Page 102 of Fallen: Darkness Ascending, Vol.1

I don’t remember falling asleep. Only where I went when I did.

The dream begins with the sound of wind through reeds, like breath caught in a dying throat. The room around me peels away in layers—wallpaper dissolving, floorboards curling like leaves in fire, and I am somewhere else. Other.

Not the chapel. Not the woods. A place between.

I stand barefoot in a corridor made of soft bone, the walls pulsing faintly with the echo of a heartbeat that’s not mine. Light drips from the ceiling in slow, golden rivulets, pooling at my feet and evaporating on contact. The air smells of iron and honey—cloying, too sweet… and too familiar.

I hear him before I see him.

Solareth.

His voice isn’t spoken—it slithers into my thoughts, warm and smooth and intimate, as if he’s nestled behind my ear.

“You dream beautifully when you stop resisting.”

I try to turn, but I can’t. Is this sleep paralysis in stance?

But my body responds to him before my thoughts do—heat unfurling in the pit of my stomach like ink in water.

A dark ichor, slowly spreading like cancer.

A hand— his —slides around my waist, unseen but unmistakably real.

Not skin. Not flesh. Something deeper. It touches memory.

“You were made hollow to be filled.”

His breath fans the back of my neck though there is no wind.

I can’t move, but I realize I’m not paralyzed.

Not exactly. It’s worse than that—I don’t want to move.

The silence hums against my skin, charged with static.

The shadows around me pulse with shape—wings, mouths, too many eyes blinking in sync.

“Let them think they came first—your lovers, your gods. But I have always been the flame beneath your blood.”

Lips brush my shoulder. I feel no weight, but the pressure is there—phantom, tender, possessive.

“Say my name. Not with your lips. With your soul. With the ache.”

A second pair of hands—more solid now—slides down my arms. His touch is everywhere, searing and cold. Each finger drags like a prayer pulled across skin, deliberate, hungry. My breath shudders. I try to speak. I try not to.

“Give in. You’ve already opened the door. Let me walk through you.”

The walls ripple. The corridor becomes a gaping maw, and I am walking into it, willingly , barefoot and burning.

Light fractures around me, then coalesces into a body— his body—half-seen, radiant, crowned in fire and absence.

I glimpse only fragments—a throat glowing from within.

A hand with too many knuckles. The slow, sinuous motion of wings that shouldn’t move. I can’t see his face.

I shouldn’t see his face.

“Come to me,” he whispers again. “Come as you are. As she did. As your blood calls for you to.”

My heart lurches.

She.

My mother.

I want to scream—but it feels like a moan. The dream is unraveling. Or I am. I don’t know the difference anymore.

Radiant, pulsing, living light nears and I feel it tasting the air around me, unraveling my shape, peeling thought from flesh. I open my mouth to scream, desperate to hold onto myself?—

But he’s already there.

His lips meet mine with a slow, deliberate hunger.

Not rough, not violent—worse. Tender. Reverent.

My scream dissolves into him, swallowed like a sacrament.

The sound is gone, but so is something else.

A thread of warmth tugged from my lungs, my ribs, my spine.

My body arches involuntarily, a ripple of pleasure laced with nausea, as if I’m being rewritten from the inside out.

His touch is nowhere, yet everywhere. Fingers that don’t exist drag down my sides, kindled in the hush between remembrance and ruin.

I try to pull away, but my limbs no longer belong to me—they ache toward him, betraying every instinct to flee.

My skin hums where he hovers near, close but untouched, as though the space between us has become a mouth, breathing me in.

I should be horrified.

I am horrified.

But my pulse answers him like a prayer, like it’s always belonged to something older, darker, more intimate than fear. Heat floods my core, and shame follows—sharp, bewildering. I want this. Or something inside me wants this. And that want is louder than my thoughts.

Tears sting my eyes, not from pain, but from the slow, sick recognition that I am being undone —not by force, but by invitation.

“You were mine long before you knew how to say no,” his voice murmurs—not through air, but through the marrow of my bones, resonant and ancient.

It folds through me like a song sung by stars long dead, velvet and venom, echoing from a place where time doesn’t move forward, only deepens.

My thoughts bend around it, helpless, as if they’ve always waited to be shaped by that sound.

For a split second, I come to my senses and try to push him away but he kisses me again.

And this time, I kiss him back.

Not because I choose to. Because I have no choice. Because I was made for this. Then—everything blinks out. A single instant of void.

And I wake.

I don’t remember falling asleep.

Only waking.

The air in the room is still, thick with something more than heat.

The ash-gray walls flicker faintly in the weak dawn light, but I feel as though I’ve surfaced from a drowning place, something viscous and ancient—not sleep and not quite dream, the in between.

My limbs ache as if I’ve been clawing through stone in my sleep.

