The old chapel on the hill was long abandoned. Moss devoured the bricks, and no one remembered the last time it held a service. But every year, during the Easter Triduum, he returned.

They called him Elias.

He arrived just before dusk on Maundy Thursday, carrying only a lantern and a silver flask he never drank from. His coat smelled faintly of smoke, and his eyes held the brittle gleam of someone who had once died, only not in the way people usually meant.

The chapel’s great doors creaked open at his touch. Inside, the air was wet with incense that had long since evaporated. The pews were broken. The altar was bare. But Elias moved through the ruin as though it were still whole. As though it remembered him.

He stayed through the three holy nights, lighting a single candle each evening.

Locals whispered of strange sounds during that time: low chanting, or sobbing, or laughter that wasn’t quite human. They said if you pressed your ear to the chapel door, you could hear the clink of glass, a voice murmuring a confession, and another voice—older, patient—whispering back, “You are forgiven. Rise.”

No one dared go in. But on Easter morning, he would leave just before sunrise. The doors would be ajar. Three burned-down candles would flicker in their own wax.

And on the altar, scrawled in ash, always the same words:

“I was dead. And now I live.”

The End