The last thing I remembered was the window open, the city breathing in pulses, and his hand leaving my chest like a door unlatched. The ground beneath me wasn't stone or soil but something that yielded slightly, like old leather stretched too long. My heartbeat came from far away, slow and misplaced, as if it belonged to someone else.
Then— a flash.
It broke the dark open like glass, flooding everything in a light that wasn't truly light at all. It was pale and heavy, a colorless white that bled through the air instead of illuminating it. Around me, shapes emerged — pillars made of bone and smoke, rising into a ceiling that dripped faint luminescence. The air smelled of wet ash and something sweet, like burnt honey left to harden.
As my eyes adjusted, I realized I stood on a bridge of stone arching over a vast abyss. The rock shimmered faintly, laced with veins of gold that pulsed beneath its surface like slow blood. Below, an ocean churned — black and luminous, reflecting nothing. Its movement sounded almost like breathing.
Then there was movement ahead.
At first, I thought the light itself was folding, until it stepped forward. A figure — tall, faceless, its body wrapped in the residue of its own glow. The edges of it wavered, as though the shape couldn't decide what it wanted to be. That glow leaked downward, painting the slick stone in trembling gold. I stumbled back, the sound of my steps echoing too loudly, repeating even after I stopped.
"Who's there?" My voice broke in the air, fragile, quickly swallowed by the space around me.
The figure didn't answer. It moved again — slow, deliberate, as if wading through unseen water. My pulse raced; I stepped back once more. The bridge gave a faint hum beneath my feet, alive, aware. Then the stone trembled. I lost balance. My heel caught the edge, and I fell, striking the ground hard enough to taste iron.
I crawled backwards. My palms scraped against the warm surface — it felt like skin pulled taut over something shifting underneath. Every breath stung. When I lifted my head, the figure was closer, its light pulsing with every step, rhythmic as a heartbeat, though I couldn't tell whose.
The abyss below stirred. The sound of waves deepened into something like a sigh — thousands of voices speaking at once but saying nothing. The scent changed too: iron, salt, and incense, thick enough to burn the throat.
I kept crawling until my hand met the edge. The drop yawned beneath me — endless, faintly glowing blue, its depths alive with flickers of movement. Shadows rose, curious, as if the dark itself were watching.
The figure stopped. It tilted its head slightly, studying me. For an instant, the light flared — and its shape grew sharper. Not a man, not entirely. Limbs a fraction too long, joints bending against nature, faint traces of wings dissolving when I blinked. Its face was smooth, featureless, until a mouth appeared where there hadn't been one.
A voice poured out. It didn't pass through sound — it arrived behind my eyes, cold and absolute. "You shouldn't be here yet."
The words rang through me, deep and resonant, as though spoken by the air itself. I flinched, pressing my palms to the living stone, trying to push myself up, but my legs refused. The light swelled until the bridge, the pillars, and the horizon were swallowed whole. Everything turned white—
and for one impossible moment, the air seemed to touch me back.
I kept running. The ground curved beneath my feet, wide at first, then narrowing like a funnel turned on its head. It should have led me down, but somehow I was climbing, the air thinning, the pressure growing heavier with every step. The path spiraled upward around a hollow core that breathed heat. The smell thickened — scorched leather and sweet rot, as if something holy had been burned wrong.
The sound began next. At first it was only a low vibration under my ribs, but soon I could hear it—screams, muffled and smothered, stitched into the air like threads that never ended. I covered my ears, but the noise pressed through my palms, traveled through bone. My knees weakened. I ran harder. Every breath tore through me. The light above rippled, grey and gold, like a storm trapped in glass.
Then the air broke.
A figure stepped out of it—born from smoke, shaped by movement. The world seemed to pull itself inward around him. His body was made of shadow thick as tar, coiling and uncoiling in slow, deliberate swirls, as if the darkness itself had muscle. A single ember glowed in his face where an eye should have been, the rest swallowed by shifting veils of black. Long fingers reached forward, tapering into points that quivered like heat mirages. His presence stirred the ash on the path, drawing it toward him in delicate spirals, every speck caught in an unseen breath.
He raised his arm—not in threat, but in command—and the cyclone shuddered. The road tilted under me.
I staggered back, the gravity breaking beneath my feet. The world twisted, pulled sideways, then dropped. The figure didn't move. The red spark in his head followed me as I fell, small and distant, until it vanished into the dark below.
The wind tore the breath from my lungs. Everything spun—the bridge, the light, the pillar of gold veins now a blur of color smeared into the void. Thoughts scattered and collided: Where am I? What is this place? My voice, if it existed, was lost to the roar. Is this a dream? Am I still alive? Am I going to wake up now?
