After returning home from Green Lake, Shade took the cat out into the snow again and donated the reward Ridgewich Field had given him for cracking the major human trafficking case to the local orphans through the Dawn Church.
The Five Gods Church in the Tobesk Diocese had now begun providing relief meals to the poor at church entrances and on the outskirts of the city. Because this winter was particularly cold, they were also giving small bags of coal to impoverished families with at least two children.
The paper bags holding the coal were themselves flammable kindling, uniformly printed with:
May the saints' surplus grain warm bodies chilled by hunger and cold.
The newspapers called the Church's generosity the "Ashes Gospel," and Shade felt that was very fitting.
When Shade arrived at the church to make his donation, he happened to run into Priest Augustus and his group as they were preparing to leave. The priest promptly pulled him along with the fathers and priests of the Dawn Church to Saint Song Square in the Slums north of the city, right outside the Three Cats Inn. There, they distributed relief food at a porridge stall, and Shade even noticed that the paper bags of coal came with a box of matches.
"I wonder if this era has a Little Match Girl."
Those who came to receive relief were all people who truly needed it: poorly dressed women carrying children, disabled people with physical impairments, unemployed workers with worried faces who kept their heads down so their neighbors would not see them, and White-Haired Old Men and women supporting one another. They were the most common sights in the line.
The church's young priests, together with police officers maintaining order, supervised the queue. From inside the tent, Shade looked out