Page 99 of Fallen: Darkness Ascending, Vol.1

I shouldn’t go back to the chapel. Every half-functioning neuron in my exhausted, frayed mind warns me not to. My mother’s voice scratches in the back of my skull, looping over itself like a half-melted cassette tape:

“If they call from the corners, Mayang—don’t answer.”

But I do. I have to. This isn’t just about work anymore—it never really was. I’m here because something in my blood knew the way. My mother’s final words, her obsessive scribbles in the margins of the hidden journal entries, the blueprints all pointed here. To beneath.

It’s late afternoon when I step out, swaddled in my thickest coat, scarf tight against the wind.

The sky hangs low and colorless, the sun barely a thought behind its gauze of clouds.

The village watches, as always—some from windows, others from doorsteps, but none approach. Even Luca won’t meet my eye anymore.

The chapel rises from the hill like a rotted tooth, jagged against the gray. In daylight, it should feel smaller. Safer. It doesn’t.

I enter through the side. The iron handles sting, the chill biting through my gloves with a spark that feels more intentional than weather. Inside, the stained glass windows fracture the light into smeared colors. They don’t look holy. They look bruised.

I pause before the altar, heart thudding. The floor here holds secrets—I’ve seen the blueprints. A void beneath, labeled only “hollow.” No burial plot. No ossuary.

Kneeling, I brush away soil and moss at the altar’s base. The stone beneath is different—darker, smoother, almost... oiled. A seam catches under my palm.

Through my extensive research and experience, my mind tells me there’s a mechanism, ancient and hidden. I search around the perimeter and find a carved depression, no wider than a coin, in the shape of an eye—oval, slanted slightly upward.

Without thinking, I reach into my coat and withdrew the feather.

Its shaft is sharp and rigid. Almost metallic.

On instinct, I fit it into the depression like a key.

There’s a low click. Then a sound akin to an exhale from deep beneath the chapel.

The altar stone moves, slowly grinding across hidden tracks as dust fills the air.

Beneath it, a narrow stairwell descended into darkness.

The moment the opening is fully revealed, the temperature around me dropped dramatically.

I light a lantern. Somehow, it feels wrong to bring modern light into this space. The flame shivers in the windless dark, its glow barely touching the surroundings.

The stone stairs tighten around me as I descend, one hand tracing the wall. I count the steps like beads on a rosary. Thirty. Forty. Fifty-seven. Then the scent changes—cloying, rotten sweetness. Overripe flowers wilting in standing water.

At the bottom, the stairway opens into a chamber unlike anything I expect. It isn’t a crypt. It’s a sanctum. A perfectly circular room, perhaps five meters wide, lined with twelve alcoves. Each alcove contains an object—though none I recognize.

A chalice made of petrified wood, filled with gray ash.

A child’s sandal, carved entirely of bone.

A mirror too small for a face, but shaped like an eye, the surface rippling as though made of liquid.

A set of wings—actual wings—pinned open against the stone with ancient nails.

Their feathers had blackened, and some had fallen to the floor, decaying into dust.

Each object hums with something unspoken. Wrongness radiates from them, vibrating through the stone like something muttering in its sleep.

In the center—a pedestal. Not stone. Not metal.

Flesh.

It takes me several moments to realize what I’m looking at—a column of smooth, pale material similar to skin stretch tight over something beneath.

Not a sculpture. A binding. There are symbols, a sigil, branded and burned into it.

I recognize none of them—no known alphabet, no linguistic base.

They seem to move when I don't look directly at them, shifting through impossible grammar.

I circle the pedestal once, twice. At its base, beneath a translucent membrane, there’s something inside. Curled. Asleep. A figure .

Dark wings wrap tightly around itself. Not feathered—not in the normal sense.

It’s somehow scaled or hardened like blades, but veined and iridescent.

The shape of a face, pressed against the interior surface, barely visible beneath the dark hair.

And its closed eyes twitch beneath the lid, dreams forged in the crucible of memory and divine blaze.

My throat tightens. My hands tremble.

Solareth .

Buried. Bound. And yet... not dormant. I don’t hear a voice this time. Not exactly. But a thought bloomed unbidden inside me:

“You’ve come further than she did.”

My eyes widen at the implication.

“She feared the door. But you—your blood remembers.”

“Let me show you what she died to forget.”

My knees buckle involuntarily. I steady myself against the wall, gasping for breath. There’s a new electric current in the air. I was being pulled from the inside, a tethering to my soul. I want to run. I need to run. But I can’t. Not yet.

I memorize the shape of the chamber, reminding myself to take note of everything I see and everything that’s happened so I can write it down.

“Let me show you…”

An unseen force coils through my mind—slick, invasive. At first, it scrapes against the inside of my skull, claws dragging across thought, sending white-hot bursts of pain through every nerve. My vision swims. My breath catches. It’s maddening—an itch inside the soul, too deep to reach.

Then, just as quickly, it shifts.

The pressure softens into something intimate. A slow, deliberate stroke along the folds of thought, a whisper brushing the underside of reason. He’s there. Not outside. Inside. Testing. Tasting.

It feels wrong. A violation.

But it also stirs something shameful beneath the fear—an electric thrill that leaves my skin prickling and my limbs trembling.

He’s learning me.

And I can't tell where the revulsion ends and the desire begins.

What is wrong with me? I need to get out of here.

When I finally claw my way back up to the chapel, the sun is gone. Dusk stains the horizon red. I expect the villagers. Torches. Screaming .

There’s no one.

But the chapel mirror—half-smashed, hanging crooked near the nave—catches my reflection as I turn. And in it, behind me?—

A tall, dark figure, crowned in flames. Wings of darkness distorted by light and ruin spread wide, curling around my silhouette.

I spin around.

No one’s there.

But when I turn back to the glass—a wicked grin carved across his face, and eyes that reflect an internal hellfire.