Then—impact.
The sound of it didn't reach me. My body met the ground and the world went utterly still, as if silence itself had taken a breath and refused to exhale. I lay there, dazed, tasting ash on my tongue. When I opened my eyes, the world had changed again.
I was in a forest—if one could call it that. The trunks were tall and straight, colorless as bone, their roots spreading across a soil that looked more like cooled wax than earth. A pale mist hung above, veiling the canopy where a strange structure hovered—vast, intricate, made of what at first seemed to be wood and vine but on closer look was flesh turned fibrous. From it hung bodies.
Dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe.
They swayed soundlessly, suspended by cords that grew from the thing's core. Their forms were lean, their skin gray, their eyes closed as if dreaming. Some turned slightly in the air, their fingers twitching when a wind passed that I could not feel. The entire forest breathed with them, the branches rising and falling in slow rhythm.
When I tilted my head back, I saw how far it reached. The hanging bodies spiraled upward toward the crown of the structure, narrowing into a single figure at the center—its arms outstretched, its torso pierced by ropes that extended like veins into the rest. It looked like a chandelier built from human devotion.
A memory clawed through me then. Thea's chamber. The chandelier of cold light that had hung above the altar. This was the same shape, the same pattern, only alive.
I stood there, trembling, staring at it through the gray air. The faint glow dripping from the cords illuminated the forest floor in slow pulses, like the rhythm of a dying heart. Every time the light passed over me, I could swear the faces of the hanging ones changed—their mouths whispering something I couldn't hear, their eyelids flickering as though they dreamed of fire.
And for the first time since the fall began, I realized I was not meant to be seeing this.
I called out for Corvian, but only my own voice came back to me, stretched thin and hollow across the endless dark. It ricocheted off unseen walls, as if the world itself were a cavern made of my fear. I tried again—louder this time—but the echo returned smaller, swallowed mid-word, as though something had bitten the sound in half.
I kept walking. Every step stirred water that wasn't there a moment before, my soles dragging through a slick film that shivered with pale reflections. The forest behind me dissolved into mist; what lay ahead grew sharper with every breath—a shape too large to belong to any human world.
Then I saw it.
The door rose from the stone wall like the spine of some ancient creature, vast and unmerciful. It stood higher than any cathedral I had ever seen, so tall I could not tell where it ended, only that it eclipsed the storm behind it. The air trembled around it, dense with the scent of wet wood and time. I stood before it as one might stand before a monument to the dead.
Its surface was carved from wood blackened by centuries of weather, each grain swollen and warped yet still whispering of the forest that had once lived inside it. The carvings crawled upward—vines twisted into knots, thorned branches curling into faces whose eyes had been worn smooth by age. When the lightning flared, those hollow eyes caught its glare and shimmered with a cruel mimicry of life. For an instant, the door seemed to breathe.
The storm gathered strength. The sky opened, and water came down in sheets so dense it felt alive. The drops struck my shoulders like needles, soaked my clothes until I could barely tell where my skin ended and the cold began. I lifted my hands to the door—red, raw, trembling—and struck. The sound barely carried, a dull, wet thud swallowed by the storm.
Above me, a bronze knocker shaped like a beast's head hung far out of reach. Its mouth clamped a ring between jagged teeth, the metal green with corrosion, the rain sliding from its jaws like tears. I beat at the lower panels again, the wood rough beneath my fists, splintered enough to draw blood. Each blow seemed to vanish into the grain as though the door drank it, deaf to pleading.
The sky groaned. Lightning broke the dark open once more, and in its brief flare I saw the carvings move—the vines twisting, the eyes widening, the mouths shifting into something like hunger. My shadow flared and fractured on the stones at my feet until it looked like a thing trying to crawl away from me.
I struck harder. My knuckles screamed. The sound of my voice drowned beneath the thunder, each plea torn apart by wind before it reached the door. It did not open. It did not stir. The rain poured harder, pooling at my knees, streaming down my hair, tracing my neck in rivulets that burned cold. It felt as though the storm itself meant to erase me.
At last my arms failed. I sank to the wet stone, my body folding inward, my breath coming out in ragged bursts. The ground beneath me had turned to a mirror of shallow water; it reflected the light of the storm and the shadow of that door rising above me like a mountain. I looked up again, and in the shifting dark, the door seemed to lean closer, its carvings alive with subtle motion—thorns coiling, faces watching.
