Page 98 of Fallen: Darkness Ascending, Vol.1

I t begins with broken dreams. But now—even waking—I hear him.

Not always in words. Sometimes it’s a feeling, buried deep beneath my viscera. The way the hair along my neck rises in a windowless room. The warmth behind my eyes whenever I pass the altar ruins—as though something ancient is smiling through me.

I haven’t slept in two nights.

I don’t trust mirrors anymore, or the sound of my own voice echoing from empty walls. My reflection lingers a second too long. My shadow moves even when I don’t.

Rasvan—the elderly grocer, the only villager who didn’t meet me with silence or suspicion—is the one who tells me about the First Winter.

We sit in his cottage behind the church, where the light never seems to touch anything fully.

Even at midday, the air is gray and sallow.

It smells of mildew, burnt parchment, and myrrh.

The fire hisses low, though the air outside is sharp enough to draw blood.

He hands me a mug filled with something thick and bitter—fermented blackcurrant, spiked with herbs I don’t recognize—and begins spilling knowledge I won’t be able to find in old text.

“When the Church came,” he says, gesturing vaguely toward the chapel’s crooked silhouette, “they found something already buried beneath that hill. Older than the cross. Older than language. A place of binding.”

“A prison?” I ask, instinctively.

His eyes, pale and sunken, meet mine.

“No. A womb.”

The word doesn’t make sense—until it does. Until it settles over everything like ash.

“The villagers had no name for what it was. Only for what it brought. They called it Soarele Ranit —the Wounded Sun. Some claimed he fell from the sky. Others swore he rose up through the earth, burning and bright, hungry for worship.”

He opens a crumbling book of sketches—charcoal renderings of twisted angelic forms, their wings serrated, their mouths sewn shut, their hands stretched toward unseen heavens. One figure stood among them—wrapped in fire, crowned in thorns of light.

“They say he came offering warmth,” Rasvan whispers. “But it wasn’t warmth. It was consumption. He fed on prayer. Then blood. Then the memories of the dead.”

I stare at the image, heart thudding, as the late light spills in through the window—amber and bruised, like the sky is holding its breath. Ma knew. So did my grandmother. Language was not free. Every syllable shaped reality.

“What happened to him?” I ask, my eyes fixed on the sketch—long, dark, tangled hair cascading around the jagged horns that crown his skull, shaping a figure more infernal than divine.

“He slept,” he says emotionlessly. “Or pretended to.”

Later that evening as mist begins to seep into the streets, Rasvan’s story continues to echo in my mind.

I walk the village alone, listening not for answers but for what people won’t say.

The silence in their eyes tells me more than words could.

They glance away. Some whisper prayers when I pass.

One woman drops her basket and doesn’t pick it up.

But it’s the bent old woman sweeping the chapel path who stops me. She grabs my wrist with surprising strength, whipping my hair into my face, her eyes like milky glass.

“You shouldn’t have stepped near the altar,” she rasps. “He doesn’t forget kindness. But he never forgives curiosity.”

“W-what do you mean?” Who is she referring to? Father Andrei or… someone else?

She stares past me, into the woods.

“There are stones under that hill,” she murmurs. “Stacked like ribs. The chapel was never meant for worship. It was a lid. And your shadow... your shadow leaves without you sometimes.”

Then she lets go and vanishes into the growing fog.

That night, I try to resist sleep, but it drags me under like a current. I’m swept away and thrown into a place devoid of space and time with Ma’s scarf wrapped tight around my throat like a tether. Like a warning.

And I dream.

I’m no longer in the chapel. I’m beneath it. In a spiral passage of bone-colored stone that seems to breathe with every step. My feet echo with whispers—thousands of voices, overlapping, murmuring in languages I somehow understand.

They speak of burning gardens. Of a mouth that swallowed the stars. Of wings that scraped open the sky .

At the stair’s end, I enter a massive, circular chamber, walls lined with angelic statues locked in agony—mouths silenced with iron nails.

In the center lies a slab, and on it, something twisted into the shape of a man—no, not a man.

A body continuously contorting and transforming from something monstrously otherworldly to something akin to human.

Light, snarled and convulsing, barely contained in a form too bright to stare at. Too horrible to turn away from.

Then it turns its face toward me.

Solareth.

He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t need to.

He sees me—and in that moment, I remember what fire feels like.

Not pain. But touch.

Intimate.

Total.

Unavoidably all consuming.

I wake gasping. My mouth tastes of smoke.

The fire has burned low, but the air still smells scorched. My curtains stir, though the windows are sealed. On the desk, the feather Father Andrei left behind after his… unexpected visit, has split down the spine, curling as if charred from the inside.

And on my notebook, in my mother’s handwriting, I notice…

He walked with me once, in the dream of Eden.

The next day, I don’t leave the house. I can’t. My body is burning with a sudden fever that clings to my bones, and my skin prickles as if touched by invisible claws. I shiver beneath layers of clothes, Ma’s scarf damp with sweat around my throat, but the cold doesn’t leave me. It’s inside now.

“W-w-what did the old lady mean?” I mumble to myself as I spread out the old blueprints of the chapel on the floor.

Each brittle fold groans like an old wound opening again.

The ink is faded, the margins smudged with time and fingerprints long dead.

I trace every line with trembling fingers, hunting for something my conscious mind hasn’t caught up to yet.

The architecture is wrong. Not just old. Deliberate. Ritualistic.

Then I see it.

A small annotation scrawled in a different hand, almost hidden beneath a crease in the paper. The ink is darker, not as aged like the rest. It notes a hollow beneath the altar, an unrecorded cavity extending several meters deep. No stairwell. No entry point. Just a gap—a silence carved into stone.

My breath catches.

It isn’t labeled as a crypt, or cistern, or cellar. Just an empty space beneath sanctified ground. There’s something buried there.

The bent old woman sweeping at the chapel flits through my thoughts. And then Rasvan’s voice returns, whispering from memory or dream—I no longer know the difference. “A womb.”

A womb for what?

I close my eyes, but images burst across my mind like aftershocks—wings serrated like ritual knives, a mouth filled with light, eyes that devour. I see flames dripping from the ceiling of the earth. I hear screaming that doesn’t end in silence, but in worship.

By dusk, my fever breaks, but the dread does not.

A knock comes at the door. Just once.

Sharp. Measured. As though someone knew the exact weight needed to reach my bones.

Who in the world would come looking for me? The only person who knows I’m here is the driver and… Father Andrei.

I open it slowly. The wind is bitter, and the horizon is bleeding into dusk.

No one stands on the porch. But in the light dusting of snow stretching down the path, I see footprints.

Bare. Broad. Almost human—but not. The gait is wrong.

The spacing uncanny. There’s something primal about the shape of them, and they sink far too deep into the snow for something that leaves no shadow behind .

They glow faintly at the edges, as if lit from within by coals.

And they’re walking in reverse.

Back toward the chapel. Back toward whatever waits beneath it.

I don’t follow. Not yet. But I know I will.