Cold bit at Elias's hands. He knelt before the cracked altar, reciting prayers in a voice gone to gravel, his breath smoking in the gloom. Dust hung in the thin grey light leaking through holes in the roof, and the murals on the walls, gods no one remembered the names of, flaked away a little more with every tremor that passed through the stone. The temple was dying. So was the village outside it. Across the chancel, the ward flickered. It was a dome of milky light, thin as a soap bubble, swelling and shrinking against the dark pressing in from beyond the doors. Every time it dimmed, Elias felt it like a blow. The village's faith was running out, and the curse fed on that emptiness the way rot feeds on wood. A tendril of shadow slid under the oak doors and touched the barrier. It hissed and drew back, then came again, a little bolder than before. "Creator, hear me." His voice cracked on the words. "Protect them. Mend this land." He'd said the verses so many times they had stopped feeling like language and started feeling like breathing, automatic, necessary, the only thing standing between him and collapse. Each one cost him something. He paid anyway. He was the last of his line. Whatever his family had done to lose the Creator's favor, generations back, no one alive remembered, only that the punishment had outlived the crime, and now it was his to carry. His knees, his voice, and his failing strength were small currency spent against a debt he had not incurred. Hours passed. His throat had gone from raw to numb. Outside, the shadow found new ways in, through hairline cracks in the walls, through gaps where roof tiles had slipped, and dark smoke turned back by the ward each time, never far. Then the temple lurched. A crack split the altar stone from base to crown, and dust sheeted down from the arches above. The ward's glow stuttered, dimmed, nearly winked out, and Elias's chest seized with a fear that had nothing to do with air. He gripped the altar's broken edge and hauled himself upright, eyes shut, willing an image into the dark behind his lids: the Creator's light, steady, white, indifferent to how tired he was. "Please." It was barely a whisper now. "Please." The ward thinned to something like glass. He could feel the cold on the other side of it now, seeping through, not just weather, but absence, the particular chill of a world that had stopped caring whether it survived. Something in the shadow beyond the doors made a sound low in its throat. It was not words. Just hunger, old and patient, certain of how this ended. He thought of the villagers in their houses, listening to the walls groan, trusting that he was still in here fighting for them. That thought was the only thing left holding his spine straight. He pressed his forehead to the cold stone. "Let your light..." His voice gave out on the last word. He forced it anyway, a dry thread of sound swallowed almost before it left him. "...shine." Then silence and the dark, listening.

Chapter 1: Whispers of Fading Light