The bronze beast above sneered down, the water spilling from its mouth like saliva. In the black sheen of the wood, I saw myself reflected—small, crooked, a warped echo of the man I thought I was. My heart pounded once, twice, slow and uneven, and I knew with the clarity of pain that whatever lay behind that door did not want me.
I stood, unsteady, and walked along the wall, my hand sliding over the carvings. The storm eased for a breath, and I saw something glimmer through the stone—a sliver of light. I followed it until I reached the side of the structure. There, tall windows arched upward like the ribs of some long-dead god. They were made of stained glass, impossibly clean, glowing from within with a light that felt alive.
I pressed my forehead to the glass. On the other side, the world was impossibly bright. Sunlight streamed through trees that did not sway, illuminating a garden of impossible calm. The air inside looked still, warm, unmarred by storm or shadow. I realized… it wasn't another room at all—it was a false horizon, a world painted on the other side of sanctified glass.
My mind frayed. I whispered Corvian's name again, weaker now, the syllables slurring into rain. No answer.
I turned back to the door, and in the shifting stormlight, it seemed to have grown. The vines reached lower. The hollow-eyed faces gleamed with wet hunger, their mouths stretched into shapes that resembled mockery. For a heartbeat, I thought the door would bend down, split at the hinges, and swallow me whole—chew my bones and spit them out laughing into the mud.
My tears had dried on my cheeks, leaving my skin stiff and sore, but the ache in my chest deepened until it felt like something was being carved out from within. My pulse slowed, deliberate, each beat measured as though judged. A realization pressed through me: I was shut out. Stranded before a door that remembered the warmth I had long forgotten.
I lifted my face to the storm. The clouds swirled low, heavy and bruised, their bellies veined with lightning. My voice barely left my throat—a hoarse, cracked whisper, raw and pleading. "Whoever watches above… if there's still a place that cleans what I've done—please."
The sky did not answer. The thunder rolled like something vast turning over in its sleep. The rain struck the stones in an endless hiss.
And beneath that sound, too soft to name, I thought I heard the door draw a breath.
A sound came from behind me, quiet but carrying through the rain like a thread of metal through cloth.
"What are you doing?"
The voice was calm, almost conversational, yet the frequency of it vibrated through my spine like something alive. The air thickened. I froze, my body turning cold and tight as a wire. Slowly, I turned around.
He stood in the storm as if he had stepped out of it. Tall—too tall. The world seemed to tilt beneath his height. His skin carried no color, only gradients of shadow that moved when he breathed, alive with glimmers of heat. His body radiated warmth like a furnace hidden beneath ash, and the rain that touched him hissed into vapor before it reached his skin. Antlers branched from his head like black lightning frozen mid-burst, curling in shapes that bent light itself. Wings stretched from his back, vast and tattered, dripping soot instead of water, each slow movement scattering a faint shimmer that might have been dust or the remnants of something once holy.
Where his eyes should have been were two cores of white fire, haloed by rings of red, pulsing with a rhythm that almost matched my heart. His mouth, when it moved, carried no expression. It was just sound—deep, resonant, measured.
He stepped closer, and the air rippled with the heat of him.
"Do you realize what that door is?"
His voice struck through the storm, low and unyielding.
I shook my head, trembling, my breath catching like it had snagged on a thread.
"This," he said, the word stretching, "is Heaven. No one will open for you, Hugo."
My lips parted, but no sound came out. The rain poured harder, as if to fill the silence between us.
"I didn't know," I stammered, each word scraping out of me, "this… this is Heaven?"
He nodded once. The motion was slow, deliberate, the weight of centuries behind it. "I looked everywhere for you."
Something in his tone broke me. I sniffed, dragging a wet breath through my teeth. "Who are you?"
He lowered himself to his knees in front of me, and for the first time I could see the details of his face—or what passed for one. The skin was marked by patterns of glowing lines, symbols carved deep and burning like molten script. The heat of him reached me, brushing against my cheeks, drying the tears there before they could fall again.
"Your companion," he said quietly.
My heart lurched. "Corvian?"
"Yes."
"That's… that's how you look like?"
He tilted his head, the light in his eyes dimming. "Yes. Told you it's not pleasant."
I wiped my face with the back of my hand, the gesture clumsy. "It's not bad."
He blinked slowly. "What?"
"You don't look bad," I said, and my voice cracked halfway through. The rain around us hissed on his shoulders, bursting into mist before it touched the ground. I reached toward him without thinking, the heat rolling off his skin like a warning, and he stepped back sharply.
