There were other groups beside Sanctum that had made it their organizational mission to root the same evils that Sanctum was dedicated to destroying. In fact, the city boasted at least two dozen such “congregations” within its limits, though relations between the groups was hardly amicable. Old Lightbearers spoke wistfully of how once these disparate communities had been unified as a single unified heresy-hunting organization with hundreds of light-keepers working under the same banner.

That was no longer the case, Quincy observed. The congregations mostly kept to themselves these days, viewing each other with distrust if not open enmity.

“Is it due to a matter of doctrine?” He’d asked Shepherd Sadler once, after Quincy had a chance encounter with a girl from Torch, a congregation located into the North Beach.

“It may have started out that way,” Sadler acknowledged, “But I’ll bet if you laid out our Doctrine of Engagement side-by-side next to theirs, you’d be hard-pressed to find any meaningful differences, certainly not any worth this current level of division.”

“Then why do we remain so divided?” Quincy pressed. Sadler didn’t have an answer; he’d merely shrugged.

Now, all these years later, Quincy thought he understood, perhaps not in whole, but a significant part. The mission of all congregations was to bear the Eternal Light and to spread that light throughout creation; that was the liturgy they all recited during service. But people were flawed and their words rarely matched their actions, this was something Quincy had realized over the years. For many light-bearers, their true devotion was not to the Light—a remote and abstract concept—but to their friends and family, in other words, to their local congregation. That was fine and perfectly natural. The problem was that this love for one’s people quickly turned into envy and bitter jealousy toward other congregations. They no longer saw each other as co-laborers, but as competitors. And Quincy didn’t see any reason this might change.