Chapter Text
“Get the pickaxe. Now, lad!”
Mihai comes out of his stupor the moment Vasile yelled at him. The chilling breeze could freeze a breath from afar, and the cold could awaken a dead man. They were supposed to just hunt, as instructed. Now, the group has gone to different paths after they all got separated when dusk settled. A small group of Lycans managed to chase them down in the woods and of course, as expected, they strayed away from the village—too far.
Vasile is on his knees, inspecting the tarn whose surface is frozen for the palms to touch. As Mihai sees it, the ground they are currently on is a lake. A small space. Merely shallow too, perhaps? The Romanian mountains indeed shield them, but even that has its own dangers—and the young lad knows it, that one crack beneath this solidness comes death embracing both of them into the arms of its glacial waters.
Mihai immediately turns his heel around, taking a step or two in haste before leaning down to grab the pickaxe. Who was that? Just when Vasile turns his neck to the younger man’s direction, about to yell at his slow pace again, the pickaxe is finally handed to him with the other almost stumbling on his feet. Well, the ground was very much slippery and the urgency pushed the tips of his shoes to slide.
Vasile quickly grabs the pickaxe from his hand and without wasting any more time, he clobbers it against the frozen surface. One. Two. Three. Then comes another blow—and another, and another. Until a part eventually cracks. Vasile still continues to split it open.
Mihai watches, flinching every now and then. Perhaps, it was from the cold. Or how Vasile is inserting such force with his batters. The steel material of the pickaxe nearly wrecked the nail off of its handle due to the heavy pressure of each wallop. But Vasile doesn’t relent—and with his relentless comes ferocity. It was then Mihai acknowledged the man underneath the tarn, almost not perceivable enough from the other end.
“Come,” Vasile says, gesturing for the other to come closer once he placed the pickaxe aside, “help me hack this open.”
“With bare hands?”
Vasile looks back at him and gives him a look. “Just come here!”
Mihai instantly moves himself next to the older man and kneels down, shaking due to both the coldness and the oddity of the situation.
“Hold this.” Vasile grabs the pickaxe again and gives it to Mihai. “Cleave it open on my count, do you understand?”
Mihai can only nod in quick motions of his head.
Vasile starts to count—and then, comes the younger’s cleaving as the other man pries the crack open with his right hand as he grabs the man underneath the surface using the other, feeling his skin so frigid. Is he already dead? No man can survive being downed below freezing waters, and he seems to be under this tarn for quite a while. Or more.
“Black God,” Mihai sighs when Vasile successfully pulls the man out of the waters, seeing how his skin is too rigid, with cold patches and marks. “Is he alive?”
“I don’t know.” He can’t be.
The unknown man is almost naked! With prominent black blemishes on his cold, pale skin. Mihai frowns and watches, looking up at the older man whilst he checks the unconscious body between them. He must be dead. He cannot be alive. The very possibility of this man still bearing life is too low—impossible, even. The mountains are not so kind to men, and everyone learns that eventually.
“Oh, Mother Miranda, do aid this man.” Vasile mutters as he starts to pray a little whilst he continues to tend to him—if he can even do something about it. “We may not know him, but such suffering is too cruel.”
“He’s dead…”
“Mihai.”
“He’s dead, Vas!”
“Shut your mouth and help me cover him! The wind’s too cold.”
“Cover him, and then what?”
“Then,” Vasile almost glares at the younger man. This lad really is too flimsy for the mountains—and he wants to be a hunter? “We’ll take him to your mother.”
“We don’t even know the path back to the village! We’re too far beyond the borders. T-The group! We don’t even know where they are now! A-And you want to… to carry a dead body with us?”
“What do you have us do, hmm? Leave him out here? Have you really got brains for a fish? Is that how your mother raised you?”
Mihai doesn’t respond to that.
“We’re not savages to leave a body in this state.” Vasile, once again, looks at Mihai. “Even if it’s dead. So, snap out of it and help me!”
