She had hardened into silence.

Stone was not meant to sense the turning of seasons, and yet she did. She knew the warmth of summer by the way no one lingered in the air made heavy by heat. She knew the cold quiet of winter by how sound thinned, and candles burned more slowly. A monolith surrounded by flickering light, she stood at the alter as she always had—hands open, eyes slightly lowered to witness devotion.

They came for many reasons: to pray, to offer small gifts laid carefully at her feet. To seek wisdom or absolution.

To confess.

She marked the time of year by the clothes they wore, by the number of bodies that passed before her. More came when the days shortened, when the nights turned sour with cold. They knelt longer, spoke softer. Wanted more.

She never let on that behind the slate-gray of her eyes there lingered an awareness no stone should possess.

She had been frozen this way for as long as she could remember. Long enough that memory itself had eroded. Long enough that eternity felt less like a blessing and more like a sentence.

December third was frigid, the skies swollen with low-hanging clouds heavy with snow. He was a stranger to her—the man with the red ribbon dangling from his fingers.

He didn’t approach like a parishioner. They came upon her with eyes lowered, not inclined to spare her a glance, but still asking something of her.

This one, though? He kept his eyes on her.

“My pledge,” he said softly, gaze fixed on her stony stare. “One offering. One confession. Each week, until the eve of incarnation.”

The air within the chamber was still, winter-quiet. As unmoving as she was. He didn’t rush, didn’t shift beneath her silence. He only stood there, letting her weigh him, his words, the thin strip of red hanging from his hand.

Then he drew the ribbon slowly across his palm.

“All I want is to be unburdened,” he said. “Will you hear me?”

Yes, she answered from behind the stone.

Her permission didn’t reach his ears, but he spoke as if it had.

“I prayed for patience,” he murmured, lifting a hand to her wrist. He looped the ribbon there, neat, deliberate. A bow tied gently into a knot.

No one ever touched her. No one dared.

But he was unlike the others, and meant to prove it.

“Instead, I learned the meaning of want so intense it could only be born of sin.”

He stepped back and took her in as she was meant to be seen—still, silent, unflinching. Something in him eased, as if her refusal to respond was a kind of absolution.

Then he turned and left without another word.

The candlelight flickered briefly, but didn’t die out.

And when the door closed behind him, the air held warmth longer than stone should have allowed.

He arrived again on December tenth, as promised. Stiff from the cold, snow still clinging to his coat.

He didn’t speak at first.

She had counted the times the candles had burned down and guttered out since his last visit—three. Each one plunged the chamber into darkness, and yet she hadn’t panicked. She hadn’t felt the familiar dread of being unseen, forgotten.

Not with his pledge echoing through stone like devotion.

Other offerings rested at her feet now. A heart-shaped box, a love letter folded and never sent, a rose gone dry at the petals’ edges. Tokens left by others—meaningful, perhaps, but not hers. Not truly.

The ribbon remained looped around her wrist. And though she couldn’t feel it, she knew its softness. Knew where it rested. Knew it hadn’t been disturbed.

Awareness anchored in offering.

He pulled his gloves off slowly, watching the shadows dance.

Please, she urged. The word seemed to linger, pressing against the walls of her prison. Look at me.

And when he did, he saw her lips were fuller somehow. Not changed enough to be certain. Perhaps a trick of the light. Perhaps he simply hadn’t noticed them before.

“I have dreams,” he said, voice soft and low, a confession meant for no one but his silent witness. “The woman within is always out of reach. We’re separated by oceans, sometimes mountains, and sometimes by only a few breaths. I reach for her, and find only emptiness. And when I wake...”

He swallowed, and she saw the effort of it. The way his throat worked around a truth lodged and lingering. Standing as still as she was, desire written in every inch of him, demanding more than he knew how to take.

“I don’t know where reverence ends, and sin begins,” he murmured, laying his gloves among the other offerings, his heat still lingering in them.

And when his eyes lifted to hers, something burned in his gaze—restraint drawn taut and threatening to snap.

“I only know my need for release.”

For a moment within the candlelight, he could have sworn the gray of her cheek bloomed like living flesh, but turned before he could be sure.

What he left behind seeped. A slow saturation pressed into stone, and she held it. Careful, as if letting it slip away would cost her something she had only just begun to recognize.

I want for you too.

December seventeenth arrived with stillness that suffocated. She waited, watching the light from the narrow windows crawl across her chamber and fade. Night followed, and with it—silence that rang.

He did not come.

She held the warmth he had left behind. The memory of it. But memory thinned with flame. The heat of his gloves bled away, hour by hour.

The candles burned lower, their shadows stretching longer along the walls of her tomb.

She felt herself slipping. Awareness blurring. Thought dulling. The certainty of solitude crept back in—familiar in its cold finality.

She waited. And waited.

And felt emptiness fester where want had been. Something in her tightened. Drew inward. It was an ache she could not ease, a hollow that threatened to pull her back into stillness.

He came on the night the world held its breath. The chapel was empty when he entered.

No offering in his hands.

He moved as if the wait had brought clarity. For her, it had only brought the chill of silence.

“I couldn’t come,” he said quietly, standing at the base of her pedestal, radiating heat she’d come to crave. “Because I knew if I did, I wouldn’t leave the same.”

He held her stony gaze.

“I won’t ask to be unburdened anymore.”

Bare hands rose to cup her cheeks, his palms molding to the facade of her face—reverent and certain.

“It’s you, the woman I reach for in my dreams. I’ve found you. And if you are trapped within stone, then so too will I be.”

Something cracked.

Not violently. Not all at once.

It gathered where he touched her, and leached slowly outward. The stone beneath his hands softened first—subtle as breath fogging glass.

She felt.

Heat. Pressure. The unmistakable pull of being drawn toward another.

Her fingers curled before she knew she had moved. A ragged breath tore from her chest as she swayed, her knees buckling beneath the shift of her weight.

He caught her.

She was flesh now—new and aching and exquisitely sensitive. His hands slid over her arms, as if afraid she might shatter beneath a firmer touch. It only deepened the ache. She pressed closer, learning gravity, trusting him to hold her steady.

Her mouth found his with need sharpened by an eternity of patience.

The kiss was not gentle.

It was desperate—restraint becoming ravenous hunger. Fingers fisted in cloth. Her gasp met his groan, and the echo filled the chamber like a benediction.

She drew him down with her, feeling the way the hard line of him settled into the cradle of her hips. The sound he made as he pressed into her slick heat was reverent. Broken. Want inscribed in every drag of his palms, in the trembling exhale he loosed against her throat, mapping the shape of her thundering pulse with his lips.

He found her mouth again with carnal greed as the memory of stone dissolved under the weight of pleasure. She moved with him, clinging, dragging him deeper with every thrust.

Sensation eclipsed thought. She gasped, arching into him, tightening around him with a cry that didn’t feel learned so much as remembered.

Release no longer felt like indulgence. This was devotion—offered and devoured.

He followed her into it, gasping into the hollow of her throat, giving her everything that remained of him—buried deep.

Later, when the chamber fell quiet and the candles burned low, the pedestal stood empty.

And this time, when he reached, he found the warmth of her. Soft. Alive.

His—just as he was hers.