Chapter 1: The Hermit's Warning
The rain hadn’t stopped for three days. It wasn’t a storm, just a cold, whispering drizzle that seeped into everything—the wool of Elias’s cassock, the pages of his breviary, the mortar between the stones of the crumbling cottage. The place smelled of wet earth, old smoke, and something else, something sweet and faintly rotten beneath the floorboards.
Brother Matthias hadn’t taken his eyes off him since he’d entered.
“You’ll leave,” Matthias said. It wasn’t a suggestion. His voice was the sound of dry reeds scraping together. He sat hunched on a stool by the dead hearth, a blanket draped over his skeletal shoulders. The single candle on the blackened oak table between them guttered, making the hollows of his cheeks seem bottomless.
“I’ve been sent to stay,” Elias replied, keeping his own voice even. He placed his hands flat on the table, the wood grain rough against his palms. He’d noticed the marks carved into it—swirling, interconnected lines that seemed to move in the shaky light. They made his skin prickle. “To minister. To rebuild.”
Matthias let out a sound that might have been a laugh or a cough. “Minister. To the trees? To the stones? The people here have a minister. They have him.”
“The old ways are dead.” Elias said it with more conviction than he felt. The forest outside the single window was a wall of impenetrable black, and it felt watchful.
“Nothing dies here.” Matthias leaned forward suddenly, the blanket slipping. The candlelight caught in his milky, wide eyes. “It sleeps. It waits. It remembers the taste of the Host, the scent of incense. It finds them… amusing.”
Elias stood up, the stool legs scraping loud against the stone floor. “I’ll fetch more wood for the fire.”
“He tasted my faith, you know.”
The words stopped Elias cold. He turned. Matthias was staring at the altar-table, at those bleeding sigils.
“What?”
“The priest of the green. The keeper.” Matthias’s gaze slid back to Elias, and there was a terrible, naked envy in it. “Before he takes your flesh, he tastes your faith. Sips at your devotion like fine wine. Mine was bitter. Thin. He found it lacking.” A twisted smile cracked his lips. “He showed me things anyway. Just enough to break me. To make me crave what I couldn’t have.”
Elias’s heart was a hard, frantic knock against his ribs. “This is blasphemy. Demonic fantasy.”
“Is it?” Matthias whispered. Then he moved with a speed that belied his frailty. He was across the room, his cold, bony hand clamping around Elias’s wrist like a vice. His breath was foul, like turned soil and spoiled meat. “He will have you. Body and soul. Just like all the others they sent. They didn’t vanish. They changed. They stay with him in the deep green, where the roots knit bones together and the sermons are sung by starlight.”
Elias yanked his arm back, tearing himself free from that shocking strength. “Enough!”
Matthias stumbled back, collapsing onto his stool, deflated. He stared at his own empty hand, trembling. “You walk into his chapel thinking you’re a missionary,” he murmured, his voice now barely audible. “You are the sacrifice, Elias. The willing lamb. He tastes your faith before he takes your flesh.”
The words hung in the damp air, clinging. Elias turned and fumbled for the iron latch on the door, needing the choking weight of the night, needing to be away from this madness. He shoved the door open and stepped into the clearing.
The drizzle kissed his feverish skin. He sucked in deep breaths, the air thick with the scent of pine and decay. The forest was a symphony of tiny noises—dripping water, the scuttle of something in the brush, the groan of a billion trees swaying. He walked to the center of the small clearing, staring up at the patch of cloud-choked sky, trying to remember the verses for protection, for strength. The Latin felt like ash on his tongue.
Matthias’s words had lit a fuse on a fear he’d carried since Rome gave him this assignment. The archives were clear. Seven priests. Over two hundred years. All sent to this valley. All gone. Reports spoke of pagan recidivism, of hostile locals, of simple disappearance. Not one mentioned a hollow-eyed survivor babbling about a forest priest.
A branch snapped.
Elias spun, his hand going to the empty space at his side where no weapon hung. Only his rosary beads, cold and smooth in his pocket.
Nothing. Just the shifting, dancing shadows of the trees at the clearing’s edge.
His pulse roared in his ears. He was a man of logic, of scripture, of ordered sacrament. This primal fear was an animal thing, curling in his gut. He took another step back toward the cottage, his boot sinking into soft mud.
Then he heard it.
Not the wind. Not an animal.
A footfall. Clear, deliberate, crushing damp leaves under a steady weight.
Then another.
Closing the distance from the tree line.
Elias stood frozen, his blood turning to ice. The footsteps were slow, unhurried. They didn’t seek silence. They were an announcement.
He tasted your faith before he takes your flesh.