The younger man crawls closer, his fingers touching the man’s nippy frame. He is hard as a rock, and clearly, he is not breathing. His diaphragm does not expel air nor his lungs absorb air. Mihai takes the opportunity to observe his face, though only briefly: his face is hauntingly beguiling despite being covered in dark patches, his dark hair a length of a whole forearm. How old is he? By the Black God, how did he even end up underneath this frozen lake? And for how long? If it wasn’t for the situation, Mihai would have complimented him.
“He must be a, I don't know, a non-native? Sort of looks like it.” Vasile speaks again, glancing at Mihai as they cover his exposed body completely. “But no one in their right mind would go beyond what these mountains can offer. And his clothes…” so peculiarly modern.
The village has their own customs, and Vasile has little knowledge of the outside world. However, he is surely certain that he can’t mistake puffer jackets since there were few foreigners who had their fair share of visits in their land—though, all had led to unpleasantness.
“The Lycans would’ve gone after him.”
“But they didn’t. Unlucky as he is, he ended up under all this solid cold.” Vasile sighs once both of them finish enveloping the frame of the unknown man. “He’s not from our village, that I know. What was he doing here, out of all places?”
They began carrying him out of the area, out of that very place. As honest as Vasile can be, he doesn’t know the trails. Not in this area of the mountains. In fact, he hasn't seen this region. Mihai was right, they are far away—too far away. Those bloody Lycans drove them quite far-off. The young lad, however, cannot help but feel unsettled. They are dragging a body—cold as it is, lifeless as it looks. It holds absolutely nothing. The body is pretty much barren.
The night is quiet for their liking. That makes the situation even more dreadful.
“Must we use that torch?” Mihai whispers just loud enough for the other to hear as he pulls the body behind him with a makeshift rope, created with the fabrics of their clothes knotted altogether. It was the same with the torch, a cloth fabric wrapped around a wooden stick.
“Mmm.” Vasile only hums. The lad is right; the fire itself could draw attention. But what use are their eyes if they cannot see properly, even if the moon shines above them along with the countless stars?
“Why won’t you help me with him, then?” Mihai grunts out, exerting more effort in pulling the body behind with him, the leverage is over his shoulder as he tails the older man.
“If something attacks us, at least, one of us would be ready.”
Mihai blinks, his face scrunching up a little. “And what happens to me?”
Vasile looks back at him, “that’s why I’m walking ahead, so your frail arse wouldn’t have to bear that burden.”
Frail. What a word. Mihai can only scoff. “Frail men wouldn’t even be able to drag a body across a field.”
The older man smirks and nods as he continues ahead. “Aye. But they’d whine twice as much doing it. Like how you’re complaining now.”
Mihai huffs with his jaw tightening, hardly kicking a loose stone out of his path whilst he continues to drag the body with him, their tracks leaving more traces across the snow-covered ground. “I’m not complaining. Just pointing out that your logic’s shite.”
“Call it foresight, boy. If something does come at us, you’ll be grateful I’ve got my hands free.”
“Or maybe, you just enjoy watching me struggle.” Mihai retorts back with a heavy breath. “Black God, help me, I’d rather face whatever’s lurking out there than carry this dead weight.”
“Be careful,” Vasile says, “this land has ears.”
Mihai adjusts his grip on the tied fabrics as he hauls the body with him with more endeavor, his muscles burning from the strain. The forest around them is unnervingly silent—no owls, no rustling of small creatures, just the heavy silence of the deadly winter and something watching. It’s strange, he thought, not even Mother Miranda’s crows are around when those avians should clearly be everywhere, right?
“Do you ever get a feeling we’re being followed?” Mihai mutters, his voice low.
Vasile doesn’t slow his pace, but his hand drifts closer to the knife at his belt. “The forest, it’s alive, Mihai. It doesn’t mean we have to stop.”
