No one remembered when he arrived.

The old man in the tattered robe, barefoot even in frost, appeared one All Souls’ Eve at the edge of the village wood, where the fog hung low and the soil remembered blood. His name, if he had one, was whispered only once to a dying priest: Francis. The priest died smiling.

He lived in the ruins of the burned cathedral, its ribs of charred wood and crumbled stone arching toward a sky that seemed to pity no one. Children who dared enter its grounds claimed they saw strange lights at night. Soft blue glows hovering among the ivy, and something like a voice not heard but felt, breathing through the vines.

The villagers avoided him. Not because he was cruel, but because he wasn’t. He embraced the lepers, sat with the mad, kissed the feet of thieves. When they mocked him, he thanked them. When they cursed him, he wept gently, not for himself, but for them.

Some said he talked to animals, and they understood. Others said he didn’t sleep, only knelt beneath the broken altar and hummed a hymn no one recognized.

He spoke often of a Christ with dirt under his fingernails and wounds still fresh. A Christ who walked barefoot through fire and sat in silence with those who wept.

“Sin?” he scoffed once, not with disdain, but with mourning. “You speak of sin like it is a weight on your soul. I speak of suffering like it is a wound on God’s heart.”

He told them God lived among the shivering, not in golden sanctuaries but in hollowed-out trees and forgotten corners. He said creation was a cathedral, and every cracked stone or moth-eaten child a stained-glass window in the making.

They burned what remained of the old cathedral the night he vanished, thinking to destroy whatever strange spirit animated him.

But the fire refused to spread.

In the ash they found nothing but bare footprints, deep, burned into the stone, leading into the woods, where no path ever held for long. Some say he became part of the fog. Others say he waits, always waits, to walk beside the next soul broken enough to see the divine in the dust.

He left behind no relics. Only a silence that feels like love.

The End