The veil is lifted here," he said. "You touch me, you burn." He paused. "And if I carry you through it, the body I wear above forgets how to breathe for a while
I stared at my hand, wet and trembling. "I was denied entry to Heaven?"
He looked past me toward the door, his expression unreadable. "Are you surprised, Hugo? You weren't exactly running a charity for burn victims."
A bitter sound escaped me—half laugh, half sob. "I want to go back," I said, shaking my head. "I've seen enough."
"Don't you want to see where you belong?" His voice had softened, but the edge beneath it stayed, gleaming like a blade under silk.
"No," I whispered. "No. Just take me back."
He didn't answer right away. The rain had slowed, and the world around us felt like it was holding its breath. Behind me, the door loomed, its carvings slick with water, its hollow faces watching. Before me, Corvian's form burned through the mist—dark, blinding, magnificent in a way that defied grace.
For a moment, I thought the door might open, or the sky might split. But nothing did. Only Corvian, standing there, wings spread and dripping ash, the heat of him reaching me even through the cold.
And I understood then—this was what he meant when he said devils still remembered light.
Corvian did not move. The air between us simmered, bending light the way heat bends distance on summer roads. Behind him, the storm was thinning—its edges dissolving into a twilight that didn't belong to either night or dawn. He watched me for a long moment, then said quietly, "You think Heaven is the only thing that remembers you?"
His eyes, burning pale, turned away from the door. "Come."
I hesitated, my body still trembling from the cold, but something in his tone made refusal impossible. When he turned, the world obeyed him. The earth split in silence, not with sound or quake but with surrender. The stone gave way to a slope of glassy ash that descended into a red horizon. Heat rose from below, dry and sour, carrying the scent of something once alive.
I followed.
Each step was heavier than the last. The ground clung to my shoes, soft and grainy, like the residue of burnt paper. The light grew dimmer the further we went, until it stopped behaving like light at all—it hovered instead, viscous and slow, painting everything in shades of dying flame. The air was so hot it felt thick enough to hold.
Corvian's silhouette moved ahead of me, his antlers branching wide, his wings half-folded, dragging smoke as he walked. His presence distorted everything around him. The grass withered at his feet, curling into black strands that turned to dust.
"What is this place?" I asked.
He didn't answer right away. We passed what looked like trees—tall structures of bone and charred bark, their branches looping together like cages. In their hollows, shapes twitched. Faces formed for a second before melting back into the wood. The sound they made wasn't screaming. It was softer, like breathing through water.
Corvian finally said, "This is the edge. The waiting ground. Every soul passes through it, though not every soul is meant to notice."
The sky shuddered once, as if a breath of wind passed through lungs too large for the world. I looked up. The clouds above were not clouds at all but folds of flesh, veined and pale, trembling with slow movement. Between them, light spilled—not from a sun but from something unseen, something vast and restless.
I whispered, "Where are we going?"
He stopped. The sound of his wings brushing against the air made a noise like sand pouring through a narrow glass. He turned halfway toward me, his face shadowed but his eyes alive with that white, piercing glow.
"I want you to see it," he said. "The truth of what you traded for wonder. The place that remembers you when no heaven will."
He extended a hand, the long black fingers curling slightly. The heat rolling from him made my skin ache, but I stepped closer. Around us, the land shifted again—the ash falling away into an open plain where the ground was made of cracked mirrors. Beneath the fractures, I saw movement. Shapes. People. Each mirror pane reflected a face I almost recognized, mouths open in silent shouts.
I stared down. One of them moved its lips, mimicking my voice. Help me.
They weren't ghosts; they were trajectories—every version of me that would have existed if I hadn't chosen fire.
I stumbled back. "What is this?"
Corvian watched, his expression unreadable. "These are echoes. Every act, every wish you buried. The parts of you that prayed to something and never stopped burning."
The faces beneath the glass rippled like water disturbed by a stone. One by one, they began to move, pressing upward, their palms slapping against the underside as though trying to break through. The sound wasn't violent—it was rhythmic, a kind of pleading.
The heat thickened. The sky darkened again. And from far away—so far I thought it might be memory—I heard a bell toll once, deep and distant, the sound trembling through the ground beneath my feet.
I turned to Corvian, my voice shaking. "You said you looked everywhere for me. Was this where you thought I'd be?"
He regarded me in silence. Then, softly, "No. But this is where you will end if you keep asking for doors that do not open."
Something inside me cracked at that, quiet and small, like ice splitting on a pond. My throat tightened. "Then take me back," I whispered. "Please."