Mihai’s biceps burn where the corpse’s weight digs into him as he continues to tow, and tow he did. He assumes the body is already a corpse, and even if Vasile remains quiet about it, he knows he thinks the same thing. Every step makes the dead man feel heavier, the drag of his limbs leaving uneven trails in the damp earth. His breath comes harder now, his grip slick with sweat.
“How much farther?”
Vasile doesn’t glance back. “Don’t know. We’ll know until we’re there.”
Mihai exhales sharply. “Helpful.”
The trees grow denser, the canopy swallowing the moonlight until they move in near-darkness. The air thickens with the scent of rotting leaves and wet bark, the ground turning soft beneath their boots. A distant howl echoes—too far to be a threat yet, but close enough to tighten Mihai’s shoulders. Vasile pauses, listening. Then, without a word, he keeps walking.
The corpse seems to grow heavier with every step, not that Mihai doesn’t already realize that. However, it’s not fueled from rigor mortis, but as if the earth itself is tugging back. Mihai’s arms strain more, his breath fogging in the cold air.
“Damn this thing feels like it’s fighting me,” the younger man grunts in effort.
“Old shepherds used to say dragging the dead calls the moroi—the hungry shadows.” Vasile says. “They follow the scent of unsettled souls.”
“And you’re telling me this now?”
Vasile’s smile is razor-thin, “didn’t want to spoil the mood.”
The environment around them caves in as they continue to tread the snow-covered path ahead of them. Animals flee ahead of them, birds scattering without sound—if they were even there in the first place. The wind carries whispers, like voices just beyond hearing; and oddly enough, the black fluid from the corpse doesn’t soak into the ground—it beads up, clinging to the grass like dew.
“This isn’t right,” Mihai mutters again.
“Dragging death always leaves a mark.”
The young lad furrows his brows. “So, you agree that he’s dead?”
Vasile briefly glances back at him behind his shoulder. “What did I tell you? We’re not savages.”
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” he trails off.
Surprisingly, Vasile doesn’t argue.
All of a sudden, the forest completely goes quiet. Not just the absence of noise—but the waiting kind of quiet, where even the wind holds its breath.
Mihai’s skin prickles. “Vasile.”
The older man slows, his hand drifting to his knife once more. “I know.”
A twig snaps. Something rustles in the brush. Then, it comes out. A beat, the skittering of small paws confirms it.
Mihai freezes. “Did you—?”
Vasile sheathes back his knife. “Rabbit.”
The younger man curses under his breath.
The trees press closer here in this zone, their gnarled branches clawing at the edges of Mihai’s vision. The body he is currently dragging has settled into a leaden rhythm—each step sending a dull ache up his spine, the dead man’s back dispersing the snow on the trails, brushing against his thighs like a taunt. He’s not totally a fool, is he?—I’m still here.
Vasile moves ahead, his silhouette cutting through the mist that has begun to coil around their ankles. It shouldn’t be this cold. But the air gnaws at them anyway, sharp with the scent of wet iron and spoiled meat.
“You hear that?” Mihai murmurs, pausing to shift his grip. His palms are slick—with sweat or something else, he cannot tell.
“Hear what?”
“Nothing. That’s the point. The forest is too still.”
Then the wind stirs again, and the moment passes.
“Keep moving.” Vasile orders.
Mihai adjusts his grip on the knotted fabrics again, his shoulders almost screaming in protest. “You’d think he’d get lighter.”
Ahead, the path narrows, the trees leaning in like sentinels. Something glints in the underbrush—a scrap of cloth, perhaps. Or teeth.
Mihai doesn’t ask. Some questions don’t need answers.
They walk.
The mist further thickens.
“He’s getting heavier,” Mihai pants.
“That’s not the body,” Vasile doesn’t spare a quick turn, “that’s the land.”
The same path narrows again, choked by thorny undergrowth. The earth here is soft, sucking at their boots with every step. Vasile glances down. The soil is dark—too dark.
“Is that—?”
Vasile lowers the torch, and the confirmation stares at him right in his face. “Blood-soaked ground.”
