Page 97 of Fallen: Darkness Ascending, Vol.1

I try to tell myself it’s just the wind. The breathing behind the walls. The flickering lights. The voice that isn’t quite a voice. All of it—explainable. Natural. But after last night, I can’t lie to myself anymore.

It happens just before dawn. I wake suddenly, a familiar pressure pinning my chest. Something invisible is there—resting heavily on me, keeping me still.

My heart thunders in my ears. The air feels wrong—thick, too close, as if the walls have crept inward while I slept, until the room itself is pressing against my skin.

I don’t move. I can't. I just listen.

There it is again, the same familiar sound.

Breathing .

Not mine.

Slower. Deeper.

It comes from somewhere beneath the floorboards, but it fills the entire room, inhaling and exhaling through the walls themselves.

My pulse spikes. I grip the sheets, my fingers curling into the fabric, trying to anchor myself to something real. Anything.

Images of the mirror flashes to the forefront of my mind. The one that wasn’t there before. The one that showed me the eye. The one that marked me.

I want to scream, but my throat stays locked. The air is too thick, wrapping around my voice and swallowing it whole.

Fight it , I tell myself. You’re stronger than this. You didn’t come all this way to lay surrender to sleep paralysis. Fight it!

I turn my head slowly toward the wall. There’s nothing there. Simply empty space. But the breathing doesn’t stop.

It’s hours before I can gather the strength to move. By the time the sun rises—weak and gray—I’m already out of bed, dressing in a daze. I don’t know where I’m going, only that I need to get out of the house. I need air untouched by that thing’s presence.

One foot, then another. I walk to the village square, hoping motion will clear my head.

Hoping that doing something will make the night feel less real.

The streets are nearly empty today, just a few old men outside the corner café, speaking in low tones, their eyes flicking toward me with the dull recognition one might give a funeral procession. They don’t speak. I don’t ask them to.

My feet carry me to the edge of the village, past the last crooked houses and up the hill where the chapel waits, half-swallowed by a thick fog that seems to rise from the ground itself.

By the time I reach it, the fog coils around the stone in the same manner of smoke, making it look older, stranger—as though it was grown out of the land.

I stop at the threshold, the heavy wooden doors slightly ajar. The chapel looks different in this light—less reminiscent of a ruin and more of a waiting aperture.

I almost laugh, the sound dry and hollow in my throat.

Of course. What else was I expecting? In this haze of sleepless nights and a mind too befuddled to think clearly.

This place, these people, it’s all becoming too much, too strange.

Yet, in my exhaustion, the absurdity of it almost feels strangely comfortable, as if I’m not the only one lost here.

But as I step inside, a new shiver ripples through me, one that hasn’t happened before. The air is different somehow but the same. Dejavu. I don’t need to look behind me to know the door has closed. I feel it.

Ignoring the warnings in my logical mind, I move down the aisle slowly, fingertips grazing the splintered pews, the dust clinging to my skin. My heart beats in a rhythm I don’t recognize—something slower, older, calming my racing thoughts.

As if with a phantom caress, something turns my chin until I see the crack in the altar’s base.

Crouching, I brush away the dust, fragments of wax and ash. Inside the hollow is a bundle of scorched feathers again. What’s with the feathers?

They don’t belong here. They don’t belong anywhere .

Too large for the average bird commonly found sacrifices.

Too perfect. Once again, they shimmer faintly in the filtered light—dark at the core, with molten gold edging.

Veins of fire . I reach out, fingers trembling as if guided by an unknown force.

The moment I touch one, another vision snaps behind my eyes.

No. The same vision, but more.

A city of glass, shattering under fire. Skies torn open. Ash falls, drifting soft as snowfall, yet heavy with ruin. And in the center of it all, a figure—tall, radiant, inhuman. Wings unfurled, bursting as if born from eternal flames.

A face too flawless to be comforting. Eyes burn with the silence of stars long dead.

An angel. But not.

Fallen.

I tear my hand back, heart hammering. And then I hear it, the same familiar voice through the darkness. The sound of it vibrating in my bones behind my ribs with both intimacy and violation.

“I remember your scent.”

Memories of my mother suddenly flooded my mind in a rapid slideshow.

She knew what words meant. She knew what they did—how a single whisper could open doors best left sealed, how a name spoken in the wrong breath could awaken things that hungered in silence.

My scent? That doesn’t make any sense…

The tongue, Ma’s been taught, was not just for speech—it was a blade, a key, a curse.

I had studied stories carved in bone and blood, recited prayers meant to shield the soul, and remember hearing my mother’s voice tremble when speaking of things that listened from the dark.