Dirt is streaked beneath my fingernails.

My mother’s journal lies open beside me. The feather—Solareth’s feather—rests on the page, curled like a serpent sleeping in wait.

And in the margin, words appear in my own handwriting.

Words I don’t remember writing.

“You said yes. ”

I sit up, heart stuttering, skin slick with cold sweat. The light outside is barely there, pale as bone.

I can’t explain what pulls me from the house.

I leave my coat behind. The cold doesn’t matter.

There’s a pull beneath my skin, something older than instinct, deeper than memory.

The woods receive me in silence. No birds. No wind. Only that same faint humming, like breath caught between worlds. My steps follow a path I’ve never walked—but my feet know it. My blood remembers.

Eventually, I come to the clearing.

It shouldn’t exist. There, nestled in the folds of forest, a circle of scorched earth bordered by warped stones sunk into moss and decay. A forgotten orifice in the woods. A familiar scent.

At first, I think it’s empty.

But then I see them.

Hooded figures—twelve of them—standing perfectly still around a raised stone slab in the center. Their robes ripple with stitched eyes and featherless wings, the fabric worn thin like skin used too many times. Mimicking what once has been.

How do I know that? Where did that thought come from?

Laid on the slab is a body. Young. Male. His chest bare, carved with radiating sigils—twelve incisions, wide and deep, bleeding into grooved channels cut into the altar itself.

I’ve seen this before, haven’t I?

The blood runs like dark ichor into a page.

A sharp crack beneath my foot. A twig.

I gasp.

Twelve hoods turn toward me.

No one speaks. But I feel the judgment. I feel the recognition.

I’ve seen this before. In Ma’s sketches? In Nainai’s warnings?

I’ve walked into something stitched into my bloodline.

I try to back away. But the air thickens oppressively and the world blurs.

Then a figure steps forward and his hood falls.

Father Andrei.

His face looks older now. Worn from the inside.

"You shouldn’t be here," he says quietly, a father scolding a daughter who’s wandered too far.

I grimace at the imagery. Too close to my suspicions. Or perhaps farther from the truth than I imagine. Nothing makes sense anymore.

“I followed a dream,” I say. My voice is small. Weak as if still in a haze.

He tilts his head. “Yes. And he led you here.”

Father Andrei raises a hand. The others don’t move to stop me, but their presence holds me fast, like invisible hands pressed to my throat.

Where is Ma’s scarf to protect me? Where’s?—

The air shifts again, colder now. The blood on the altar begins to smoke, curling upward like incense offered to a deity.

“She called him once,” Andrei murmurs, “but she turned back. You haven’t.”

I look down. The boy’s eyes are open now. He stares at me. His mouth still sewn shut. His gaze begs.

And then the altar begins to sing.

A tremor stitched into the fabric of me, a resonance that thrums through bone and blood, unraveling reason at its root.

Smoke rises from the altar’s base. A shape climbs through it—bladed, burning, and shifting too fast to comprehend. Wings stretch and fold. Not feathers— spines . Hooks. Flames curling through the gaps.

A halo spins, cracked and shrieking.

And then—a face. Not formed for mortal eyes. But I know him.

Solareth.

I don’t see him fully. But I feel him.

He brushes against my mind, a touch that pierces and curls in pleasure. It starts as pressure—like claws raking across thought—then softens, glides inward like silk dipped in heat and soaked in blood.

I feel him inside me. Not physical. Worse. Intimate.

He tastes my memories, the shape of my name, the voice of my mother humming lullabies in a language no one writes anymore.

And it’s a violation. But also… a temptation .

My breath catches as he whispers—not with words, but with consummate want.

“You belong in my flame. Come deeper. Come undone.”

My knees hit the ground but I don’t remember falling. Andrei steps toward me, the blade in his hand now glowing.

“This is not your death,” he intones. “It is his welcome.”

He presses the tip to my sternum just enough to draw blood. His eyes full of… regret? Desire? And… jealousy?

Before I could break through the fumes of confusion, the boy on the altar moves. And he sings. Though his lips are sealed, the sound pours from him like sunlight filtered through bone—painful, ecstatic, wrong. Both divine and unholy.

The others stagger. One screams and combusts into a crimson spray, christening the ground as my hand automatically goes to my chest, coating my fingers in my own blood.

And from the altar’s carved wounds, a hand rises. Long. Translucent. Lit from within.

It reaches for me.

Something in me reaches back.

My fingers meet his. And in that moment?—

The world dies.

Not with a bang, but with silence so profound it erases the self.

I float. Weightless. Nowhere.

In the dark, I hear my mother’s voice.

“Don’t say yes. Don’t answer when they call from the corners.”

But I already have. I’m sorry, Ma.

And somewhere in the quiet space between names and echoes, Solareth waits and grins wickedly.