Page 106 of Fallen: Darkness Ascending, Vol.1

I wake in the dark.

Not the blind dark of unconsciousness or sleep, but something thicker. The kind of dark that wraps around you like a womb. Or a grave.

I don’t know how long I’ve been down there. Hours? Days?

My body feels like a collapsed shrine. Every muscle is sore, every nerve scorched. My wrists and ankles are raw from the chains, though they are gone now. So are the cultists. So is the altar.

And yet, I’m not alone. I never am.

Lips graze my bare shoulder blade, the weight of a familiar dark presence behind me, heavy and all encompassing.

The tips of his feathers are both razor sharp and flexible as it whispers against my fingertips spread out before me.

When he undulates his hips against my bare ass, I claw against…

pure white, silky satin sheets that provide no real grip.

His hands—vast, grotesque things—hover between claw and flesh, blackened with gold-veined corruption that pulses like molten metal beneath cracked skin.

Where they touch mine, the stains bleed into my bones, threading through tendons like whispered curses.

They shift in real time—one moment monstrous and taloned, the next disturbingly human, as if even his form can’t decide what it truly is.

A gasp slips out as he continues to press his weight against me. A hot tongue trails along the curve of my neck seductively and I feel it in my spine, in the places language hasn’t reached. My skin pebbles beneath his wicked allure.

“You still tremble like prey, even as your soul leans forward.”

My back arches, not by will, but as if pulled by an unseen song—lilting, poisonous—a pied piper's lure stitched into my very being. I hate the way he affects me—like a wound I can’t stop pressing.

“You wear fear like a veil, angelica. But it is not fear that made you stay,” he purrs.

I shake my head, trying to dislodge his spell. “I didn’t stay. I’m trapped.”

He chuckles—soft, intimate. Too knowing.

“Are you? Or are you beginning to remember what it means to be chosen?”

His hand curls around the front of my throat. I flinch, but I don’t fight it. Not yet. The gesture alone feels like a brand.

“Your will resists. But your blood has already bowed. You think you inherited her madness. But you were born as the answer.”

The words sink deeper than they should. They confuse. They tangle with the grief I still carry, the longing I pretend not to feel, the loneliness I never speak aloud.

“I’m nothing like her,” I whisper, more to myself than to him.

His cock actively hardens. He thrusts his newly formed weapon against me, grinding against the crease of my ass.

“No,” he says. “You’re stronger. She broke. But you, angelica, you bend.”

The room warps. The light bends strangely around his form, leaking into mine. Reality feels... optional.

“You’ll learn to want the bending,” he murmurs in my ear like a master manipulating his slave. “You’ll call it surrender. Then devotion. Then”—his breath grazes the nape of my neck—“home.”

He undulates his hips until the head of his cock sinks into my pussy, slick with arousal. I hold back a mewl and squirm as he teases the entrance with a mere few inches, stretching me uncomfortably, teasing back and forth.

“You will not run this time,” he says with an unrestrained groan. When his fingers slip beneath me, teasing my clit, my body tenses in anticipation. “Because part of you... already sings.”

My breath hitches. I try to speak, to resist, but the lines between my thoughts and his words blur like ink in water.

His presence suddenly recedes, and I’m empty, left on the floor. His absence leaves a hunger in the space where once was intimately against me. Hunger and maddening frustration.

The stone floor beneath me breathes —slow and rhythmic, like the belly of a sleeping beast. My head throbs. The scars on my chest aren’t bleeding, but they burn, and when I look down, they shimmer faintly under my… ethereal gown.

How is this possible?

But my focus is on my chest. Twelve marks. Still there. Still changing. They look less like wounds now… and more like writing.

I force myself to my feet, the fabric of my attire flowing like soft waterfalls.

The new chamber I’m in is massive. Vaulted stone. This isn’t a chapel basement or crypt. This is something ancient and hidden.

The thick scent of sandalwood, rot, and something metallic—blood or ink—weaves in the atmosphere. Light glows dimly from cracks in the walls, soft and wrong, like starlight filtering through living flesh.

