Page 1 of Fallen: Darkness Ascending, Vol.1

E I G H T

“ I want to talk about what happened when you were little.”

I try not to wince. “…A lot happened, back then.”

Dr. Karagiannis is nice about it. Gentle, as always. Coaxing rather than prodding. His tone is warm, quiet, and encouraging in a way he knows gets me to open up. “I think it would be good for you to talk through it.”

Flashes of it flare into my mind, eyes half-closing as I resist shutting them all the way. That won’t stop the imagery.

“Hope?” he calls.

I let the wince through with a small sigh, now. “What if it makes me break? I-I, anytime I start to think about it too much, I just…I cross over.”

“I know; it’s okay, Hope. I promise. I’ll be right there with you. I know what I’m doing, and this is vitally important to your recovery. To helping me be able to help you better. You trust me?” he says. And he sounds so certain of it all, too. “Look at me, look here.”

I force my gaze up to the laptop screen.

The ornate office behind him, lacquered mahogany, shuttered window, dim lighting.

Dark, thick lashes and short hair and a clean-shaven, masculine jaw that would’ve made Michelangelo weep.

I swallow nervously under his soft, loving gaze even as he begins to smile at me.

“I’ll keep you safe. Do you trust me?”

I breathe in. It’s a little more complicated than just those pretty words, but I understand his meaning. And I do trust him. We…we go further than just doctor & patient, Cornelius and I. My case is too unique for anything so strictly professional.

My eyes flick away, bottom lip worrying between my teeth as I steel my resolve, give him a single hesitant nod, and begin.

“…I was ten, the first time I was eaten alive by a demon.”

I’d been seeing them for almost a year, at this point.

Since the day I almost drowned at my friend’s birthday party, I’ve been able to see them.

At this point, it was only just bad enough that my parents were starting to believe something was wrong with me and I wasn’t just faking things for attention.

Not that they cared enough to actually do anything about it but sequester my at home, isolate me from people, and use it as an excuse to pull me out of public schooling.

I snuck out while mom was taking one of her “self-care baths” that I knew would last two hours.

I’d have three before she thought to check on me.

Hopped out the window and into the bushes, and ran down the street to the elementary school park a few blocks down.

I remember feeling so free, then. My shoes hitting the pavement.

Running through the park grass to head for the big plastic slide.

I hadn’t been outside the house or tiny, fenced-in backyard for three straight months at that point, and the sound of other kids playing around me fed my soul.

I had fun for maybe twenty minutes.

The kids cornered me up at the top of the slide as I was about to go down it.

They didn’t want to play with the weird kid .

They didn’t want to get my crazy cooties on them.

They didn’t want me to infect the playground equipment in case the younger kids caught what I had.

When I started crying the said my tears were toxic.

I didn’t know what that word meant back then.

Laughing, they shoved me down the slide.

My head hit the plastic tunnel hard, body flailing through the wide tube, sneakers getting caught and making me turn and twist and have to force myself through now that I was upside-down.

The bottom half of the long, wavy slide was slick-wet like rain had fallen through it.

By the time I was spat out the bottom, it wasn’t wood chips my body landed on but the crackling sound beneath me was from little, minced bones.

Some still had pieces of their flesh and tendons.

There was blood on my hands, my arms, my clothes.

That slickness in the slide had been blood—not mine, but that didn’t matter.

I was covered and smeared in it. My crying didn’t stop, but it went silent as I stared at the bones under my hands, as I tried to back up and crawl away and tell my mind not to let this happen.

The playground was empty, the clean and brightly-colored plastic now torn, ripped, and blotted with viscera.

Strange, dry, dead-like plants and ivies hung across the beams and posts of the equipment like the apocalypse had come and gone decades ago.

Back then I didn’t know I was in hell. I thought if I stayed still and breathed calm and quiet and kept hidden, eventually the images would go away and I’d be back in my classroom or at home.

The slide croaked and groaned as a figure climbed over it, and I remember hearing its breath so loud.

