The Darkness I Carry

Chapter 12: The Ones Below

The mud was cold, but Leah didn't move.

It clung to her legs like something sentient, creeping higher, slow and deliberate, like it was tasting her. She could feel it inside her boots now, seeping between her toes, slick and chill. Her breath came in short clouds that vanished before they reached her lips. The voices below whispered in rhythms older than language—clicks, pulses, groans that rose from the pit like the moaning of a world long buried.

She didn't try to understand them.

She let them in.

Let them soak into her bones like water into dry earth.

The Beast was silent.

Not gone—just listening.

Still. Patient.

Like a predator crouched in the tall grass of her ribs, waiting to see who would make the first move.

The pit pulsed.

Not with movement, but with presence.

This wasn't a grave.

It was a mouth.

And Leah had stepped into its breath.

She felt it now—the truth of it—not metaphor but living fact. This place had teeth. Had hunger. The bones were just offerings. The mud, a tongue slick with memory. It knew her. It had been waiting for her.

Something shifted beneath her.

Not earth.

Not bone.

Something alive.

It pressed against her heel and then vanished. A ripple in the muck. She opened her eyes.

And saw her.

Clara.

Standing at the edge of the pit, barefoot and soaked in rain. Her hair clung to her face in strands, her dress was torn, her hands were filthy. But her eyes—her eyes glowed faintly. With light. With knowing. With something not quite human.

"I didn't mean for you to follow," Clara said softly.

"You knew I would," Leah replied.

Clara's expression was unreadable. Not sad. Not angry. Something deeper. Older. Like a priestess at the edge of revelation.

She stepped down into the pit without a sound.

The mud didn't touch her like it did Leah. It parted around her, like water for something sacred. It recognized her. Welcomed her.

Clara moved until she stood face-to-face with Leah. Her eyes shimmered with something between light and shadow.

"You heard them," Clara whispered.

"I did," Leah said.

"They're not gods. Not demons. They're…" Clara paused, glancing around them. "Truths. Forgotten by the world. Buried because they terrified the first ones who saw."

Leah's jaw tightened. "And we're what? Their messengers?"

"No." Clara's voice dropped. "We're their voices."

She knelt.

Pressed her hands to the mud.

It hissed under her touch. A sharp, angry sound. Then—light. Glowing symbols bloomed in the muck, one after another, spiraling out like veins of fire under the skin of the earth. Glyphs Leah had never seen and yet somehow recognized. Her heart thudded once. Twice. Then fell into rhythm with the pulse.

The Beast stirred.

It growled low—not with hunger, but awe.

It was sated. For now.

The mud pulsed with light.

Clara didn't look at Leah. She stared at the symbols.

"I saw you before I ever met you," she said. "In dreams. In the in-between places. You were always walking toward the pit. Even when you didn't know it."

Leah swallowed. Her throat was dry, her mouth wet with the taste of iron.

"And what happens when I reach the center?" she asked.

Clara looked up.

And her face—her face—was both hers and not.

A thousand echoes shimmered through her skin.

Girls. Women. Children. Beasts. Shadows. All of them layered atop one another like ripples in water. All of them watching Leah.

"You decide," Clara said.

The wind howled through the trees above like it was mourning something.

"You can let them in," Clara continued. "Become what the world fears. A voice not just for the Beast—but for the truth it hides. Or you can bury it again. The hunger. The power. The memory."

"And what happens to us if I do?" Leah asked.

Clara stood slowly, rain dripping from her fingertips. "Then we fade," she said. "We become myths again. Whispers behind curtains. Warnings in bedtime stories. Shadows behind church windows."

A pause.

"And if I let it in?" Leah asked again.

Clara smiled.

But it wasn't warmth.

It was fire.

"Then we burn the world awake."

Silence fell.

Not empty, but full—stuffed with meaning too large for words.

Leah's hands trembled. She looked down at her fingers—pale, muddy, stained with the glow of the symbols beneath them.

The voices in the earth grew louder.

Calling her name.

Not just Leah.

But the name beneath that.

The one the world had forgotten.

The one the earth still remembered.

She looked at the symbol carved into the tree above the pit. Then at the one glowing beneath her feet. Then deeper—into herself. Into the Beast.

For the first time, she didn't feel alone with her darkness.

She felt chosen.

Leah stepped closer to Clara.

Close enough to see the flicker of a thousand eyes beneath her skin.

"Do you remember the first time I bled?" Leah whispered.

Clara nodded slowly. "You thought it made you broken."

"I wasn't broken," Leah said. "I was waking up."

She dropped to her knees.

Pressed her palms into the glowing mud.

It didn't hiss.

It sang.

The symbols responded immediately—flaring brighter, deeper, folding around her hands like warmth. The cold was gone. Replaced with something ancient and electric, as if the ground beneath her beat with a heart of its own.

The Beast inside her rose to its full height.

Not snarling.

Not raging.

Just waiting.

"Do you feel that?" Clara asked.

Leah nodded.

"They're listening," Clara whispered.

"What do they want?"

"Truth," Clara said. "But truth is never kind. It strips everything away."

Leah closed her eyes.

And the visions came.

Not dreams.

Memories.

Not hers alone.

She saw fires in the old world. Girls tied to stakes. Villages swallowed by mud. Forests that whispered names older than any scripture. She saw herself in every age, in every body. Different faces. Same eyes.

The Ones Below had always been here.

Waiting for someone to remember.

To open the gate again.

To speak the name.

Leah leaned closer to the earth. She opened her mouth.

And the voice that came out wasn't hers alone.

It was many.

A chorus of hunger and sorrow and wild, untamed knowing.

The symbols exploded in light.

Clara gasped.

The trees groaned.

And somewhere far below—

The Ones Below opened their eyes.

The soil trembled with breath.

Because Leah had chosen.

She felt the shift in her bones, in her blood. Something had passed through her—a door, a key, a decision that could never be taken back. She had accepted the invitation. She had spoken the name.

And now they would answer.

The light in the pit turned red.

Then gold.

Then something that had no color.

Leah rose.

Her eyes glowed faintly now too.

Clara took her hand.

The rain stopped.

The wind died.

The woods went utterly, impossibly still.

And there, at the center of the world, in a mouth full of bones and memory, Leah smiled.

Because she finally understood.

She wasn't the Beast.

She was its voice.

And there would be no turning back.