Clarence

Father Abernathy was not always a man of the cloth. No, once upon a time, many decades ago, he was just another youth in a sleepy, scared town in the middle of nowhere. His youth should have been nothing of note, except for the attention he drew to himself from paranoid townsfolk by ways of his "strange" behaviour. He was met with no mercy, no kindness. Outsiders were not to be tolerated. Disturbances of the peace were not to be tolerate. Sinners invite sin, and this town had no space for such things.

He was driven out one night. The young woman fled barefoot into the deep woods, barefeet sore and stumbling through the swamp mud. The shouts and gunshots behind him as he ran. It became too much eventually, though the cries of his fellow townsfolk--his neighbours, children of his God, faded, the fear and pain did not. He succumbed not long after.

That night was not to be the end of his story. He was met with a voice, a being in the woods that night. Was it an angel? Surely. It promised him a rebirth. He was able to take part in the divinity of creation as he was reborn in his own image--God made the grapes, but left it to man to make wine. Like the saviour before him, Father Abernathy was able to come back from the dead. It was not without a cost, sure, but now he was able to finally be the servant of humanity he had longed to be. One can become holy through him. The townsfolk didn't know any better. He can forgive them. They will learn. He will show them.

He speaks in a low Southern drawl. His words confusing and comforting all at once. Voice like liquid gold, tone like a mother's embrace, and a story as terrifyingly lovely as the infinity of space, one can find his congregation, set up in an old rotting church in the woods, if one looks in the right places--or listens to the right station.