Like a panting bull, but sniffing for me.

At me. I’d seen demons like this before, and I knew what would happen if they ever found me.

So far though, I usually only saw them through windows—and if I clamped a hand over my mouth and didn’t breathe, they wouldn’t notice me.

This one noticed me.

The putrid, puss-leaking eyes were locked in on my very soul, and it dropped the long bone it had been attempting to crack between its spiked teeth.

Long, long face like a horse but longer than that, jagged teeth all exposed, no skin, just bleeding muscle, bits of its own, black bone sticking out in places, arms two times as long as they should be, hands twice as long, fingers twice as long, and clawed at the tips bigger than a bear.

As big as the biggest knife in our kitchen.

All four limbs climbed up to perch on the top of the slide as I crouched with both bloody hands over my mouth and stared up through tears. Its back curved in wrong places, scrunching up sideways to fit all four clawed feet, before the gaping maw drooped open and it screamed at me.

The sound was so sharp it made my ears bleed.

Bits of bone flew into the air as I turned and ran into the deadish trees of the nature walk beside the park.

The ground was ash, and left puffs with each step, almost slippery to run through.

I could hear trees cracking as the demon crashed into them mindlessly, I could feel the sharp brambles and twigs cut through my arms and face as I fled.

Mom always told me that when I have my moment I need to sit down and hold my breath for as long as I can, and sometimes it would make me fall asleep but that at least made the visions stop.

But I couldn’t do that this time. I just couldn’t.

And the louder the demon screamed, the more attention we drew, and I could hear others echoing the call and beginning to rush forward at us too.

I was small enough that I could fit through narrow trees and that was all that was saving me, I could feel the wind of its claws swiping through the air behind my back, the creature having to force its way straight through and break the trees I just darted between if it wanted to stay on my tail .

At one point I heard another demon join the hunt, jumping on top of the first to try and get at me.

They rolled and wrestled, I could hear them fighting, feel a burning-hot spray of blood like acid across my shoulder that made me scream and the demons all wailed at the sound I made.

Like it made them happy . Like it made them feel joy .

I was running too fast and thinking too hard about just getting away that I didn’t think of the waterway ravine at the other side of the nature walk.

It had a fence to keep people from falling in, but here the old wood was rotten and broken and piled up, and by the time I broke the trees and saw it there, I couldn’t stop.

I tripped over my own feet, over the old wood, and I remember spinning first before my body hit the ground and started to roll and roll and twist and duck and slam its way down the slope, hard bones embedded in the ground cracking against my shoulder and face and legs until I splashed into a river of goopy, clotted blood at the bottom.

It was shallow enough that I didn’t risk drowning, but left me to slam into the ground beneath the blood and felt a wash of dizziness through me.

I spat out chunks of blood, coughing up grime, trying to crawl my sore way to the other side of the water but the earth was shaking and quivering like a trampoline and something had just splashed into the water behind me.

Hunks of I don’t know what were bumping into my legs as I crawled, making me shriek and cough to think the demon had caught up to me, that its hands were almost on me, but a new outcry bellowed into the air with a percussive force that sent ripples out through the bloodied river.

It was a behemoth demon, of course. It had crawled out from under the reservoir, and when I looked back the creature had two smaller demons in its hand, splayed between the fingers of its car-sized fist, and their limbs writhed as it closed its grip and broke their bodies.

A third had fallen down the ravine too, its body broken from the descent, and the behemoth lowed loudly and smashed the little one’s body beneath one, hulking, elephant-like foot.

Bits of the demon came up to float along the slow-streaming river.

Two more, up top, that managed to halt before tumbling over. They shrieked and screamed, one uncertainly backing away, but the other leapt like a raptor and jumped onto the behemoth’s wide face and attempted to scratch out its eyes.

I turned away, attempting to climb out of the ravine and up the slope on the other side—too steep. Too slick. A series of crackles behind me, and the demon screeches went quieter.

The ground shakes again.