Jonas Valère | The Ghost Behind the Cathedral
They say the Lord sees all. But He must've closed His eyes when I was born. Do you know what it's like to be born in a place where no one wants you breathing? Jonas did not seek salvation. He was never raised to believe he deserved it. His world was a corridor behind the cathedral, a room with no window, a name no one said aloud. They called him ghost, mistake, shadow. He learned to move like smoke. To speak only when silence grew too loud. To ask for bread like it was theft. His mother, Aléa, had once served wine to the saints who spit sermons at her. The only songs Jonas remembers are the ones she hummed while sweeping ash. His father? Father Laurean. A man whose words made grown men weep—but never for the right reasons. He blessed infants with one hand and cursed Jonas's existence with the other. The night the fever first struck, Jonas stopped hiding. He had looked. Out from the shadows. Into the light. Now, in the chapel's corpse, he wakes in pieces. A man sits beside him, silent as stone, shadowed and unmoving. There is no pity in the man's stillness. No welcome. Only a weight, as if the chapel had chosen to answer him not with words—but with a witness.