Episode 3the dark mikslda angele be varpuciu .zoles spslvos ir samanu

They came again last night. Geležinės rankos. Iron hands. I heard their boots on the stairs, the way they never knock, just push. I held the children behind me, their small bodies pressed into my back, trembling like leaves in a draft. The hands searched our shelves, our pockets, the corners where we hide our warmth. They took nothing this time, but they left a silence that still hangs in the room like a bruise.

Why. That is the word that beats inside me now. Why do I still believe I will return to the mountains? Why does my heart say I do not believe, yet my feet keep walking toward something I cannot name? The ball is cold. The children sleep curled together under a blanket that smells of moss and dust. I watch their faces—too old for their years, too sharp in the jaw, too quiet in the breath.

This morning I stepped outside the wall for the first time in weeks. The Dark Place ends abruptly where the concrete crumbles into a field of pale grass and grey moss. I walked there, the ball in my pocket, and the ground felt soft and damp under my shoes. The sky was a milky white, no sun, no moon, just a flat lid over everything. And then I saw her.

She stood at the edge of the moss, half-hidden in the mist. An angel, but not like the ones in the old stories. Her wings were dark, frayed at the edges like burnt paper. No bells hung from her robes—only silence. She did not move. She did not speak. But her eyes were fixed on me, and in them I saw the same question I carry: Why.

I stopped. The ball in my pocket pulsed once, a faint warmth that faded as quickly as it came. The angel raised one hand, palm open, and in that palm was a single blade of grass, still green. She held it out to me.

I did not take it. I could not. My feet stayed rooted in the moss, and the moment stretched until the mist swallowed her whole. When I looked down, the grass at my feet had grown darker, the moss thicker, and I knew she had been real.

The children will wake soon. I will make them eat the dry bread and drink the water that tastes of metal. I will tell them nothing of the angel, because what can I say? That I saw a dark messenger in a field of moss, and she asked me the same question I cannot answer? That I still do not know why I return to the mountains in my mind, why I carry this ball, why my heart is a locked door I keep trying to open from the inside.

But I do return. Even now, as I write this on the floor with my finger on the dust, I feel the path ahead—not the road of iron hands and flat hums, but the old road into the hills, where the grass grows wild and the air tastes of stone. I will go again. I will search for the angel without bells, for the green blade in her palm, for the answer that hides in the moss.

Why. Because the ball is cold. Because the children breathe. Because somewhere in the dark mixed place, a silence waits to be broken.