Josiah Reubenson was an Army chaplain stationed outside Philadelphia, assigned to a position that suited him better than he expected: a kind of institutional odd-jobs role for cases that didn't fit neatly into any other chaplain's portfolio. Strange artifacts. Unusual deaths. The things that arrived in supply crates from the territories without explanation and needed someone willing to sit with them. He had come to the chaplaincy through a theology degree he completed without arriving at certainty and a family expectation he lacked the conviction to refuse. What he found in the work, unexpectedly, was genuine purpose — not in the doctrine, but in being useful at the edges of things.

The blood-written book from Arizona was the most significant object he'd ever been handed. He catalogued it carefully and professionally, and he also read passages aloud at night because the language had a pull he didn't fully examine. It described boons from entities he had no theological category for. He filed careful reports and told himself he was doing his job. When the meteor fell and the shadows came for the barracks, the book opened on its own and a voice offered him salvation. He accepted. He has been less comfortable with the terms of that acceptance the longer he's had to think about it.

The mutations that followed were disorienting — limbs lengthening, proportions shifting into something that made people look twice and then look away. His Patron communicates rarely and without explanation, in the manner of an employer who considers the employment contract self-evident. Josiah continues to function as a chaplain in temperament if not in formal standing: methodical, oriented toward helping, prone to treating theological problems as something that can be worked through with sufficient patience. Whether that patience extends to the situation he's currently in remains an open question.