Page 105 of Fallen: Darkness Ascending, Vol.1

T here are no paths anymore—only roots, thorns, and the thick breath of the forest. I don’t know if I’m crying or screaming. My legs move without memory, without rhythm. I’m fleeing, but I have no idea what direction could ever be called away as the trees begin to bleed together.

Branches move where there is no wind. Leaves rustle in patterns. A dead bird falls from the canopy and lands in front of me, its body carved with tiny symbols I’ve seen before—in my mother’s journal, in my dreams.

Still, I run.

When I finally see the edge of the village—the last power pole rising like a cross—I sob with relief.

That’s when they stepped out from behind the trees.

Five of them. Hooded, their faces are half-covered. Robes damp from mist and mildew, marked with fresh blood.

I freeze. They do not.

Two lunge. I punch and kick wildly in their direction, catching one in the leg. He screams but another grabs my arm, and suddenly I’m overwhelmed. They’re too strong, driven by something deeper than will.

They don’t speak the entire time, but they don’t have to because I feel it. They’re not dragging me back as punishment, they’re bringing me to the center. Where it all began and possibly… where it would all end.

The descent underground is suffocating, a hidden passage beneath the town that leads to who knows where—beneath even the crypt and graveyard in this place. Roots claw the walls like veins on the skin of a buried god. Every step deeper, the stone grows more wet, warm, and alive.

They bind my hands behind me with their firm grips. One cultist holds a lantern, another mutters phrases under his breath, over and over like a prayer he no longer understands.

“She is the breath of His silence. She is the eye between fire.”

My blood runs cold. Solareth. I can’t escape him even in my waking hours.

The room they drag me into is massive, and circular. The ceiling arches into darkness. The walls are covered in murals—fleshy, fibrous scenes depicting winged figures erupting from the spines of people with open mouths and hollow eyes.

At the center stands no altar of stone, but a grotesque monolith of fused bone and sinew—slick, pulsing, and probably warm to the touch. It breathes in slow, wet shudders, like something dreaming beneath the skin of the world. A living altar. A cradle for sacrifice. A nightmare given form.

It’s the exact place they chain me to.

Iron cuffs clamp around my wrists and ankles. I scream, kick, thrash. No one flinches. They begin chanting in a language older than anything spoken. A language of structure, not sound—built into rhythm and motion, an invitation carved in motion.

Above me, the mural bled fresh, crimson drips staining the ground in growing speckles and pools.

As more cult members surround me, I notice their eyes. None are truly there. They’re not possessed. Possession implies a soul to be occupied. These people have been emptied, broken open long ago.

A new cloaked figure steps forward from the shadows—Father Andrei. Always the priest. Why can’t he leave me alone?

He looks worse than before. His robes are damp with sweat, hair wild, face half-burned where the veil had possibly kissed him. How do I know that?

But his eyes gleams.

He places a hand over my chest, right where the twelve scars pulse faintly with heat.

“You will open soon,” he says. “And through you, we will speak to him .”

I try to spit in his face but my mouth is too dry.

Sharp pain laces through me as the cult begins chanting louder. Low, resonant tones that vibrate inside my body, twisting muscle, unraveling nerves. I scream as my skin lights up with unseen fire. The scars bloom beneath the fabric of my top—glowing, pulsing, widening—not bleeding, but opening.

And in the chamber’s upper air, the veil begins to thin. A slit. A shimmer. A hum like the silence between two dying stars.

My spine bows in violent ecstasy, seized by an unseen force and I feel him then, the one who twists through my soul, not to love, but to claim. To master. To unmake.

But it’s not like before, not the way he was in dreams.

He unfolds from the dark like a rift in heaven, descending not with grace but with gravity—too vast to comprehend, too precise to be anything but deliberate. Reality bends around him as he lowers, piece by impossible piece.

Slowly. Impossibly. Wings dragging reality behind them like curtains on fire. His form was vast, but folded perfectly into the room.

The cult drops to their knees in unison. One woman begins sobbing in ecstasy. Another strips and lays flat on the stone, offering herself wordlessly.

Father Andrei kneels before the altar, arms raised in worship. “We bring her to you, Lord of the Hollow Light. We open the gate?—”

He stops mid-word because Solareth looks at him—and it was not with love.

The temperature drops instantly. The fire in the lanterns invert—blue, then black. The air congeals. And the first cultist begins to melt .

Skin sloughs off like wax, revealing raw, red muscle that steams and writhes. She reaches for the altar—maybe for me—before her hand dissolves mid-air.

Another man screams. His scream turns into birdsong. Then silence.

Father Andrei backs away, hands shaking. “I—I brought her! She is Yours!”

From above, Solareth descends fully. His face, still blank, opens slightly, just enough to reveal a flicker of eyes, mouths, memories.

He chooses to speak through me .

“You brought her to bind. I came to unmake. You have mistaken a lantern for the flame.”

Solareth reaches forward, not to Father Andrei but to the altar—to me .

I scream. The light inside my body surges, my mouth opens against my will.

His voice begins to pour out again but this time, I fight it. Not with spells, not with prayers—with memory.

My mother’s laugh. The taste of rice soaked in soy sauce and chili. The sound of rain against our zinc roof in Ipoh. A photograph of us by the temple gates.

My name. Mayang . Not his vessel. Not his gate .

Not yet.

I force my mouth close and bite down on my own tongue. Blood gushes—and the residual chanting stops.

Solareth tilts his head… and for the first time, he laughs. A sound akin to glass breaking underwater. A chorus of joy and mockery.

“So be it. A flame that denies the sun still burns.”

He turns toward the others. The cult tries to flee. He does not let them.

Bodies bloom inside out. Some age to dust in seconds.

One bursts into light, but the light is full of shrieks of agony.

Another begins to shake, spine bending backward at an impossible angle before his chest caves inward…

and then detonates. A blast of gore hits me like a wave—hot entrails, shattered ribs, clots of pulsing meat that slide down my skin with wet finality.

Something that might have been a lung sticks to my shoulder, still twitching.

The smell is copper and rot and burning hair. I gag, but can’t look away.

The priest begs on hands and knees, face smeared with ash and blood.

But Solareth isn’t done. “You sought to command a god. Now return to your dust.”

Father Andrei doesn’t die. He simply stops existing.

His body erases, cell by cell, until nothing is left but the sound of retreating breath.

Solareth slowly turns to look at me. Without touch, his words crawl into my chest like roots seeking water.

“You are still opening. The soil resists the seed. But it will flower. And you… will love it.”