He didn't answer immediately. His eyes dimmed, their light lowering like embers cooling in ash. Then he looked at the horizon, where the sky pulsed red as if a heart beat beneath it. "If I take you back," he said, "you will still hear the knocking in your sleep. The door remembers what called to it."
"I don't care," I said, my voice breaking. "I don't care what it remembers."
He exhaled—if that's what the sound was. It felt too heavy to be breath.
"Very well."
He stepped forward. The world around him bent, folding inward like the surface of a mirror shattering. The heat rushed toward me, burning through my clothes, searing my lungs, until all I could see was his shape—those antlers, those wings, that impossible height. He reached out, and before I could think, the air caved in.
The ground vanished.
I felt the world pull itself apart again, not like falling but like being unstitched from the inside out.
And through it all, I heard him whisper, close to my ear, low and certain—
"Then wake."
I woke with a gasp so sharp it tore my throat raw. Air burned as it filled me. My chest heaved, every muscle seizing as though I had been dragged through the surface of something deep and merciless. The sheets clung to my skin, slick with sweat. The room swayed before settling—a familiar ceiling, a window cracked open to the night, curtains trembling with the slow rhythm of the wind.
For a moment, I didn't know where I was. The air was too still, too ordinary. No storm, no fire, no gates that reached the sky. Only the dim pulse of city light slipping through the blinds, slicing the room into quiet bars of gold and gray.
I turned my head.
Corvian lay beside me. His body looked wrong.
He was stretched on his back, one arm resting limply across the sheets, his face turned toward the wall. The color of his skin had drained into a shade like candle wax—smooth, still, unreal. His lips were parted slightly, but there was no sound, no movement in his chest. The air around him felt heavy, as if it refused to pass through him.
My pulse stuttered. I reached out, my hand trembling, and took his by the wrist. The skin was cool to the touch—not cold, but cooling, like the last warmth fading from something once alive. I tried to lift it, and it slipped from my grasp, falling back onto the bed with a soft, final sound.
"No," I whispered. The word barely formed.
I pushed myself upright, stumbling out of the sheets, my bare feet hitting the floor. The room tilted as I stood. I could hear the blood rushing in my ears, deafening in its panic.
"Corvian?"
Nothing.
The silence that followed was absolute. Not the kind that comforted, but the kind that pressed against the ribs, demanding to be filled. My breath came shallow, uneven. The night outside murmured faintly—a car in the distance, a dog barking somewhere down the street—but here, in this narrow space between us, the world seemed to stop listening.
I leaned closer, whispering again, "Corvian?"
His name left my mouth like a secret I wasn't meant to say aloud. It felt wrong to speak it into such stillness. My voice trembled, small, like a child's.
He didn't move. The air around him carried a strange scent—sweet, almost floral, threaded with something that reminded me of iron and rain-wet stone. His chest remained still. The light from the window brushed over him, tracing the sharp line of his jaw, the closed lashes, the hollow at his throat where no pulse stirred.
My hands shook as I reached for him again, pressing my palm to his shoulder. The fabric of his shirt was dry. Beneath it, the body was firm, unnervingly intact. Not gone, not alive—something in between.
"Please," I breathed, leaning close, my forehead brushing against his arm. "You brought me back. You can't—"
The sentence refused to end. My voice cracked on the air, dissolving into a dry sound that wasn't crying yet but close.
The wind shifted through the window. A strand of curtain lifted, swaying like the slow motion of breath. The light caught the curve of Corvian's hand, turning his skin into something almost translucent. In that thin glow, I could see the faint outline of veins beneath the surface, blue and unmoving, like rivers sealed under ice.
I pressed my fingers to his neck. Nothing. My pulse pounded through my fingertips, louder than anything. The silence swallowed it whole.
I stepped back, the room spinning. My heart ached so violently I thought it might split. I wanted to call him again, louder this time, shake him until the world remembered how to answer. But something held me still—the terrible knowledge that whatever this was, it wasn't sleep, and waking him might mean something worse than silence.
I whispered anyway, barely audible, "Please. Don't leave me here alone."
My voice broke on the last word.
And in the half-light, for the smallest fraction of a second, I thought I saw his eyelids twitch—no more than the shiver of a shadow—but I was too afraid to believe it. And in the half-light, the curtain breathed and a filament of warmth threaded under my palm—so slight I could have imagined it. Then his eyelid trembled like a ripple under ice.
--------------
I've already eaten the apple
And I want to come home
God I want to come home
Please let there be some kind of mercy
To pick the locks of these garden gates
Better yet, could there be a party
To mark the end of knowledge and pain...