Where the Wicked Pray.

He didn't really care for the Holy Book... Growing up his mother had been devout, she had been strict, but not necessarily unkind...still, he never let her know that he found no solace in her faith.

"Now...Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen". (Hebrews 11:1). He knew that one by heart. The only part of religion that fascinated him. The only part that he wanted to test.

He was never sure anymore when he was awake or when he was dreaming - life seemed like a constant nightmare. He wanted to wake up so badly.

But... the voice in his head kept whispering evil things.

Ever notice how the wicked lives forever and the good die young. Maybe the wicked are the good ones and the good ones are completely wicked.

So it was his job to test that premise. To prove that his foundational theory was correct.

The man had lived a good many years...so he must be good. He had seen many die young...including his baby sister. Had she been wicked - for that was when his mother had changed - becoming sad and distant, almost forgetting that he existed.

..

It always started the same way...as if he were viewing himself outside of himself...questioning and proving his hypothesis.

The way he could barely contain his Anticipation as he paced back and forth. The sheer excitement...the exhilaration, expectation and ecstasy of his fake faith filling his mind and giving joy to his soul. His entire body trembled with the beauty of these private and treasured moments. MOMENTS WHICH WERE HIS ALONE TO DELIGHT IN AND SAVOR WITH FERVENT PRAYER.

The man always arrived at the clearing already knowing what he was supposed to do... His eyes ablaze with the light of one who had mistaken madness for sacred belief.

Above the altar was written the inscription...

Here at the altar, we pray for the wicked

Who among us is the wickedest of all

We neglect the important things in life

thinking ourselves Immortal

Forgetting that we exist always under the shadow of death.

The stone slab altar waited in a secluded glade that didn’t exist on any map, he had made sure of that ~~ this was his forest, his sacrificial sanctuary and...part something else entirely. Candles fluttered and flamed. Shadows loomed eerily - listening to the creature who believed himself devout, but only inasmuch as it suited him to be so- lifting his hypocritical hands in ritualistic worship.

Yet, somehow, he could never see the victims’ faces. They were blurred, like offerings he wasn’t supposed to understand. He only sensed their fear, clouded and thick as smoke, drifting around him. Each time he whispered the prayer ~~words he didn’t recognize but somehow knew~~ he felt a strange satisfaction, a righteousness that was completely foreign. Something that belonged to him alone.

He circled the altar...chanting...drunk on his own depravity.

Here at the altar, we pray for the wicked

Who among us is the wickedest of all

We neglect the important things in life.....

He encouraged his guests, his victims, to join in...they too, feeling the effects of the holiness of their savior, so they circled...hands lifted to the Heavens - never realizing his true purpose. Never seeing the blood that pooled beneath the traitorous altar...too late realizing the perfidious lies of their betrayer.

Before the altar came to see him for the hypocrite that he was, there were many others ~ each lured here by a different personal hunger, each convinced by him that they were chosen.

....

People, he long realized - were hungry for something which only they could see, feel and understand. Something which made their souls thirst, made them gullible for believing any lunatic's offer of a quenching. Oh yes! He knew he was a psychopathic madman. He thrived upon the knowledge.

The first of his followers was the lovely Marina, a painter whom he convinced that the altar whispered colors no mortal eye could see. She came with her brushes and her trembling faith, painting the invisible canvas with strokes that she thought mesmerising, even though they vanished immediately right before her eyes. When she finished, the forest seemed to breathe through her lungs. She followed his instructions to the letter. Never questioning - just blindly accepting. Laying herself prone upon the un-blessed stone.

Marina never truly realized the dark nature of her predicament...Her life - her body, she believed, was being lifted to a higher plane.

Her last words were a prayer to imagined pigment itself.

...

Then came Jonah, a scholar who mistook devotion for discovery. He cataloged the altar’s symbols, tracing them into his notebooks until the ink began to bleed upward, rewriting him instead. He thought he was recording history; he was only rehearsing his own erasure.

...

Evelyn arrived next, barefoot, carrying a candle that burned with her fervour and passion. She said she dreamed of the altar every night, that it promised her peace. When she knelt, the candle flickered even brighter to life ~ into flame, into shadow. The light bent away from her face, as if ashamed to witness what came next.

There were many others who came...all believing in something beautifully religious - a reawakening and rebirthing.

Each believed they were offering, and being offered something sacred. Each left behind a silence drowned in evil and blood.

.....

And then, the man ~ the one who believed himself devout ~ stepped forward, rejoicing. He thought he was continuing their work, completing the rite.