“Old killings?”
The older man kneels halfway, touching the liquid cerise sticking on the snow, his fingertips nearly frosting upon feeling it if it wasn’t for the blood’s warmth. Warmth. He frowns. “No. This one’s fresh.”
“W-What?”
Vasile follows the blood trail. “It’s leading somewhere.” To something that eats and doesn’t leave leftovers.
Mihai’s grip on the knotted fabrics tighten even more than before. “Are we being hunted?”
“We’ve been hunted since we stepped into this woods, lad.”
“W-Where are you going?”
“Stay put.” The older man says and walks toward where the blood trail is pointing.
Vasile follows the crimson smears, his torchlight carving jagged shadows into the trees. The blood isn’t just spilled—it’s dragged, as if something too wounded to stand had clawed its way forward.
Mihai hesitates, then curses under his breath and lumbers after him, the corpse he was supposed to be dragging now forgotten behind. “If you’re walking into a trap, at least wait for me to—”
A whimper cuts through the dark.
A human.
Alive.
Vasile stills himself on his spot. Right ahead, slumped against a gnarled oak, is a figure—a man, his coat furs torn, his belly split open like a gutted deer. His fingers twitch around the wound and his breath shallow, devoid of anything that could possibly translate into life.
“Help…” he rasps.
Mihai’s stomach lurches. "Black God above.”
Vasile immediately moves, his feet automatically taking their steps toward the man as his grip on the torch tightens.
“Cornel.” Vasile calls, finally recognizing the man. He is from their group. What happened?
The wounded man, now identified as Cornel, grunts in pain as he sees the other man approaching.
Vasile drops to one knee beside Cornel, torchlight flickering across the man's ashen face. The wound is worse up close—the gash is not just a gash, but more of a cavity, ribs protruding like broken fence posts. Too much blood for any man to lose and still draw breath. With the stench of ruptured bowels and iron-rich blood hanging thick in the air, Cornel's shaking hands clutch at Vasile's sleeve, leaving smeared fingerprints.
“T-The others...” Cornel gurgles, a bubble of blood forming at his lips. “Gone… all gone…”
“Were you bitten?”
“It… played with us.”
“Were you bitten?” Vasile forces the other’s attention on him. “This is a Lycan, right?”
Cornel shakes his head, whimpering more in agony with his tear-streaked cheeks tainted.
Vasile’s fingers press against Cornel's neck, feeling the erratic flutter of a pulse that shouldn’t still be beating. The torchlight dances across Cornel’s face, revealing veins turning black beneath his skin like ink spreading through parchment.
Mihai leans in, bewildered with dread, then swiftly recoils. “What the hell is that?”
Embedded in Cornel's chest, pulsing like a second heart, is a mass of writhing black tendrils. They squirm beneath his skin, spreading outward in a grotesque web.
Cornel's breath comes in wet, shuddering gasps. “Not... Lycan,” he chokes out. “Never was. It made us think... made us chase…” his body suddenly arches off the ground, tendons standing out like cables in his neck. “Oh Black God, it's in me—!”
The thing in his chest bursts forth in a spray of dark fluid. A whip-like appendage lashes out, wrapping around Vasile's wrist. The torch hits the snow with a hiss as Vasile bellows, trying to pull away as the black tendril tightens, the skin beneath it turning colorless.
Vasile quickly steps back, almost stumbling backwards as Mihai watches with widened eyes.
“Vasile!” Mihai shouts, recoiling further as Cornel's fingers elongate into blackened claws, digging into the frozen earth. The dying man's ribs crack outward like a grotesque blooming flower, revealing not organs but a writhing, pulsating darkness.
"It made them... see things! T-The others…” Cornel looks at them with terror as the black tendrils continue to devour him. The dying man’s eyes lock onto theirs once more. “Run,” he chokes. “It’s still—”
The torchlight gutters violently on the ground, though there is no evident wind.
“—here.”
