hoops in his wing, but the pain that wells up as he touches it has his vision tunneling. He sways on his feet, unsteady, as he tries to keep himself from falling by bracing his other hand against the counter.
By the time he’s sure he isn’t going to pass out, he’s also sure that he can’t make himself pull the hoops from the open wounds. The wings at his lower back wrap tightly around his shaking form, his unpierced wing folded at the side of his head.
Sunday is trembling under his blanket, praying in whispers when his door opens. He knows who it is even before he feels the weight of someone sitting on the edge of his bed.
“Child, what troubles you so?” Gopher Wood’s voice is kind and soft, and it only makes Sunday shake more.
“I’ve messed up,” he mumbles, still hiding under the blanket. His wing is throbbing with pain, sticky with iridescent blue blood. “Father—Mr Gopher Wood,” he corrects, knowing that at this moment, he does not have the right to his father, but rather only to the Dreammaster, “I fear I have committed a grievous sin.”
“Is that so?” Gopher Wood asks. “There is nothing that cannot be made pure by way of the Aeons.”
Sunday swallows.
“Confess your wrongdoings,” Gopher Wood instructs. “Only by doing so will you feel better.”
Sunday takes a breath before slowly lowering the blanket, refusing to look up. He can feel the weight of the Dreammaster’s gaze on his oozing wing even without looking.
“Why would you think to do something like this?” Gopher Wood asks, his eyes focused on the jewelry poking through Sunday’s wing.
Sunday’s wings pin back in shame, and even that aches fiercely, but maybe he deserves it. “I—I don’t know.”
“You must know,” Gopher Wood replies, his arms crossing. “Must I ask the Triple-Faced Soul to get a simple answer from you?”
Sunday panics. He doesn’t know why he did it, but he is afraid of what the truth might be, and he is afraid of his Aeon thinking even less of him, so he says the first thing he can think of.
“I just—I thought they would look nice,” he says, his voice shaking. “I wanted to look… different. So I… pierced it. My wing, I mean.”
“You care too much for appearances, boy,” Gopher Wood scolds. “You should know better. Vanity is nothing more than self-idolatry. You are attempting to liken yourself to the greatness of the Aeons for the sake of your own image. Those who are vain become divorced from the Divine grace of the Harmony. Pride goes before destruction, and…?”
“A haughty spirit before a fall,” Sunday finishes, his head hanging low. His voice is frail as he asks, “C-can you help me remove them? I—I can’t do it. It hurts too much to touch.”
“You’ll keep them,” Gopher Wood says quietly, in that voice that offers no opportunity for disagreement, for negotiation. “Let them be a visible reminder of your failures, of your vanity, and may they serve as a reminder to always strive for better.”
Sunday whimpers, but he nods. “Yes, Mr Gopher Wood. Of course. I’m sorry.”
“I know you are,” Gopher Wood replies, “but sorry does not absolve you of your sins. It is not me that you need to apologise to.”
Of course he should apologise to his God. He has insulted Them by assuming he knew better.
If he was meant to be decorated, he would have been born that way. His halo is already a beautiful ornament. He should have never been greedy. It is appropriate that this sin should stay with him for the rest of his days.
Sunday nods again. “Yes, sir. I’ll go confess right now.”
“Tomorrow,” Gopher Wood says, not unkindly. “You need rest.”
He stands and pats Sunday on the head, giving him a sympathetic smile, and then he leaves.
Sunday doesn’t sleep a wink. His thoughts are plagued with terror at the idea of dying in his sleep with unconfessed sins. But to worry is to sin, and that makes him worry more.
He doesn’t want to go to hell.
So all night, he sits there under his blanket and prays and cries to a God who never seems to listen to him. He writes that verse—pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall—over and over, until his notebook is running out of pages and his hand is cramping too badly to hold a pencil.
Sunday’s eyes and wing are both swollen when he finally deems it late enough to get up and dressed. He runs out the door of Dewlight Pavilion without a word, fleeing to the church and all but begging to confess.
As he spills his wrongdoings and doubts to an unidentified man behind a bronze screen, his hands clasped tightly and knees bruising against the floor, he wonders if that will be him someday. Nothing more than an angelic voice, guiding people from their darkest baseline, into the light of Harmony. But he’s not good enough for that—not yet—and so he is the voice on the other side, begging to be forgiven for sins he cannot help but commit.
The man behind the screen thanks him for his honesty, and then tells him he is forgiven.
“Th-that’s it?” Sunday asks.
“You cannot undo that which you have done, child,” comes the Bronze Melodia’s response. “It seems you have already figured out what your punishment should be.”
Exactly as Mr Gopher Wood told him, then. These piercings will stay with him, for eternity, as a reminder of his vanity and frailty.
