Page 104 of Fallen: Darkness Ascending, Vol.1

T he mirror no longer shows me.

Its surface breathes. Oily, molten, and wrong. My reflection is a ghost—blurred and incomplete. Behind it, something moves —wings unfolding, vast and watching. Its eyes follow me perfectly. Too perfectly.

I shatter the mirror with the heaviest book I can find. The glass falls slow, soft as petals. But I swear I still see my smile grinning back— after the reflection is gone.

Then comes the hunger. Not for food. Not for warmth. But for him .

It starts in the chest, a raw gnawing ache—like I’m missing a piece I never knew I had. Or worse, that something foreign is growing inside me. I dream of fire crawling under my skin. I wake glowing. Briefly. Gold veins, pulsing like a second heartbeat.

I tell myself it’s stress, grief, possibly delusion. But I’m lying.

“You are opening,” he whispers from somewhere inside my mind. "The way you were always meant to."

I shake my head in denial, but every time he speaks, my spine straightens. My breath shortens, my nipples tighten.

Sleep becomes invasion—I dream of corridors carved from flesh and stone, of red marble halls breathing slowly, like lungs. My own name etched into the walls in every language and burned. I try to run but I always end up in the same place.

He’s there shaped like a man but wrong in the ways that count. A body like sculpture wrapped in shadow, wings too large to belong to anything merciful, eyes like stars collapsing—beauty sharpened into cruelty.

His gaze strips me bare—more intimate than fingers. I burn under it. My body betrays me, every nerve tuned to his attention, aching for more.

My mind whispers, no . But my body hums yes .

"You were carved from the marrow of obedience," he breathes against my mind, velvet-wicked. "Every part of you was shaped to fit inside my will. You were never yours. You were made for me ."

I try to pull away, but he follows, always just behind—a breath on my neck, a hand inside my heartbeat. He never forces. He invites . And somehow that makes it worse.

"You were mine before you had a name," he murmurs, voice seductively weaving a spell over me. "Even inside her—squirming, blind, unfinished—I marked you. She ran. Bled. Prayed. It changed nothing."

“Her womb was just the first altar. But you, angelica, you were always meant to crawl back to me.”

His hand ghosts along my jaw until he slowly solidifies into tangibility, fingers gripping my chin firmly. Every nerve leans toward him like flowers to sun, even as my mind thrashes.

He leans close. “I lit the first fire in your lungs,” his breath ghosts along the skin of my jawline. “I kissed your name into your bones before your mother could bury it.”

I shudder and my knees give way. It’s not submission—it’s surrender. Not to love. But to possession .

“I hate you,” I choke against his firm body as his palm presses the dip of my back.

He laughs, low and satisfied. “No. You hate that I make you want .”

Pressing my hands against his chest, I try to lean away but instead my finger somehow slips between his lips and he seductively sucks the pad, sending a jolt of electricity up my arm.

“Let me wear your name,” he says, dark, sultry, in a tongue that aches in my blood. “Just for a little while.”

And I… I nod. Gods help me, I nod.

The forest collapses into flame around us. My skin burns but doesn’t blister. I fall to my knees before him—not because he tells me to, but because something in me is made to.

At thirty-eight, I’ve never made space for intimacy—not out of choice, exactly, but because my life has been methodically consumed by work and the quiet, compulsive need to make sense of my mother’s unraveling before her death. I observed, I documented, I buried the ache beneath logic.

And now, I watch in awe and fear as he grips the shaft of his engorged cock.

The tip glows faintly, as if anointed by flame, as he traces a wet path across my lips not with force, but with terrifying intent.

He’s an impossible creature of divinity and ruin, his cock monstrous and inhuman in nature, the veins threaded with burning light as well as dark ichor that seem to fight one another for dominance—every line of him radiant and blasphemous.

“Worship me,” he whispers. “The way your body craves to. ”

My mouth falls open in a gasp and his fingers thread the back of my head guiding my growing hunger for what he has to offer.

My hands involuntarily climb up his bare thighs, the sensation of his skin akin to marble and underlying scales. He doesn’t give me a chance to breathe or fight it when he shoves my head forward, my mouth automatically parting for his invasion.

He tastes of divinity and embers of hellfire, bitter and sweet. The more my head bobs, the more my tongue gets used to his unique flavor, begging for more.