And all around me, nestled into alcoves, shelves, and hollowed bone are scrolls. Hundreds. No, thousands . Wrapped in silks, tied with blackened rope, many too brittle to touch. This is no storeroom, it’s a library. A reliquary of thought buried beneath lies.

Drawn to one shelf, I reach out and pull a scroll free. The fabric disintegrates in my fingers. The parchment beneath pulses faintly as if it recognizes me.

It’s written in three languages—Latin. Mandarin. Sanskrit. And somehow, I can read it. The words unfurl in my mind like an instant download, a life I’ve never lived.

“The wound in the sky shall weep twelve rivers. The exile will wear the name of light, but carry the hunger of ash. He will find the blood of the Seer, and in her, open the veil anew.”

My stomach turns cold.

Another scroll. The same eerie, trilingual style. This one names him directly.

“Solareth the Bright-Mourning. Once first among the Flame-Bearers. Cast down for the rebellion of choice . For he dared speak the will of mortals in the halls of the Divine.”

And beneath that?—

“He fell not alone. He fell with a song. And in the ruins of that song, she will be born. The Prophetess of Flesh, the Keeper of the Wound.”

I stumble backward, the scroll falling from my hands, unraveling like a dead serpent at my feet.

The last line was written in something darker. Something that doesn’t look like ink.

“Only through the Seer can the exile take form again. Her womb, her will, her memory—the three seals. ”

I can’t breathe.

My mother’s stories. Her quiet mutterings. The way she looked at me when I was thirteen and covered in fever, saying, “Don’t open your mouth too wide. Something else might speak through it.”

I thought she’d been mad. We all did. Now I wasn’t so sure.

The air shifted like a drop in pressure before a storm. I turned and he was there.

Not as he’d been in my dreams or hallucinations.

Not as he was in front of the cult. His presence is fully manifest—a silhouette of light folded into human shape, too tall, too symmetrical.

Wings like spiraled bones shifting and scraping like broken mirrors against one another, trailing golden ash that floated without falling.

His face is almost beautiful. Almost human this time—if you look at it for less than a second.

I’m frozen in place.

His voice doesn’t echo or ricochet like it does in the past when he would speak through me. This time, it cradles my mind like a sinful lover.

“You found your inheritance.”

I back away, the wall pressing against my shoulder blades. “Stay away from me.”

He takes a step closer, gliding more than walking.

“You’ve read what you are. What she left for you. The Prophetess was not just your blood. She was your beginning. And I…” He pauses, as if savoring the words. “ I was her end.”

My legs trembled, but I stood tall. “You’re not a god.”

“No. I was cast down for remembering freedom. For refusing to kneel.”

His form flickers. For a heartbeat, I see wings made of screaming mouths. Hands that reach into my thoughts and pull at things I haven’t thought about in years.

My first kiss. The time I nearly drowned in a rain barrel. My mother’s funeral, when I felt nothing but relief.

He smiles with a face that shouldn’t have known how.

“You burn so beautifully, angelica. You ache like she did. But where she feared me, you will come to understand.”

“I won’t be your vessel.”

“You already are. But you’re still so full of will. That’s what makes this delicious.”

He reaches for me and I slap his hand away. The sound echoes through the chamber like a thunderclap.

His face shifts—not to anger—but joy . His wings ripple outward, light bursting in violent shards.

“Yes. Fight. It makes you taste like fire.” He leans in with inhuman speed, his voice barely a whisper inside my skull. “ I do not want to devour you. I want to be born with you. Through you. And in doing so… set you free.”

“You don’t love me,” I spit.

“Need is love, in its most sacred form.”

He caresses my cheek and I flinch. Light flares behind me—cold, not golden. Blue.

A sigil. Hidden beneath one of the scrolls now glows faintly with frost.

I turn, reach out without hesitation and touch it.

A scream like thunder cracks through the room. Solareth reels back. His body shatters into a thousand gold shards, spiraling in reverse, wings folded in, light crumpling inward like a dying star.

And he’s gone.

Silence.

Only my breath remains.

I fall to my knees as the scrolls flutter around me like dead leaves. The burn in my palms haven’t faded, the sigils still move. And somewhere, deep in my spine, I can still feel his laughter—low, patient, taunting.