.....But

Before the altar began to stir, there was one more who came -- a presence that would unravel everything the man believed about devotion and dream.

~~~Her name was Lucian, though the man never heard it spoken. She arrived without sound, her footsteps absorbed by the mist. Before her unannounced arrival, he was always the one who invited the others who brought offerings ~ paint, ink, or flame...

She arrived uninvited... carrying nothing but a small mirror wrapped in mystery. When she reached the clearing, she did not kneel. She simply stood before the altar and whispered, “I’ve been here before.”

The man, watching from the shadows, felt the words strike something deep and un-remembered. He had seen her face before, he was sure of it - perhaps in the reflection of the altar’s stone, perhaps in the blurred faces of the others. But when he tried to recall, the memory slipped sideways, replaced by the echo of her voice.

Lucian began to unwrap the mirror. The air thickened. The candles bent toward her as if drawn by gravity. When the cloth fell away, the mirror reflected... not her - it reflected him, standing where she stood, hands raised in his usual ritual.

He blinked...but she was gone. Only the mirror remained, resting on the altar, showing him performing the ceremony he had not yet begun.

That was when the altar began to grow restless.

The forest seemed suddenly closer, too close for comfort - the shadows trembled...as if remembering what he had forgotten.

And somewhere beneath the stone, something whispered - not to him, but through him:

“He knows.”

.....

Lucian’s arrival didn’t just interrupt the routine of his ceremony - it rewrote the dream’s architecture, the way a single wrong note can spoil a good tune.

At first, the man tried to pretend nothing had changed.

He stepped toward the altar, ready to resume the familiar motions: the raised hands, the whispered prayer, the sense of righteous purpose that always washed over him like warm oil before a kill. But the air itself seemed to resist him. It thickened, as if the clearing itself could not easily breathe.

The mirror Lucian left behind gleamed faintly on the altar.

He refused to look at it.

He told himself she was just another dream-figure, another offering, another shadow passing through the rite. But the forest disagreed. The tree branches became shapes he almost did not recognize - shapes that looked like letters, like warnings, like bodies he had buried under layers of devotion.

The candles flickered without flame, then they sparked in unison, as though responding to a single pulse.

He lifted his hands again. The shadows leaned back.

He whispered the first syllable of the prayer.

The altar shuddered...just enough to make the stone seem alive, as if it were inhaling.

The man froze. The prayer dissolved on his tongue. The mirror’s surface rippled, and for a moment he saw Lucian’s reflection instead of his own. She wasn’t looking at the altar. She was looking at him.

I’ve been here before.

He shook his head. “No. You haven’t. I’m the one who performs the ritual. I’m the one who...”

The forest emitted a long, low sigh that made the ground tremble.

~~~

The mirror shifted again. Now it showed him standing at the altar - but not as he was now. This version of him was older. Tired. His hands were bound. His eyes were wide with the same fear he had sensed from the victims whose faces he never saw.

He stepped back.

“No,” he whispered. “That isn’t me.”

But the altar disagreed.

The symbols carved into its surface began to glow faintly, rearranging themselves like living script. They formed a pattern he recognized - not from the dream, but from somewhere deeper, a place he had never dared to acknowledge or assign a name.

The shadows whispered in a single voice, echoing:

He knows.

The man clamped his hands over his ears, but the voice wasn’t coming from outside. It was rising from inside him, from the hollow place he had mistaken for faith.

The clearing warped. The imagined cathedral of arches stretched taller, bending like arteries around a beating heart. The forest floor rippled... The candles flickered - reversed, flames pulling inward instead of outward.

Lucian’s knowledge was rewriting the dream.

And the man - desperate, trembling- tried to deny it.

“I am the one who sacrifices,” he insisted, voice hysterical. “I am the one who leads the ritual. I am not...”

The mirror cut him off.

It showed him lying on the altar.

It showed the shadows leaning over him.

It showed his own hands performing the ritual - not as priest, but as executioner.

The altar pulsed once, twice - --

Then it spoke - not in words, but in sacred certainty:

You were never the devout one.

You were always the offering.

And as the dream folded inward, the man finally understood why Lucian had come.

She wasn’t a victim.

She was the witness.

The one who remembered the truth he had spent countless dream-cycles forgetting.

The one who arrived to break the loop.

The one who forced the altar to awaken.

.....

The altar sighed...groaned. It had learned enough from its worshippers to dream on its own.

That was when the turning began.

The forest folding. The altar breathing.

The dream decided it was time for the real awakening.

.........

To the dreaming man...tonight...something was different.

The trees seemed bent differently, branches curling together. The altar pulsed faintly, as if somehow alive. And the shadows~~usually content to watch ~~ began to move with intention.

He tried to speak the prayer, but the words tangled. Melted. Slipped away.

A voice rose from the altar, soft and familiar.

“You don’t belong on that side.”

He froze. The shadows thickened, swirling around him - became black nothingness. The candles flared - the light went out. The forest exhaled.

Then the altar cracked open.

Hands ~~his own hands ~~reached out from inside the stone, grasping his wrists. He tried to pull away, but the dream logic held him fast. The world folded, edges collapsing like wet paper. The victims all appeared - blurred faces sharpened, and he realized with a cold jolt that they were all versions of him ~~each one staring back with a different expression: pleading, furious, hollow, resigned. Revenge-fuelled.

The altar swallowed him whole.

He fell through darkness. The prayer echoed around him, spoken now in a voice that was unmistakably his.

Here at the altar, we pray for the wicked

Who among us is the wickedest of all

We neglect the important things in life

thinking ourselves Immortal

Forgetting that we exist always under the shadow of death.

And then~~

A jolt. A gasp.

A surface beneath him.

He opened his eyes. He was not home in his bed. Not anywhere he recognized.

He lay on a cold slab of stone, wrists bound with something that felt like woven roots. Candles flickered around him~~~real ones this time, their flames steady and bright. Too close...they were burning his flesh.The forest loomed overhead, but it was no longer dreamlike. It was solid. Heavy. Alive.

And standing over him was a figure with his face.

Unblurred. Undistorted.

He realized he was not dreaming.

The figure smiled gently, almost kindly.

“You finally woke up,” it said. “Now the real ritual can begin.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~