The man’s body contorts, his ribs cracking outward as something black and glistening erupts from his chest—not a beast, but a limb, long as a spear, ending in hooked talons.
Vasile yanks Mihai back just as the claw scythes through the space where his throat had been, not even minding the now extinguished torch on the ground. “Move!”
The trees shudder. The wounded man’s body collapses, hollowed out—a puppet now discarded.
And from the canopy above, the Vârcolac drops.
The Vârcolac lands between them with a ground-shaking thud, its matted fur bristling with fragments of bone and frozen blood. Mihai stumbles back, his boot catching on something soft—Cornel’s emptied skin—as the beast’s human-like eyes lock onto him.
Pray, goddamnit! “Mother Miranda, hear me—” he gasps, crawling backwards, “b-by the Black God’s mercy and His blessed name—save us!”
The air shudders.
The older man is already moving, his knife flashing toward the creature’s flank. He aims to stab it! And he did. The blade bites deep, but perhaps, not deep enough. The Vârcolac roars—a sound cracking like ice.
Then, it swipes.
Vasile flies backward, crashing into a tree. The impact knocks the breath from his lungs, but his shout is raw with a warning: “Mihai, run, lad!”
Mihai scrambles for the fallen torch, fingers fumbling with flint. Despite the extinguished light, he still has chosen to cling to it. Was it for hope? To still find themselves escaping this horror? To find the light of the day? But then, he hears Vasile’s horrifying screams of anguish from behind him. No hope. No hope. No ho—!
“Oh, G-Great Mother, offer us rescue!”
Vasile's screams continue to curdle the air—not from pain, but something worse. The sound of a man being unmade. Mihai doesn't dare look back. His fingers close around the cold metal of the flint, striking wildly until sparks dance across his knuckles but catch nothing. Useless. Like praying to a turned back. His voice cracks like a boy's, the entreaty on his tongue ragged between gasps. The torch rolls from his grip as he scrambles forward, snow soaking through his stained trousers.
He picks it up again, whilst Vasile's screams are cut off with a wet crunch. Mihai’s determination of not daring to look back doesn’t falter. He already knows. The very sound of tearing flesh and splintering bone tells him everything. His fingers finally strike sparks from the flint, but the torch only flares for a second before guttering out again, as if the very air rejects the light. He attempts again; this time, the sparks work. With passing urgency, his eyes cast up ahead—
And he stiffens.
The body.
The corpse he’d been dragging—the man’s corpse—is gone. Only the knotted fabric remains, frayed ends stirring in the windless air.
He swears he left it there!
The Vârcolac roars again from behind him. He is going to die, like them. The primal understanding of a prey that knows he has been cornered. What a bitter end.
Mihai promptly spins, the torch held out like a crucifix against the dark.
The beast stands over Vasile’s… whatever is decently left of him. Its maw glistens, but it isn't looking at Mihai. Its ears are flattened, lips peeled back in something that isn't a snarl. Behind Mihai, the snow crunches. It was not from the heavy tread of boots, but the delicate press of bare feet on frost. A strong scent washes over him afterwards—a scent of expiration.
The Vârcolac cowers, its belly scraping the earth as it backs away, and the forest holds its breath.
Why won’t this beast come at him? Certainly, it is not a Lycan, he thought. This is much bigger, deadlier, more… out of control. Mihai’s breath comes in ragged bursts, the torch trembling in his grip. The Vârcolac—a monster that had torn through men like paper—now whimpers like a beaten dog, its massive body pressed low to the ground. However, he doesn't know this beast, for he has only seen it at this moment for the very first time. However, the realization is worse than the beast itself: something has scared the devil.
Behind him, the cold snow whispers again. This time, it's clearer.
A hoarse and gravelly voice of a man cuts through the silence, raucous and deep, similar to the cadence of a benediction.
“The Great Mother always listens.”
Mihai turns.
“You just have to call.”
