Page 4 of Where the Dark Knelt (Worshipped by Darkness #1)

Eveline

Road to the Monastery of Saint Marie.

It took us several days to reach the monastery.

The journey was physically unbearable, I hated flying on airplanes, but to get to this remote town on the edge of the continent, I had to endure my own personal hell.

Every year, air travel became more expensive, yet the service only grew worse, and I despised it.

I remembered how, when I was little and my parents and I flew to other countries for seaside vacations, they used to serve meals on the plane.

The cabins felt wider and more spacious back then.

But now? We had to pay extra just to choose a window seat, and for food, and practically for every damn breath we took on that plane. It was infuriating.

Still, none of it really mattered anymore.

I didn’t care about the prices or the discomfort.

I didn’t care how much it would cost. My father had sent me here, and he flew with me in silence.

We hadn’t spoken a word through all four flights in a row.

It was a suffocating silence, and he looked so tense that I just wanted to cry.

I was shaking the entire time, throwing up in the plane’s cramped bathroom despite having nothing in my stomach for hours.

It felt like a sick reflex, to purge the last remnants of old emotions, anxiety, and the life I was leaving behind.

To erase my old self completely and start anew.

By the time we boarded the final plane, my entire body felt weak and hollow.

I slumped into my seat next to my father, watching as he held his massive silver cross embedded with red emeralds, pressing it to his lips while murmuring another quiet prayer.

The man sitting beside him eventually got up and moved elsewhere, apparently unable to endure my father’s presence.

I couldn’t blame him; few people could tolerate being near him for long.

Then, for the first time during the journey, my father turned to me with a flicker of concern in his dull gray eyes, eyes dulled even further by exhaustion after so many endless flights.

“Is everything okay?” He looked at me, puzzled, suspicion flickering in his eyes.

I must have looked extremely pale because I felt absolutely disgusting.

“Are you pregnant?” He frowned and placed his hand on my stomach.

“Dad, are you completely insane?” I shoved his hand away and crossed my arms over my chest, glaring at him accusingly.

“If you’re not a virgin or haven’t been celibate for at least a year, they won’t accept you into their ranks. You know the rules.”

“I’m a virgin, calm down, and I’m not pregnant.” I almost told him then that I’d been secretly dating a girl. But he would never approve of that kind of love, to my endless regret.

“Then what is it?” His eyes scanned my face, searching for answers he clearly couldn’t find in my words.

“I just… I can’t handle so many flights. And… well, depression probably has that effect. Plus, I haven’t eaten much in the last forty-eight hours, as you’ve already noticed.”

“Yeah… well, never mind. We’ll arrive soon. Then it’s just a couple of hours by car up the mountain serpentine, and we’ll be at the monastery.”

Why couldn’t they have sent me to a monastery closer to home?

What was so special about this one? Oh God…

This entire journey had already drained the life out of me, and the very thought of winding through mountain roads in a car made my stomach churn again with anxiety and horror.

My vision blurred, and I had to close my eyes to keep myself from throwing up once more.

I don’t even know what motivated me to agree to go to the monastery, relatively voluntarily at least, but everything felt so strange.

There was this wild anxiety curling inside me at the thought of leaving my past life completely behind.

It felt like I was just… disappearing one day.

Gone. No one at the university or at work would ever see me again.

And did that make my insides feel lighter, somehow?

I didn’t know why, but the thought of never seeing those toxic people again actually filled me with relief. With a twisted kind of joy.

In the end, I had nothing to lose. A university degree didn’t solve anything these days.

Almost no one worked in their field anyway, and with each passing day, as technology advanced, everyone clung to their pathetic jobs in fear of being replaced by robots.

But in reality, that day was still far away — people were just stupid and panicked over nothing.

I’d realized long ago that none of it made sense.

Corporations brainwashed everyone into that fucking nine-to-five life.

Working in an office was supposed to be the dream, right?

But no. It wasn’t life. It was just an illusion of living.

