Prologue

 I didn’t always feel lost.

At least, not at first.

Loss came quietly, one blow at a time. First my father, then my mother. Each death carved something out of me I didn’t yet know how to name. When Omi died a few years later, that empty place collapsed in on itself. What remained wasn’t just grief, it was absence. Weight. A sense that something essential had gone missing and wasn’t coming back.

Then there was the silence.

Not the peaceful kind. Not rest. This was the kind that settles in after prayers go unanswered. After sermons feel hollow. After the men you respected, the voices you trusted, fade away when you need them most. God felt distant. The church felt procedural. Community felt conditional. Everything I thought would hold me upright went still.

So I adapted.

I learned how to perform.
How to succeed loudly enough that no one asked what was breaking quietly.
I built a life that looked purposeful, respectable, finished. And for a while, the illusion worked.

But beneath it all, the clock kept ticking.

Every second felt like a reminder that nothing stays hidden forever. That eventually, the truth catches up. I was haunted by the sense that my choices, my compromises, the slow erosion of who I was meant to be had already sealed my fate. That one day the light would finally expose me and finish the job grief had started.

I believed reckoning was inevitable.
I just didn’t know when it would come.

Fear became my constant companion.
Fear that God wasn’t real.
Fear that faith was just something people used to survive until it stopped working.
Fear that purpose was a story we tell ourselves so the dark doesn’t feel quite so final.

And if none of it was true, if love and calling and redemption were just myths, then what was left?

I kept moving. I kept achieving. I kept avoiding the places that asked too much of me.

Until I couldn’t.

This story begins when I stopped running.
When I returned to a town I thought I’d outgrown.
To memories I had tried to bury.
To a place I never meant to find.

I thought the truth would destroy me.

What I wasn’t expecting was that the light of truth would save my life.

That is where Outpost 17 enters the story.
And where everything I thought was over finally began.