The corpse—the man—stands before him, barefoot in the snow. His skin is no longer the pallor of death but something stranger, veins dark as tree roots beneath the surface. His dark hair cascading down his open shoulders and his eyes are unsealed, in the hue of something odd for a man. Iridescent and oil-slicked. Those pairs look wrong. Too black, too knowing.
Mihai stumbles back for the nth time, with the torch raised. The man doesn’t react to the flame. He only smiles—a slow, serene thing, as if privy to a joke Mihai cannot fathom. But he knows nothing is a joke. Not at this moment.
Mihai’s resolve trembles. “Y-You’re dead…”
He only bestows a smile. It’s a gentle expression, the kind a priest might wear before delivering last rites. “And yet, She breathed into me again.”
She. “W-Who?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he lifts a hand, cold and rigid against the young lad’s cheek. He strokes the warm skin as he looks into those brown eyes. So delicate, so fragile, so… mortal. “Can you not feel Her? The sigh in the roots, the whisper in the water? Mother has slept so long… but now, She stirs.”
A gust of wind cuts through the clearing, though the air had been still before. The torch in Mihai’s hand snuffs out for the nth time.
His thin smile widens and his iridescent eyes reflect nothing at all. “She dislikes it when Her children forget their place.” Then, his face slowly falls in seriousness. “You are afraid.” He observes further, but Mihai would be foolish to consider it as kind. “But fear is only the first prayer. She will peel it from you like a rind from fruit. By the time you open your eyes, you will be clean.”
Mihai tries to jerk away, but his grip—gentle, so gentle—tightens just enough to still him. Then, it hardens. His mildewed nails are digging against his flesh, before his thumb brushes the corner of Mihai’s eye, catching the tear that spills there.
“She is coming home,” he adds in a deep murmur, voice like wind through dead leaves, “and your tears will not be wasted. This will be your salvation.”
Mihai’s pulse remains to thunder in his ears, a frantic drumbeat against the other’s quiet certainty. The tear on the man’s thumb glistens—not with reflected light, but with a certain type of darkness that clings like resin. He studies it, transfixed, before pressing it to his own lips. A sacrament. A promise.
“But for now,” his tongue slips his next words easily, his grip tightening back around the young lad’s jaw, “She will make you see, as She made me see.”
Mihai thrashes, but the blackened roots coil faster—serpentine, hungry. They do not tear, but instead, they lend. They even unmake with the precision of a priest breaking bread for communion. Mother Miranda’s communions are far different from this. This… tears not the flesh, but between it.
Then, the first root pierces Mihai’s palm.
It slips into his veins like water into dry earth, branching beneath his skin, mapping his nerves in filigrees of black. His scream is soundless, choked by the tendrils already surging past his teeth. They do not gag him. Rather, they open him. Like Cornel, he will be dismembered—but dismembered he will, freedom will meet him in the end. Isn’t that the real undertaking?
His visions begin to fracture.
Mihai chokes as the man’s grip shifts more, his thumb pressing into the hollow beneath his jaw, tilting his head back like an offering upon an altar as the black tendrils cling more to him in desperate anguish.
His iridescent eyes gleam, pupils dilating into voids, repeating the same words again. “She will make you see…”
This is grace.
The pain is immense, and Mihai feels every twist. But the understanding is worse. The sound that tears from his throat is layered—a chorus of the dead, the taken, the changed. The trees shudder more around them, bark splitting like skin over too-full veins as the snow blankets them.
Then, the ripping begins.
The tendrils pull, their blackened threads in a clear mission. Mihai comes apart not like a man, but of a concept—limbs separating at the joints, skin peeling back in wet ribbons, his very essence unraveling into the soil’s embrace. His blood does not spill. It is absorbed, drunk greedily by the black threads, feeding the slumbering thing beneath. And the other watches, his face light with rupture.
“Behold,” he breathes a whisper.
