In a Priory community by a yellow lake, a young man works for his mother's acquaintance to build the basement of her beach house. He is pushed to complete the project before the community summer solstice celebration, though the celebration turns out to be a rather cheerless, mundane success without necessitating the finished basement anyway.

A priest on a planet with aliens that commune with their dead must go on a pilgrimage when the first human at his outpost dies and becomes a confused ghost.

A Buddhist monk tells a visitor about an enchanting woman he met and why he feels he must redeem himself.

A young man takes a woman to haunted ruins in England. They begin a happy romance until they encounter an enthralling monster and return from the ruins with portions of their memory missing.

An unwilling Antarean guide takes an obnoxious family of Earthlings on a tour of the planet's most important temple.

An orderly at an elder care facility discovers an unexpected connection to one of his elderly residents, a former mother superior at a Catholic orphanage with a horrific reputation for decades of abuse.

A woman recounts her travels to and from Iram, a lost city mentioned in the Qur'an.

Old priest travels to Rome to visit the Vatican, where he sustains an injury sending him into a trip down memory lane.

Thousands of years in the past, men in Babylon try to build a tower that reaches heaven. One miner, in his exploration, learns the mind-baffling true shape of the world.

A community of nuns unsuccessfully try to raise funds to build a new chapel at their convent after they exceed the capacity of their current one. One sister in particular is cynical about the whole ordeal, but most of the sisters join in fervent prayer in hopes of Divine Intervention.