“That’s it, angelica,” he purrs, voice slick with mock-affection. "So soft when you stop pretending. Your surrender—" he inhales like he’s tasting it, "—is the only honest thing you've ever given me."

He presses me further against his crotch, choking me as his will curls around my ribs like thorns.

"You're prettier this way. Quiet. Obedient. Made to be unmade."

A pause—then a whisper, cruel and reverent all at once.

"Even your defiance," he murmurs, “was just the foreplay of your becoming."

His presence presses in—not touch, but gravity—warping the air around my mind. He wrenches my head back, and I gasp—air tearing down my throat like shards of broken crystal, each breath a punishment, each inhale a hymn carved in delicious pain.

"But now…" He smiles monstrously with a pause, thick with ancient hunger, "you remember the altar you are. The offering you were always meant to be."

My thoughts fracture like glass in frost. His voice fills the cracks.

"You were built for this. For me. To open. To burn. To sing my name into the dark where no gods dare follow."

Before I’m able to respond, he shoves his cock inside my mouth once more and begins a brutal pace. Hot tears stream down my face, dripping onto my knees as I try to hold him back to no avail.

My body cries out for more while my mind screams for me to bite his dick off and get as far away from this entity as possible. But in the end… I take everything he has to give me, even when my mouth feels as though it will rip in two.

Just when I think my body can’t take anymore—lightheadedness threatening the border of unconsciousness—Solareth lets out a guttural groan and buries his pulsating, veiny cock to the back of my throat.

Jets of his molten hot release forces itself down into my belly, my mouth and throat having no choice but to take it all in with twisted adoration and voracity.

With a husky exhale, he jerks me upward, no tenderness in the gesture—only dominance.

I lick the remnants of him off my lips right before his mouth crushes against mine, all fire and possession.

It isn’t a kiss. It’s a conquest. His grip bruises, his hunger devours, and I feel myself unraveling beneath the weight of his will.

There's no illusion of choice—only the dark gravity of something ancient wrapping around my spine, pulling me deeper into him. Into this.

I jolt awake in my bed, drenched in sweat, lungs gasping like I’ve surfaced from drowning. The sheets cling to me—soaked, twisted. My hands burn. When I lift them, they’re etched in blackened sigils, smoldering faintly like ash refusing to die.

Across the room, the mirror smiles. But I don’t. Its reflection tilts wrong.

I don’t think—I flee.

Clothes are shoved into a bag with shaking hands. No plan. No direction. Just away. I walk through the village, avoiding the eyes that I feel watching from shuttered windows. No one stops me. No one ever does.

But when I reach the edge of town, the road is gone. Fog stretches out before me, thick and unnatural, swallowing trees, fences, memory. I whisper my own name just to hear it. The fog answers— a sound like wings unfurling .

I return hollow. The silence inside the house feels predatory. My phone is lifeless, the screen a cold void that reflects nothing. On my desk, where my mother’s journal once lay, new words have seared themselves into the wood—burnt into the grain like some ancient curse.

SAY YES AGAIN.

I scream. Raw. Animal. The kind of scream that tears something loose. But the house only answers with a low, contented hum—warm, resonant. Like it’s pleased . Like it knows.

Later, I strip and bathe, as if water could undo what’s already been carved into my soul. I scrub until my skin burns and peels in pink ribbons. I want to pull my hair out but resist the urge to do more damage to myself. The tub stains rust-red. The water never warms.

When I finally step out, I see them.

Twelve scars.

Radiant. Raised. Still pink. Etched from the hollow at my collarbone in a perfect, terrible sunburst—like my flesh had been kissed by something divine and monstrous.

That night, I wake to the cold weight of a different presence. My mother stands at the foot of my bed—not a memory, not a ghost, but something in between. Her skin is gray-blue, too tight around her bones. Her eyes are soaked in grief and horror, and her mouth—sewn shut, stitched with black thread.

She raises her trembling hand and points to my chest.

The scars begin to glow.

His voice coils through me like honey poured over rot.

“Soon, angelica, you will sing for me. And you will call them—others like you. With longing. With worship. With need. They will come. And you will open the way.”

I want to scream again, but I’m afraid of what else might answer.