Page 95 of Fallen: Darkness Ascending, Vol.1

MAYANG “HANA” BINTI

G rief doesn’t howl.

It taps.

Quiet. Repetitive. Unrelenting.

The kind of sound you only hear when everything else is dead silent—akin to water dripping from a broken tap at 3 a.m., or your own breath echoing inside your chest.

It’s been four months since my mother died.

Not “passed.” Not “gone.”

Died.

There’s a sharpness to the word that people try to soften. But I don’t. I need the sharpness. It reminds me I’m awake .

When the doctor gave me the time of death, I remember staring at the clock behind his shoulder. 2:44 p.m. In Chinese, the number four sounds like death. Si. We used to joke about it, me and Ma, avoiding hotel rooms or license plates with double fours.

And yet there she was. Gone.

At the hour of death—doubled.

She’d been sitting upright in front of the ancestral altar, her hands folded neatly as though she was waiting for something. Or someone.

Her lips were open, murmuring even in death. My aunt said it was some name, something foreign and wrong on her tongue. “Solareph... or Solaleth? Something like that. You know your mother, always collecting nonsense from those old scrolls.”

But Ma wasn’t a fool. She was a librarian at the Buddhist university in Petaling Jaya. She had studied old languages for entertainment. She knew what words meant. She knew what they did.

After the funeral, I found her voice again—on an old cassette. One she used to play for me when I had night terrors as a child. It was filled with gentle stories—Buddhist parables, Chinese folktales, whispers of kindness and karma.

But then the tape... changed.

A skip.

A pause.

A different voice—but still hers. Tighter. More afraid.

“If they call from the corners, Mayang—don’t answer. If the shadows wear faces, don’t look. Some angels burn from the inside out.”

She repeated it three times, similar to a mantra… or a warning.

I memorized it before I ever believed it. I listened in the dark. Every night. Hoping to find something else in her voice that I missed. Some clue. Some answer.

But silence doesn’t give you answers .

It only gives you space for the questions to get louder.

The train jerks, pulling me back into the present.

We’re winding through the Carpathians, a blur of gray trees and snow-streaked hills outside the window. I clutch my coat tighter. I’d thought I’d prepared for the cold, but it seeps through fabric and bone.

As a cultural anthropologist and mythographer from Singapore, the chance for this experience was once in a lifetime.

The village I’m headed to— Baracinesti —is barely on the maps.

A forgotten European village cloaked in mist and folklore, with deep roots in pre-Christian mythology.

I had to request special permission from the local council to access the old chapel ruins deep in the woods that holds a legend about a “sun angel who fell like fire.”

That phrase came up once in one of Ma’s handwritten journals. Not translated. Just... there. Out of place. A single entry between pages of grocery lists and clinic appointments.

“The sun angel dreams beneath stones. We must not let him remember.”

Why would she write that? Why keep it secret?

I arrive just before dusk to research comparative folklore for the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization—or UNESCO—project.

The station is barely more than a raised slab of stone and a rusted sign.

A man from the village waits for me. His name is Luca, and he smells of tobacco and old paper.

We drive in silence, the car winding through narrow roads that cut through the pine like veins through flesh. The trees crowd close, their branches arching overhead, blotting out the sky. They lean in as if they’re listening—holding their breath, waiting for something to pass.

When we finally pull up, the house appears out of the mist. A memory half-remembered.

It’s old, two stories, the wood darkened with age and moss clinging to the edges.

The shutters hang slightly crooked, and the porch creaks under Luca’s weight before I even step out.

A weathered plaque near the front stoop marks it as a former schoolhouse residence—built in 1874, once home to a teacher who, according to Luca, “left one day and never came back.”

Inside, the air smells faintly of dust and cedar.

The floors groan with every step, as though the house is aware of my presence and not entirely pleased.

A crucifix hangs crookedly above every doorway, some barely holding on to their rusted nails.

The walls are thick, the kind that hold heat in the summer and secrets in the winter.

But there are no mirrors. Not one. Not even in the bathroom.

When I ask why, Luca just shrugs as he sets my bags down by the stairs.

“Bad luck,” he says, not meeting my eyes. Then he adds, almost too casually, “Better that way.”

That night, I unwrap Ma’s old scarf from the folds of my bag.

It still carries the faint scent of her—orange blossom oil layered with a trace of citrus, the way her hands always smelled after evening prayers.

I press it to my face, breathing her in, and drape it around my shoulders as I lie down. I sleep with it wrapped close.

But I don’t sleep. Not really.

Something wakes me just after midnight. Not a sound, not exactly. More of a pressure sitting on top of my chest as irrational fear takes over my entire being. It’s as if someone is standing just outside the bedroom door but I can’t turn or move to see it.

I freeze beneath the blankets. I have no other choice.

The floorboards creak. Once. Then again. Then silence .

I hold my breath. Count the seconds. Something shifts behind the wall. Not in the room— inside the wall.

A dry, scratching sound. Fingernails? Or wings?

Then a voice. So faint I could almost pretend it’s a memory. Almost.

“Mayang.”

It speaks my name, analogous to something once beautiful made wrong.

I somehow manage to break free and leap from the bed, fumbling for the light.

But there’s nothing. No one there.

In my periphery I catch sight of something out of place and slowly turn my face toward it. On the mirror across the room—one I swear wasn’t there before—someone has drawn an eye in the condensation. Wide, lidless. Staring directly at me.

I don’t sleep after that.

Instead, I sit at the desk and open Ma’s journal again. I flip to the last entry, the one dated two days before her death.

“He’s coming to Europe. I should’ve burned the book.”

There’s a smear of something brown across the bottom corner. I tell myself it’s tea.

But it smells of rust.

Or identical to blood dried too long on old pages.

Outside, the wind howls. But beneath it, there’s something else.

A tapping.

At the wall.

At the edge of thought.

And in it, a voice.

“Don’t look away this time, Mayang.”