The Songs Of The Hollowed Light (Chapter 1)

 

Chapter I — The Book of Dust and Echoes

It is strange, the way silence fills an old room.

It settles like a fine gray dust—over the shelves, the forgotten corners, and the remnants of voices long since gone.

I have lived most of my life inside that silence.

The bookshop has stood here for nearly a century, huddled between two narrow streets of Edinburgh where the fog rolls in every evening and the bells of St. Giles bleed faintly through the mist. The shop smells of old paper and sandalwood. It was my grandfather’s world once—his sanctuary. When he died, it became my inheritance, my home, and, perhaps, my prison.

During the day, I dust the shelves, replace candles, and listen to the floorboards sigh beneath me like something half-asleep. At night, I paint upstairs—in the attic, where the roof leaks slightly and the light from the streetlamps sneaks through the cracks of the shutters.

I was never a painter of fame or fashion. My art did not belong in galleries or among gentlemen who drink wine and pretend to understand suffering. My brush is clumsy, my palette narrow, yet my strokes are deliberate—each one weighed with something I can’t name. People who’ve seen my work say my portraits look “haunted.” I don’t disagree.

They are haunted. By what, I cannot tell.

Tonight, rain lashes against the glass, and the wind hums like an old hymn. I had been sorting through my grandfather’s shelves, dusting volumes I’ve touched a thousand times yet never read. Among them was a worn collection of poems bound in deep maroon leather. Its title—Songs of the Hollowed Light.

When I lifted it, something slipped free—a single sheet of paper, yellowed and soft at the edges.

I might have ignored it, had the handwriting not caught me.

It was elegant, fragile, as though each letter carried the weight of a confession.

The poem read:

“Beneath the hush of mortal dust,

A prayer burns, unseen, unheard.

Who dares to name the silence just,

When God forgets His word?”

I stood there for a long time, reading it again and again.

There was no signature. Only a faint watermark in the corner—an emblem I didn’t recognize: a pair of wings intertwined around a serpent.

It felt less like a poem and more like a message, misplaced in time.

That night, I dreamt of a woman’s voice—soft, like smoke weaving through candlelight.

She whispered the lines back to me, slowly, as if tasting each word.

And when she reached the last one, she said something that wasn’t written:

“You’ll find me where your brush trembles.”

I woke before dawn, heart pounding, paint-stained hands clutching the parchment.

Somehow, in that moment, I knew the poem wasn’t meant to be found.

It was meant to be remembered.

I don’t know her name. I don’t know if she’s real.

But when I look at the empty canvas on my easel, I can almost feel her eyes watching—

not from the world of the living,

but from somewhere older, deeper, crueler.

And so I paint. Not to capture her, but to understand her.

My name is Malien Valithea

And this is where it began.

© 2025 Mahadin Ahsan Malvin

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