A sigh ripples through the clearing, the windless air stirring as if the earth itself has exhaled after centuries of silence. He gradually falls on his knees, his fingers buried in the frost, his blackened veins pulsing in time with the great, unseen heart beneath them. The figure of the young lad in front of him, so gruelly misshapen, disfigured, malformed to be the perfect imperfection. Transfigured. His body is no longer his own; it is a tribute, a thread woven into the tapestry of something… something. He hums, his iridescent eyes set on the very form in front of him. It wouldn’t look like mercy at this end, but it is. The black tendrils retreat eventually after a moment, slithering back into the earth like penitent serpents, their work complete. What remains of Mihai is not a corpse, but a monument—a sculpture of flesh and fungus, his limbs twisted into the shape of supplication, his mouth forever parted in the ecstasy of understanding. His eyes are open. Always will be open.
His Mother’s cruelness is gentle. Oh, what a blessing it is—to be seen.
He exhales, a sound like parchment crumbling to dust. He doesn’t mourn. Mourning is for those who believe in endings, and here, in the heart of the frozen wood, there is no such thing as an end. Only the slow, sweet unraveling of one truth into another.
Mihai’s body gleams in the weak light, his skin sheened with something wet and dark, not blood but the sap of the dreaming veins. His fingers, curled like roots around an invisible relic, have already begun to petrify, the flesh hardening into something that is neither muscle nor bone. Delicate caps of ivory fungus push through the seams of his skin, unfurling like the petals of some grave-born flower. His fingers, frozen in their final tremor, have sprouted fine, hair-like hyphae, tangling with the threads of his torn clothing. His spine arcs gracefully, a bridge between earth and altar, the vertebrae etched with dark, spiraling patterns—a scripture, written in the language of decay.
He leans forward, pressing his lips to the boy’s forehead. So ever young. And the kiss lingers.
“She has taken your fear,” he murmurs. “Now you will never starve. Never weep. Never be alone.”
In the quiet, in the dark, in the unmaking of all that came before.
He rises a minute later, with knees that do not ache nor a heart that doesn’t pound. He is beyond such mortal frailties. Death doesn’t have meaning to him anymore, but rebirth does.
And his Blessed Mother is dreaming—dreaming of it, and She is dreaming loudly.
Soon, She will step into the world wearing flesh, like a silken robe sticking against skin. Soon, She will peel back the veil of this fragile reality and show them all what lies beneath. Suffer no longer, for She will save us all.
And Mihai—
Mihai is beautiful now. Free of terror, free of torment and misery.
Blessed and remembered, he draws a curl out of his lips. But the hymn is not yet complete. His rejoicing will come in later time.
He slowly steps back, his shadow stretching long and thin across the snow, a dark finger pointing toward the village miles away. The wind carries the scent of damp earth and something richer—copper, salt, the iron tang of a storm yet to come.
The village.
He will start there. Besides, his Blessed Mother will need of her followers. In time, they will recognize her in acceptance. Pure and unconditional.
As the dawn comes, the inevitable is slowly painting the world in hues the living were never meant to see—or perhaps, they do. Just at the perfect time. He has known of this. He has envisioned it. He has bled for it.
And now, Mihai will see it too.
The young lad’s lips part further, not in a scream, but in a sigh. A single, spiraled tendril unfurls from his mouth, questing toward the sky like a vine toward the sun. It trembles, then blooms—a tiny, grotesque flower, its petals black and glistening.
“Yes,” he murmurs, “sing for Her.”
Somewhere, in the dark between worlds, something sings back.
He finally turns away at last, his bare feet leaving prints on the snow-covered ground. He walks—not with haste, but with the certainty of a man beyond living who has already seen the end of all things.
And it was glorious.
Behind him, Mihai’s body continues its slow, sacred unraveling. His spine arches, his ribs splay like wings, his skin splits with purpose. The fungal colony clings to him, blooming out of his body to form a hideous shrine. From the ruin of his mortal form, something new begins to rise.
Let him be with Her, and he will feel Her love. Her warmth.
And high above, in the village miles away that doesn’t yet know its impending doom, the church bell tolls—once, twice—before falling silent.