Page 103 of Fallen: Darkness Ascending, Vol.1

T here is no light, no body, no air. Only thought—and even that begins to fray.

Floating in the absence of time, I curl inward like a seed in the black womb of the world. There is no pain. No terror. Just silence so thick it presses against my thoughts, decaying them.

Slowly, something stirs within me. A heat blooms in my chest. Gentle at first. Familiar, even. Like the first flush of fever, or the touch of a hand I had longed for in a dream. It spread through my limbs, threading itself into the seams of who I am.

And with it comes the voice, now acquainted.

"You were always meant to listen.” The words pressed into the hollow of my spine. "Not with your ears—no, with your blood, your breath, the ache between your ribs. Your body remembers the altar. It remembers me . "

The voice gets louder as if his non corporeal form leans close. "You were carved for obedience, shaped for devotion. Don’t pretend you haven’t felt it—how your soul arches when I speak, angelica. ”

My eyes open—but the world has changed. Or perhaps I have.

I stand in a space that defies architecture, where walls curve and bend like breath, made of obsidian glass and endless sky. Starlight hangs in thick strands from the ceiling like veins. Beneath my bare feet, the floor throbs—alive, warm, almost skin.

There is no altar now. No trees. Only the throne.

A shape towers above me—immense and coiled in ribbons of light that fracture as I look. Wings stretch in every direction, made of bone, fire, and folded mirrors. Its form shifts constantly—sometimes man, sometimes beast, sometimes a crown of hands cradling an eye that wept backwards .

Solareth.

He does not speak aloud. Language through mouth was beneath him. But his presence seeps into me, winding through my cracks like mist through broken glass.

“You have seen the gate. You have touched the wound. You have bled into the pattern.”

I try to speak. Try to say no . But no word comes. My mouth is sealed—not with thread, but reverence.

He steps closer—or perhaps he always has been close, and the illusion of distance is just my mind trying to protect itself. His shape burns without flame—too beautiful to behold without harm, so much so that tears well in my eyes without my permission.

“They fear me because I do not forget. They banish me because I do not forgive. And still, they get on their knees and pray in secret.”

I stagger back, but my legs betray me. The floor reaches up and cradles me like a mother would.

His voice nestles behind my eyes.

“You came because you remembered, angelica. The hunger. The light. You came because she tried to bury it, and still you grew. You came to finish what she could not.”

My mother.

A flash of her eyes, her voice on the recorder, the torn page in the journal. Her final warning.

“She tried to sever you from me. But blood sings louder than denial.”

A searing pain blooms across my back—phantom, and yet so real I scream soundlessly. My spine arches. Skin split open—not torn, but peeled.

And I feel it, something moving inside me. Unfolding. Wings—not feathered, not scaled, but born of forgotten dreams and sacred embers. Too large for my frame. Too old for my body.

I collapsed.

He kneels beside me—if such a thing could kneel.

“This is not punishment. This is inheritance.”

His form melts into something closer to human. A face now, elegant and ancient. His eyes gleam like gold drowning in oil. Lips curve not into cruelty, but something worse— devotion .

“You were mine before breath. It was my fire that sparked in your lungs. I carved your name into the dark before your mother dared speak it.”

A memory ripples through me. Me, as a child, fevered and trembling beneath a mosquito net. A shadow outside my window that sang without words. My mother burning herbs in a clay bowl, weeping, chanting an old prayer.

Not to God.

To keep him out.

Solareth cups my face, and my skin might physically melt beneath his touch .

“They built walls. But you were always the door.”

I wake on the chapel floor. Alone. The robes are gone. The cultists—vanished. The altar stands silent, scrubbed of blood as if it had never tasted any. And yet… the stone beneath me radiates warmth.

My hands tremble as I raise them. They’re marked—not with soil, but with sigils. Dark veins of meaning etched across my palms, as though burned in with shadow and ash.

A voice stirs the air. Soft. No louder than breath, yet it curls into my bones with too much familiarity.

“Soon, I will make you sing for me, angelica.”