The steps came closer. He could hear the subtle suck of mud releasing, the quiet crack of a twig. They were just beyond the ring of faint light leaking from the cottage window.
Elias’s breath caught. He should run. He should call out. He should fall to his knees and pray.
He did none of it. He just stood, paralyzed, waiting for the walker to emerge from the dark and show him what a god looked like.
ELIAS HEARS FOOTSTEPS.
Elias hears footsteps.
They stop at the very edge of the light.
His own breathing sounded ragged, shamefully loud in the silent clearing. The drizzle beaded on his eyelashes, blurring the dark shape that now stood motionless between two ancient pines. It was tall. Impossibly tall and straight, unlike the slouching trees.
“Who’s there?” Elias called out, his voice cracking on the second word. He cursed himself for it.
The shape shifted. A booted foot stepped into the wan orange light from the window. Then a leg. The hem of a dark, water-logged cassock, stained green at the knees with moss. A hand, pale and long-fingered, resting against a tree trunk.
Brother Matthias stepped fully into the light.
Elias’s breath left him in a rush, not of relief, but of a deeper, more profound confusion. The man stood differently now. The trembling weakness was gone. He stood with a grim, solid posture Elias had seen before. A teacher’s posture. A scholar’s bearing.
And in that moment, the fractured pieces of memory he’d been suppressing since he arrived snapped together with a violence that made him dizzy.
The sharp, intelligent eyes that had held a classroom rapt. The precise, deliberate cadence of a voice explaining the fall of empires. The auburn hair, now gone to grey and white, but the same sharp, angular cut to the jaw.
“No,” Elias whispered, the word a puff of mist in the cold air.
Matthias’s face was a grim mask, the hollows still there, but the wild terror was replaced by a bottomless, weary sorrow. He looked like himself. Like the man Elias remembered.
“Teacher Matthias?” The childhood title fell from Elias’s lips before he could stop it. He took an involuntary step forward. “Brother Matthias? You… you taught me. Church history. Third form.”
A faint, agonized smile touched the older man’s lips. It was the most horrible thing Elias had seen yet. “Elias Thorne. Yes. I wondered if you’d remember. You were always my brightest. Asked the difficult questions. The ‘why’ questions.” His voice had changed, too. The reediness was smoothed over by a familiar, lecturing timbre, though it was worn thin, cracked at the edges.
“They told us you’d retired. Gone into silent seclusion for profound prayer.” Elias heard the accusation in his own voice, the betrayal. This man had been a lighthouse to him, a proof that intellect and faith could be one. To find him here, in this rotting place, speaking of tasting faith…
“I did retire.” Matthias’s gaze drifted past Elias, into the deeper black of the forest. “Just not to a monastery. I retired from one god to attend another.” His eyes flicked back, sharp. “And you’ve been sent to take my place. The brightest always are. He prefers it.”
“Stop.” Elias felt anger surge, hot and clean, burning away the fear. This was a perversion. A sacrilege against his own past. “Stop talking in riddles. What happened to you? What is this?”
Matthias took a step closer. The scent of rot was stronger now, mixed with the pungent, sweet smell of crushed fern and deep, unturned earth. “What happened? I did my duty. I came to conquer a pagan shadow for the light of Christ. I brought my books, my rosary, my certainty.” He leaned in, and the classroom master was gone again, replaced by the haunted revenant. “He showed me they were the same thing. Light and shadow. Order and wildness. Your faith and his hunger. They are just two prayers offered to the same silence, Elias. He made me see it. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It breaks the world in two.”
Elias recoiled. “He? Who? A man? A demon? Show me.”
A true laugh escaped Matthias then, short and biting. “Oh, he’ll show you. He’s already begun. The dreams you’ve had since you entered the valley? The feeling that the trees are watching you back? That’s the first taste. He’s sampling you.” His eyes, old and broken and terrifyingly lucid, scanned Elias’s face. “Your faith has a different flavor than mine. Richer. More complex. He’s… curious.”
The intimacy of it, the violation, felt like a physical touch. Elias wrapped his arms around himself. “This is madness. You’re sick. You need help.”
“I need nothing from your world anymore.” Matthias straightened again, pulling the tattered dignity of his past around him like a cloak. “I came out tonight to warn you. As a final courtesy. From your teacher to his student.” He took a step backward, towards the consuming dark. “Leave this valley at dawn. Take your certainty and go. Build your faith somewhere the stones don’t listen and the roots don’t remember.”
“Or what?” Elias challenged, the fear morphing into a stubborn defiance.
Matthias was almost gone now, just a silhouette. His final words floated back, clear and cold.
“Or you will stay. And you will learn a different history.”