The Seraph Lord

I woke with my eyes already open.

No gasp. No jolt. Just the cold weight of breath returning to my lungs like I'd been underwater too long.

The bunk above me creaked, someone shifted in their sheets, but I stayed still. Sweat clung to my chest like oil. My hands were curled into fists against the cot. I hadn't meant to.

For a moment, I wasn't sure I'd ever fallen asleep. The dream — if it was one — still sat behind my eyes like something real. Not memory. Not vision. Just… residue.

I didn't move. Didn't speak. The silence in the barracks was different than the silence in the dream. This one felt emptier. Hollowed out. Like the quiet after a confession.

There was no firelight here. No figure in white. Just the slow waking world, soaked in shadow and breath.

Across the room, I saw Farid already up, kneeling in the corner beside his cot. He hadn't lit a candle, but his fingers moved in the air like they were tracing something — psalm lines, maybe, or old battle prayers. He didn't look up.

Tomas was half-awake, face buried in his coat. Jacob lay flat and still like a corpse. Nicco snored.

I turned to the last cot.

Leo.

His breathing was shallow but steady now. The bruises around his collarbone had yellowed. A few bandages wrapped his shoulder, and someone had splinted his finger. Whoever patched him did it rough, but it held.

He looked better.

But still too still.

I reached out and shook his arm — gently at first.

"Leo," I whispered. "Come on."

Nothing.

"Leo."

His eyes fluttered. Not all the way open. Just enough to know the dream was letting go.

He groaned like someone waking from deep water. Then his mouth moved, no words — just a breath, cracked and dry.

I handed him the cup we kept beside the bed. He drank with both hands, like it weighed more than it did.

When he finally looked up at me, I saw it. Not just pain. Not just confusion.

Recognition.

He remembered me.

He remembered all of it.

"You're alright," I said, more to myself than him.

He didn't speak, but he nodded — barely. And I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding.

Behind us, I heard Tomas mutter something about food. Jacob was already tying his boots.

"Still alive," Nicco croaked from his bunk. "A miracle."

Farid crossed himself.

The barracks were waking up.

But I wasn't hungry. I wasn't tired either. My body felt like it had been wrung out and hung back over the bones. There was something else in me — like an ember still glowing under ash. I couldn't name it.

I glanced once more at Leo. He'd gone quiet again, but not empty. His breath was steady. His hand still wrapped loosely around the cup.

The others moved in the dull rhythm of morning — Tomas sitting up, grumbling; Nicco looking for his boots like they'd betrayed him; Jacob already lacing his with soldier's precision. Farid stayed kneeling.

No one saw me slip out.

I moved quiet as I could, pulling my coat over my shoulders. The hallway outside was colder than I expected — like the stones remembered something the sun never knew.

I didn't know where I was going. Only that I needed to. I passed half-lit corridors and rooms with rusted doors, torch-niches black with old smoke. There were icons nailed to some of the walls — worn, flaking, faces of saints whose names I didn't know, but who still watched.

I bowed to each one.

The fortress was built like a prayer — tall, grim, and shaped by suffering. No map made sense of it. You found your way the way the faithful always had: not by sight, but by yearning.

And still, I found it.

Not a chapel — not really. Just a room behind a rusted gate, with iron bars and old dust and a single cracked fresco of the Transfiguration. The paint had bled into the stone, but His face was still there. The light behind Him. The wounds.

I stepped inside.

There were no candles. No altar. Just a broken stool and a slab of stone that might've once been an offering table.

It was enough.

I knelt. Not because I felt strong. But because I knew I wasn't.

I crossed myself. Then again. Then again.

"Lord," I whispered, "I saw him."

The words came slow.

"I saw him again. In the white."

I didn't say the man. I didn't say the dream. I didn't need to. He already knew.

"I don't know what You're showing me. I don't know what it means. But I'll carry it. If it's from You, I'll carry it. Even if it breaks me."

The silence after that felt deeper. Not empty. But listening.

I touched my forehead to the stone.

And waited.

The air was still. No warmth. No reply. Only the ache of my own chest rising and falling — the slow labor of a body waking into silence.

I stayed kneeling.

I didn't cry. I didn't beg.

I just waited.

And then — without wind, without sound — I knew I wasn't alone.

The air grew heavier. Not colder, not darker. Just full. Like something enormous had entered the room and filled it to the seams.

I didn't lift my head.

I didn't need to.

A presence stood above me. Not beside. Not behind.

Above.

The scent came again — myrrh, frankincense, and something older. A tomb fragrance. Sacred, but buried.

I looked up.

And there he was.

Not a man. Not quite.

Robed in white, towering and still. His face was veiled. His hands empty. There was no weapon, no halo. Only that impossible stillness. That knowing.

He looked down at me. Or through me. Or into something behind me I could not see.

And then he spoke.

"Is he listening?"

Not a challenge. Not a sneer.

Just a question, asked aloud — like thunder might ask why the ground trembles.

I didn't answer. Couldn't.

My lips moved, but no words came.

"You offer prayers as though they are coins," he said, "and expect Heaven to spend them."

He began to move — not walking. Just arriving in different places as though time was soft.

"He does not tally. He does not bargain."

"He does not need you to speak."

He turned toward the altar, though there was none. Just rough stone and dust.

"You are the one who must listen."

A long silence followed. Not empty. Full of everything I didn't know how to ask.

Then — as he began to fade — he said one last thing, quieter than the rest:

"The Name is written once."

"But the soul is written daily."

And then he was gone.

No flash. No smoke. Just the return of ordinary shadow.

Just me.

Kneeling.

Alone.

A week passed.

The bruises faded first.

Then the swelling. The cuts. The burns. The cracked lip, the purple ribs, the welted eye.

Not gone. Just buried beneath the fabric of routine — under clean bandages and mended coats and sleep that came too late and left too early.

Leo could stand now without groaning. The split in his knuckle scabbed over, though he kept curling his hand into a fist like he didn't trust it yet.

Farid stopped flinching when he stretched, though the red mark still lingered above his brow, faint as ash.

Tomas walked without a limp, but he winced every time he sat — his finger still swollen, a crooked thing he'd stop and stare at like it belonged to someone else.

Nicco hummed again, not the broken note from before, but close. Softer.

Jacob never mentioned his jaw, though the bruise along his cheekbone turned green before it disappeared. He still chewed slower, and never looked you in the eye when he did.

We never talked about the chapel. Not what we saw. Not what we heard.

No one asked why I barely slept or why I kept a hand over my heart when I prayed.

Even when the blood stopped, something in us still bled.

The mornings came colder now. The wind off the sea carried salt and silence. Our breath hung in the air long after dawn — like incense that no one had lit.

The priests hadn't summoned us again. Neither had the sergeants. Not yet.

We'd been left mostly alone — save for drills without weapons and silent inspections by robed medics who checked our pulses and watched our eyes like they were looking for ghosts.

I spent most days in the yard behind the barracks, watching crows gather on the black wall that faced the sea.

They didn't sing. Just watched.

Sometimes I thought they were waiting for us to fall again.

I read from the psalter Farid lent me. Just fragments. Psalms that felt like old nails in my mouth.

Sometimes I didn't read at all. Just sat there with the names of my family on my lips like a rosary.

I hadn't told anyone what I saw in the chapel. Not the figure. Not the voice. Not the words.

But I prayed differently now.