At her church's request, Sister Kelda Adler begins to actively tend to the spiritual needs of the docks community and its surrounding alleys. On an evening when winter's chill can still be felt, she sets herself up on a corner between the docks and the alleys. It's late enough in the day that laborers are between shifts, fishmongering wives are growing bored, and off-duty sailors are beginning to roam the streets. Kelda knows the people of the docks well enough at this point, the ebb and flow of their busy working lives.
"...Every winter can be endured, every night seen through to dawn, every storm weathered. New hardships may always be on the horizon, but every hardship ends and each one of us has survived the last. Good times come just as reliably as the bad times, but it is how we face each challenge that defines us and the nature of our suffering. Do we weather the storm together, giving each other strength in solidarity and learning from our difficulties? Or do we huddle alone through it, scrambling to help only ourselves?"
Her sermon, like that at the Triadic Temple, has a simplistic and humble quality to it. But now in her own realm outside the grandeur of the temple's hallowed halls, her past as a rural shrine maiden sthrough and mix with her new place in the church. She adorns her speaking space with daisies and a bundle of lavender, and presents bundles of medicinal burdock and comfrey. Her gentle sermons are punctuated with invitations to ask questions, make requests or pray together.
"Ilmater is with us in every moment of our pain and suffering. Although we can't easily feel it, he shares our pain in childbirth, our grief and mourning, our hunger and poverty. We are never truly alone through the night or through the storm. Solidarity through suffering, Ilmater teaches us, is what makes us stronger than any cruelty the world can inflict. As Ilmater offers us his hand and hurts alongside us so that we are never alone, we must offer our own hands to our neighbors and to strangers..."
Where Kelda collects donations elsewhere in the city, she spends it largely here: offering food and blankets to the city's poorest, though she makes it her goal to speak to all who come through the docks. Travelers, merchants, sailors, and especially children, to whom Kelda (especially shyly, and a bit uncomfortably) occasionally offers handmade candies or carved wooden statuettes.
"Although times are hard, refugees like those of the Tuigan war in Thesk--refugees like myself--have found succor here in your arms. You have shouldered some of our burden with us. We will both be made stronger for sharing our suffering: through fellowship we will be stronger than either of us would be alone. There is much we can both learn from each other, and we must continue to carry each other through these difficult days so that we can better face the next challenge..."
The priestess makes blessings of light in the less safe alleys and streets of the docks, so that they might be less vulnerable to muggers or other agents of suffering--a purely practical act, perhaps an example of the sort of action she advocates. Perhaps unexpectedly, she speaks to groups of Theskan--and other--refugees where she can find them, appealing to her fellow countrymen, echoing the words she speaks to locals.
"...Ilmater shows us how to be strong in the face of difficulty. We have known great suffering and heartache, lost friends and families and livelihoods. We have endured much and will endure more, but we can rebuild ourselves stronger than we were before. Although the people of this country are wary of strangers and foreigners, they have sheltered us, and we have much to learn from each other. What we have seen and lost does not need to be in vain: we can embrace our new home and its people. Let us show these good people who have fallen on hard times—different hard times from ours, but hard times—that we can help carry their burdens, too..."