“Yes, sir,” Sunday whispers. “Thank you.”
He walks back to Dewlight Pavilion with his head hung low.
***
Sunday is only a little bit older when he learns the truth.
The truth of the Harmony and the truth of the Order and the truth of all the things that come between.
Sunday sits, and he listens to the Dreammaster’s instructions and teachings, and he writes every word down.
It makes him feel good. He sits and scrawls, hoping his God is talking somewhere to someone and reading his frantic scribbles. He hopes that the Order might provide him the feeling of peace that he’s come to crave, and in time, it does. The world makes more sense when it is given Order, kept in line by the watchful eye of all things logical and perfectly in place.
This, surely, is the feeling he has been looking for his entire life. Finally, he knows the peace so many have spoken of. He finds it in perfection, in order, in symmetry. But behind the peace of finally belonging, Sunday still feels the watchful gaze of the Harmony, all of Their many faces turned towards him, judging his every action.
He hopes Xipe is listening when his words whisper I’m sorry.
I wish I could have done better. I wish I knew You liked me, but I can never be sure of it now.
***
Time never stops moving. Sunday gets his wish, christened as a Bronze Melodia and listening to each word spoken by the faceless Dreamseekers on the other side of the screen. He offers his wisdom—and what a joke that is.
So many seek absolution for selfish reasons, he finds. They want to be freed of responsibility, of guilt—they do not truly feel sorry for the things they’ve done.
He wishes he could say he were different. He doesn’t think he is.
It’s like that time so long ago when he was but a child, and he consumed every word preached from the altar—the prefixes of all those descriptive words that soaked through his skin as if he had been baptised in them. As if the vicar poured soluble syllables over his little head in the name of Xipe the Harmony, that Thousand-Faced Soul. Each word christened him, created him, built him of a broken language rather than a holy one.
He is still made up of broken words.
He will never not be broken.
***
She’s returned.
Sunday walks quickly through Dewlight Pavilion, a box of sweets in his hands for his sister. She’s back in Penacony for the Charmony Festival, come to lend her voice for a handful of days before soaring back to the skies to spread the Harmony’s grace. It’s been far too long since he laid eyes on her, since he spoke to her face to face rather than through carefully written letters.
“I don’t think my brother is well,” Robin’s voice comes from inside a room, and Sunday pauses outside, listening.
She sounds different. Older, softer, her voice carrying that soft melodic tone it does even when she’s only talking. She sounds… worried. For him? What a selfish thought.
“Everything has to be perfect,” Robin says quietly, “as if perfect exists. All aligned, all symmetrical. Clothes hung in the same place, the fronts of both shoes touching the wall, and all his books stored alphabetically.”
“He sounds obsessive,” a young woman says.
It’s the first time Sunday confronts it with an external force.
“He is obsessive,” Robin admits, and that hurts more than anything. “But I think his heart is in the right place.”
Sunday hesitates a moment before knocking on the door, pushing it open. Robin and one of the Pavilion’s servants turn, looking surprised.
“I hope I’m not interrupting,” he says with a smile, pretending like he heard nothing. “I only wanted to come greet Penacony’s most brilliant star.”
“Sunday,” Robin says, smiling warmly.
“I’ll take my leave,” the servant excuses herself, bowing quickly. “I’m sure you two have a lot to catch up on.”
She all but runs out the door, and Sunday closes it behind her.
“Robin,” he returns, holding out the box of candy, one hand behind his back, fingers trembling as he holds them in a loose fist. “It’s been too long.”
“That it has, brother,” she returns, accepting the gift with a small curtsey. “Have you been well?”
Sunday keeps the gentle smile he’s learned to wear like a mask as he takes a seat, gesturing for Robin to sit as well.
“I have,” he says. “How were your travels?”
“They were wonderful,” Robin sighs wistfully as she sits across from him. “I only wish you could join me; the cosmos is so vast, and there’s so much to see.”
“Ah, but who would maintain this beautiful dream, then?” Sunday asks, tilting his head slightly. “We each have our place.”
Robin smiles, but there’s something tight about it. “I suppose we do. Tell me, then, how has Penacony been? How is it, being the Oak Family’s Head?”
Sunday crosses one leg over his knee. “It is… stressful, but rewarding. There is always something to do. You have nothing to worry about; let us not talk about my work. Instead, tell me about your journey, sister. Have you seen many interesting things across the galaxy?”
Robin relaxes as she begins to recount the tales of her tours, of all the people she’s met and all those she’s turned to the Harmony—the newest members of the Family, so many light years away.