The hairs on my neck rise. I turn, slowly.

No one’s there. Just as before. Just as it was in the house. Only dust and shadows remain—still and watchful. The air carries the faint trace of old incense... and something else.

Burnt metal and honey, perhaps. Sweet, sharp, clinging. Not decay, but something left behind with purpose rather than time.

The scent could be residue , I tell myself, some echo of forgotten offerings. A place once bled into by sacrifice. But the feathers… they felt new .

Fresh.

Despite my confusion, one thing is for certain, the chapel has changed. Shifted. I’m not alone.

It watches as I exhale a stuttering breath, the warmth of it blooming into a pale mist that curls in the cold air, veiling my vision in a fleeting, otherworldly haze.

Survival instinct jolts through me, pushing my body into motion before my mind can catch up.

I stumble through the thick, unnatural fog, each step a desperate move toward something familiar.

Slowly, the town’s streets emerge from the haze, and with them, a fragile sense of calm begins to quell the rising anxiety in my chest.

That evening, when I return to the house, the air feels heavier than before. Twilight bleeds into a bruised sky, and the cold from the chapel settles into my bones. Every corner I turn, I feel eyes on me. Every shadow stretches a little too long.

Inside the house, Father Andrei is waiting.

The sight of him—still, composed, standing just beyond the threshold—sends a violent jolt through me. My breath catches in my throat, and for a moment, all I can hear is the thundering of my own pulse.

He shouldn’t be here. He couldn’t have gotten in. I locked the door.

But there he is, as if he’s always been there. As if the house itself allowed him in.

His eyes meet mine, calm and unreadable, but something beneath that calmness twists my stomach.

“I knew you’d go back,” he says. Calm. Measured. “And I knew you’d find the feathers.”

I stand frozen. My mind catches on his words.

“I hoped you wouldn’t,” he continues, eyes flicking to the black-gold feather now resting on the table. “But you’re too much like her.”

I swallow. “What do you mean? What do you know about my mother?”

He pauses, his face unreadable. “She understood what few dared to believe. The truth about the Morning Flame. The truth about him .”

My voice trembles. “Who is he?”

Father Andrei’s eyes darken, as if he’s staring into something far beyond the room before slowly turning his gaze to me.

“His name is Solareth. One of the forgotten. And he’s coming for you.”

After his unsettling departure—silent and abrupt—I found myself drifting toward the edge of the village, disoriented and tense. His words clung to me, thick and sour, and refusing to lift. I needed distance. Space. Anything to dilute the atmosphere he left behind.

I had even thrown open a window before leaving, hoping the cold night air would cleanse whatever unseen thing had settled in the room the moment he appeared. But it lingered—just as he had.

That’s when I saw them.

A ritual. Quiet. Hidden. Moving like a secret passed from lips to lips. The villagers were gathered in a clearing, their faces half-lit by firelight, their eyes glazed with something ancient and fervent. I hadn’t meant to find them.

But I had.

I watch from the edge of the square as they light tall flames laced with pine and something acrid. The chanting starts low, guttural, ancient syllables passed from mouths too old to remember their meaning.

And then I see it—or think I do. I rub my eyes, trying to dispel the lack of sleep and look again, waiting for my vision to refocus.

A shape, hulking and wrong, stitched from shadow and curling smoke. A figure far too tall, limbs bending in ways they shouldn’t, standing just beyond the reach of the firelight. Its presence hums beneath my skin as its form continues to contort, an electric sickness that coils around my spine.

I blink—and it’s gone. The space it occupied snaps shut, a wound sealed in denial, feigning it was never torn open.

But something in me knows the truth with the certainty of a scream swallowed too late.

I had always known the power of words .

Even as a child, I listened carefully when Ma spoke—pausing before certain names, whispering old phrases with the reverence of someone standing at the edge of a grave. In our family, language was never just sound. It was sacred. Dangerous. Alive.

Words could soothe or summon. Heal or harm. A tongue well-trained could bend the unseen. A tongue reckless could tear open doors best left sealed.

I remembered sitting by the low altar in her grandmother’s house, fingers tracing the carved wooden talismans, each etched with syllables from a dozen half-buried tongues—Sanskrit, Mandarin, old dialects from the mountain people.

They weren’t just prayers. They were warnings.

Locks. Spells meant to guard the soul. Ma had told me, more than once, that some things didn’t need blood to come forth—only an invitation.

“You’re too much like her,” Father Andrei had said. Who was he to her?

It didn’t matter now. The name had already been spoken into existence.

Solareth is already here… and I’m marked.