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.

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.

The forest hadn't ended for days. Or maybe it had, and he hadn't noticed. Hunger made time circular, and the fever made space a blur. Trees repeated like a prayer—same branches, same thorns, same relentless echo of leave, leave, leave.

But Jonas didn't leave. He didn't know where else to go. He had run out of city. Out of coin. Out of names to give strangers when they asked where he was from. So when he saw the chapel—half-devoured by ivy, hunched in the fog like a sinner too tired to kneel—he didn't ask why it was still standing. He just fell toward it. Like a moth with no flame left.

The door gave way with a sound like a dying breath. Jonas fell forward, onto stone as cold as the thoughts behind his eyes. Inside, it smelled of rain and soot and time. No candles burned. No voices sang. Just the faint dripping of water from a broken place in the roof, a rhythm like a leaky clock. His legs folded. His face met the floor. And the fever bloomed again, violent and gold and cruel. His body shook. He bit his tongue to stop the whimper escaping, but it came anyway.

The chapel breathed around him, stone cracked by ivy roots, floorboards swollen with rain, the holy scent of something old and dying. And that man—quiet, always there. Like he belonged to the church, or maybe the church belonged to him.

Jonas shifted, the fever still curling inside his gut like a coiled snake. His lips were cracked, voice low. "I didn't mean to come here..." No answer. Just the rustle of cloth. The creak of weight settling beside him again. "I wasn't even trying to live," Jonas whispered, dragging a hand across his face. "I was just—trying to leave."

Something moved. Not a noise. A shift. Weight. Footsteps. A presence older than the wood. He didn't flinch. If death wanted him, it could take what was left. But it didn't. A shadow bent beside him. No words. Just silence so thick it swallowed breath. Jonas turned his face away. And there it was. The first thread of memory. Pulling at the edge of his consciousness like a torn collar. He closed his eyes and let it drag him back, back through soot and shame and silent hallways.

He'd grown up in shadows. The city had many churches, but only one priest who made people cry just by speaking. Father Laurean. A man of marble voice and serpent gaze. Jonas had watched him once, from the cracks in the choir loft floor, preaching salvation with the same mouth that had whispered poison into his mother's ear.

Jonas was never allowed to be seen. The "bastard ghost" behind the cathedral walls. A smudge on the glass. A mistake dressed in borrowed clothes. They gave him a name, but no birthday. A room, but no window. Bread, but only if no one saw him take it. He had learned to be silent. To walk like a shadow. To pray like he was apologizing for breathing.

And then, on the night the fever first struck, he had done something he was never meant to do. He looked. His father had been standing at the altar, surrounded by gold and guilt and the scent of incense thick enough to choke angels. And Jonas—drunk on pain and heat and the sudden, aching need to exist—stepped forward. Into the light.

They screamed. They called him a lie. And when the guards came to drag him out, he ran. Ran until the cathedral was a bruise behind him. Ran through mud and market, through alleys and gutters. Ran into the forest.

He awoke sobbing, throat raw. When he opened his eyes, he thought he was hallucinating. He shifted, tried to sit, but the ache in his limbs fought back. The man moved closer. Not with pity. Not with kindness. With... something heavier. Something that wrapped around Jonas's throat like a vow.

Jonas's breath hitched. His mouth tasted of iron and dust. Fever still clung to his bones, but something colder moved in him now—recognition. Not of the man beside him, not yet, but of the silence. Of the rot between stone and scripture. Of the way sanctuaries rot slowest when no one prays.

His fingers curled against the cracked floor. He laughed—soft, broken, joyless. "Are you a priest?" Jonas asked, voice frayed. "Or just another ghost?""If you're an angel," he whispered, eyes wide and wild, "you're late. I've already buried the boy who used to beg for light." No one answered. Not God. Not the man. Only the dripping from the roof.

He had run from the church. And somehow, he had found another. The circle had closed. And he didn't know if that meant redemption—or just a prettier kind of ruin.