Sunday listens patiently, asks questions when there’s a gap, smiles and nods in the appropriate places. He watches his younger sister—he observes the way her eyes light up as she speaks of her missionary work, the way her wings flap when she gets particularly excited about something. Her hands never wring nervously, and her posture never shifts in the uncomfortable way Sunday can never stop himself from doing.
Later that night, he sits at the altar and prays until he can no longer feel his knees. His hands have been clasped too tightly for too long—he can feel the impressions of his own fingers embedded in his skin. His fingertips are paler than when he began; his head is too heavy to hold up.
Please let me just be normal. I would do anything; take this obsession—what a filthy word it is, too round and too long and too many repeating letters but not perfectly mirrored—and turn me into someone worthy of Your radiant gaze. Please. I beg of thee.
But it doesn’t work. It never works because he is not enough to be listened to. Not by his God, nor by the remnants of the one They consumed.
His fingers finally unclasp only to grip the altar tightly, and he chokes back a sob.
Tell me what I am doing wrong. Tell me why I can never be enough for either of You. Why am I not enough for the Harmony, and too much for the Order?
Still, there’s no response. Not yet.
But in time, all things will be made whole.
Amen.
***
The years continue to pass, and Sunday still grows. The Order’s influence twists around his heart like the roots of weeds choking the life out of everything else, and yet…
It’s not enough. Still, the Harmony sings somewhere in him. Even as the song of the Order grows louder day by day, it is never enough to fully drown out Xipe’s melody.
Stuck between Aeons. Never enough for either one, and never small enough to be forgotten about.
He exhales sharply, pulling off his coat and draping it over the back of his chair. Next comes his shirt, exposing pale skin and glistening wings like the ravens watching mindfully over all over Penacony.
Surely this will cleanse him. This will make him pure. He doesn’t know how, but he knows that it will.
Sunday draws in a breath, looks at himself in the mirror, and carefully extends one dark wing. His hand reaches out to pick up the scissors. Steady, steady—
Snip.
He trims his feathers until they’re even, the flight feathers now flat instead of tapered. He folds his wing back against his body and stares down at the cartlidge clippings around his feet.
“Oh, Triple-Faced Soul,” he whispers, “please accept this lowly one’s offering. Everything I do, I do in Your name. See that I am trying.”
He doesn’t know if he’s speaking to the Harmony or the Order anymore. Perhaps it is both at once, two conflicting but eternally interlocked faiths nestled deep inside of him until he can only exist in disharmony.
He extends his other wing, clipping the feathers with a careful hand. He wraps both tightly around his body, breathing a deep sigh of relief as he sets the scissors down on the counter with a soft metallic clank.
The pounding in his body settles, slows, until it’s back in his chest instead of in his head and fingers.
He leans forward, gripping the counter as he closes his eyes.
“Your will be done,” he whispers. “Amen.”
“Sunday!”
Robin’s shrill cry pulls him from the thoughts, from the spiral that tightens until it threatens to consume him. He turns and looks at her blankly.
“Oh,” Robin whispers, her hands covering her mouth in shock. “Oh, Sunday. What have you done?”
“I—” Sunday looks at his clipped wings as they wrap back around his torso. “I needed to fix… myself.”
“They won’t grow back,” Robin says, her hands still over her mouth as she steps closer. “Sunday, they won’t grow back. Not for a very long time.”
“Good.” Sunday’s voice is unwavering. “The skies will not call for someone who cannot appreciate them.”
“Is that what this is about?” Robin asks. “Do you think that this will make you more pure, somehow? As if marring your body will somehow endear you further to the Harmony?”
Sunday stares blankly at her for a moment, and he tries to find the words to explain.
It is not about the Harmony. It has never been about Them. It has only ever been about the Order.
But he can’t say that. He can’t tell her that the faith he holds is stuck between the Aeons, so similar and yet vastly different. He is too afraid to commit to one or the other in case he is wrong.
He swallows back the words and sits down, wrapping himself in a blanket and hiding his clipped wings from Robin’s tearful eyes.
It’s like being the child who pierced his wing and thought that he could hide under a blanket from the Harmony’s many eyes once again. Everything changes, but he never does, stagnant in his faith, in his spiritual development.
“It’s… fine,” Sunday finally says. “My place is not in the skies alongside you. It is only a reminder to be grounded in faith.”
Robin stares at him in disbelief, but she says nothing before she runs off, halo catching the light and reflecting into Sunday’s eyes.
He blinks until his vision clears, standing and redressing. He pulls his sleeves straight, folds his collar flat, wraps his wings around his body until he’s compressed in the familiar weight of his mortal shell.
He exhales, then lets that small smile he wears like a mask adorn his face once more.
All things in their rightful place, as Your will commands.
Yes, all things in their place but the one who has still yet to find his.