Editing Stranded in fantasy (section)

==Journal Entry 197==

I had a long talk with Avery.  We were alone, the others asleep.  She finally opened up with what's been bothering her.   It's all a fraud.  The churches.  She says the gods are there all right, and she is a strong believer in whatever the sun god stands for, but the gods are like tools, they can be wielded and they don't necessarily care how they're wielded, just that they are.  The church, while it started as an organization to help people of the same following and spread the love, it has become a bureaucratic nightmare that exists solely to support its continuing existence.  The church and it's god have become separate.  It's become a guild.  She believes that if she separated herself from the church, she'd be labeled a rogue traitor and hunted down and purged.  Why did she join in the first place?  They have very convincing recruiters, and not all of them are bad.  So what have they done to her?  Word spread that she was an offworlder.  Some took that to mean that she was divine in some way and have been trying to take her for their own; some have tried by force but her power has let her resist and block such attempts.  Why did she do what she did to me in Wolflake?  She was appalled at what I had been doing, but also she needed someone there she could fall back on.  She used approved church methods to keep me there since she couldn't have an evil psion running around.  And I ditched her.  Twice.  That's why she never escaped during the war and returned.  Wolflake was a particularly bad church and she believes that it had been infiltrated and destroyed from within by a group taking advantage of the situation.