Exile is a complicated place for the people of God.

Moral norms at odds with holiness.

Power used in dishonorable ways.

Systems unsympathetic to the plight of the religious.

A landscape riddled with obstacles forces a jagged path for those who'd navigated.

This is a story about whether faith is compatible with exile, about complexity and the choices we're faced with

in a far kingdom, layered options dappled with light and shadow.

It's a story about how sometimes the choices before us feel fraught with inevitable compromise,

and how sometimes, at the same time the right thing

emerges I'm Justin Gerhardt welcome to Holy Ghost Stories The The palace of Xerxes looms over the Persian capital of Susa, massive and opulent. Carved stone and intricate tapestries and shining gold, sculpted columns, flanking great halls, dental molding,

zigzagging its way along the pin-straight roof lines, vast rectangle walls rising from the earth,

standing in sharp contrast to the undulating landscape, a promise of order, authority, power. Esther has never seen it from the

inside. None of the girls in the group have, but they will today. Esther walks briskly, trying to keep pace with her military escort while drinking in the incredible surroundings.

The centerpiece of an empire future generations will say is the most powerful ever to have existed.

For a moment, she almost forgets why she's visiting the palace. She looks

around at the other girls in the group, all of them and their mid-teens like her, all of them

nervous, like her, all of them beautiful, none of them married, and only one of them ever will be.

Like Pied Pipers, King Xerxes soldiers have traveled from province to province gathering virgins to audition for the role of queen.

Twelve months of beauty treatments followed by one night with the king,

and then for his favorite, the position of a lifetime.

For the rest, every single other girl the king chooses to sleep with and pass on the harem.

Their virginity stolen, there will be no marriage for them, not to Xerxes nor to anyone else.

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