A slow suffocation, surviving on minimum wage. And if it weren’t for my parents, I’d probably have starved to death in the streets by now, or frozen somewhere alone. And people were having kids with the same salaries? Uhm… well, no.

It was terrifying. All of it. The world was spiraling straight into hell, and I was going with it. But now… now I was slipping away from all that fucking noise and chaos, into the silence of the monastery, into the possibility of finding faith again.

Of finding peace.

I took off my cross a long time ago when I lost faith in God. Yes, it happens. But how could I not lose it, seeing everything around me, the endless news about wars and the horrors of this world? How could He let all this happen? All this suffering and loss… It was inhumane.

When I became a teenager, my faith completely crumbled.

Another war, another wave of deaths, another reminder of how suffocating and terrible this world really was.

Incurable. Rotten to the core with no way out.

The planet was heading straight for its own destruction, and with each generation, people only grew worse — greedier, unhappier. How could He allow all this horror?

That was when my faith died, along with the cross I locked away in a box for years.

Grandma always told me these were the tricks of the devil, all these wars and tragedies. But if God was so strong, then why couldn’t He defeat the devil Himself? Grandma would just shrug her shoulders and say, “There’s a balance in the world.”

And it made me angry. It still does. Because she lived in a completely different world from mine, one that no longer exists.

In her time, the state even gave apartments to its employees, people worked hard and had some semblance of a future, even if it wasn’t perfect.

But us… our generation was doomed to wander the world without homes or hope.

Our dreams had long since died, shattered by the brutal reality of existence.

And now, I was holding that very cross in my hands…

twirling it between my fingers, letting the silver chain slide over my skin.

The cross had always fascinated me, it was engraved with red rubies, a beautiful fusion of silver and crimson that gave it a bold, almost regal appearance.

It was striking in its Gothic style, reminiscent of the Old Believers and their faith in more ancient, primordial gods.

There was something powerful about it. Its weight was comforting, both on my neck and in my palm, it was solid and grounding, as if it carried something more than metal and stones. It defied logic and common sense. A talisman. A magical artifact that, somehow, had kept me safe.

And when I took it off… it was as if lightning had struck.

Everything had started to fall apart after that.

One by one, my grandparents died — so fast, so suddenly, I could barely process it.

It felt like the world was unraveling at the seams, and I started fearing for myself too.

The idea of even making it to thirty felt distant, unreachable.

Existing became a weight I couldn’t carry.

Each day was torture, a blur of dread and quiet despair.

Maybe the cross really was a talisman. Maybe it did protect me…

or maybe it was just a coincidence. A string of cruel events strung together by fate, not faith.

After all, even if the cross had power, it couldn’t prevent death.

Nothing could. Not in our world. None of us possessed the magic of immortality, only the illusion of safety, fleeting as breath.

As we drove up into the mountains, the sky grew thick with heavy clouds, obscuring everything around us.

The trees changed too, becoming older, darker, ancient pines filling the view on either side of the winding road.

Their needles blurred into a sea of deep green and gray, reminding me that the climate here was far harsher than I had imagined.

The scenery quickly turned ominous, and fear gripped my chest. My heart pounded furiously, echoing my dread of the unknown.

Deep down, I knew no one would hurt me there, that there were no terrible people waiting to torment me in the monastery.

I was sure of that. But still… it was terrifying to change your entire life in just a few hours. Utterly terrifying.

I fiddled with the cross in my fingers, trying to calm myself, running my thumb over its cold surface again and again. Suddenly, my father glanced at me and snatched it from my hands.

“Stop playing with it. Please, put it on.” His voice softened with something close to pleading.

He bowed his head humbly, and I mirrored the gesture, holding still as he reached around to fasten the clasp at the back of my neck.

His fingertips brushed lightly against my skin before letting the cross fall against my chest.

I was already dressed in a formal, long black dress — not a nun’s robe, but close enough in its somber elegance.

“We’re almost there,” he said quietly.