Elias felt the approaching solstice in his bones, an ache deeper than arthritis. For seventy-four years he had been the Sexton of St. Giles-in-the-Dell, a title inherited like his thinning hair and the slight stoop in his shoulders. St. Giles was a stone thumb pressed against a sullen sky, its graveyard a spill of crooked teeth. Elias tended both with a weary, methodical love.
The town, however, had long since moved on. They used the church for Christmas concerts and the graveyard as a scenic shortcut. The whole town, it seemed, had been quiet quitting on its own soul for a generation. They were all about their little online shops, their soulless side hustles selling artisanal dog biscuits or curating playlists for people they’d never meet. They had a parasocial relationship with their own history; they liked the idea of a quaint old church, but couldn’t be bothered with the inconvenient truths of faith or decay.
His grand-niece, Lyra, visiting from the city, had diagnosed it last week. “The whole vibe of this place is just… constipated, Uncle Eli,” she’d said, scrolling through her phone as if the screen held a cure. “It’s like everyone is permanently in goblin mode, but with nice curtains.”
Elias just grunted and continued polishing the brass lectern. She didn’t understand. No one did anymore. It was an IYKYK sort of duty, and Elias was the only one left who knew.
The night of the winter solstice was clear and cold enough to crack a tooth. A blade of a moon hung in the inky black. Elias pulled on his thickest wool coat, the one that smelled of damp earth and beeswax. He ignored Lyra’s concerned look from the doorway of the rectory.
“Going for a walk? It’s freezing,” she said. “Are you sure you’re not just, like, entering your spooky old man era? Mom said I should watch you.”
“The dead don’t mind the cold,” Elias said, his voice a gravelly whisper. “I have a chore.”
He trudged out into the graveyard, his lantern casting a wobbling circle of gold on the frost-kissed tombstones. He bypassed the new section with its clean granite and laser-etched portraits, heading for the oldest part of the yard, where the stones were worn to nubs, their names swallowed by lichen. At the very center, under a yew tree so ancient it had become a gnarled black shadow, was a single flat stone, bare of any inscription.
Elias knelt, the cold biting through his trousers. He waited. The wind sighed through the yew’s needles. For a moment, a sliver of modern doubt pricked him. He was just an old man kneeling in a frozen graveyard. Perhaps the town was right. Perhaps the stories his father told him were just that. He wondered if the collective indifference had finally succeeded in gaslighting him into believing his own family’s fables.
Then, the stone began to glow.
It started as a faint, pearlescent shimmer, like heat haze on a winter’s night. The light intensified, pulsing with a soft, internal rhythm. From the center of the stone, a form began to emerge. It was not a creature of flesh but of woven moonlight and captured frost. It coiled upwards, a foot, then two, then ten. It was long and slender, its body a shimmering, translucent tube through which faint, dark specks swirled like sediment in a river. The Solstice Worm.
It had no eyes, no mouth, but Elias felt its ancient, silent question.
“They’re not well,” Elias whispered to it, his breath pluming. “They’re full of bitterness. The argument between the butcher and the baker over that fence post. The silent resentment of Mrs. Gable for her son who never calls. The boy who delivers the papers, his heart broken for the first time. It all just sits. It festers.”
The Worm undulated, its light seeming to listen. Then it unspooled from the stone and began to drift, floating an inch above the frozen ground. Elias stood and followed, his lantern held high. His job was not to command it, but to guide it, to bear witness.
They floated past the newer graves, then out of the churchyard gate and into the sleeping town. The Worm passed through walls as if they were mist. As it glided over each house, the dark specks within its body multiplied. It was feeding. Not on people, but on the shadows that clung to them. It consumed the unsaid apologies, the hoarded grudges, the quiet griefs that had no other place to go. Through the lit window of the pub, Elias saw two men who hadn’t spoken in a year suddenly catch each other’s eye and nod, the ancient anger dissolving like smoke.
He saw the town’s collective misery, a foul, stagnant accretion of small pains. The Worm ingested it all, purifying it, its own light growing brighter and cleaner with every silent scream it swallowed.
Suddenly, a figure appeared under a streetlight. It was Lyra, wrapped in a duvet, her face pale.
“Uncle Eli? What is that?” she breathed, her phone forgotten in her pocket. She wasn’t scared; she was mesmerized.
The Worm paused, its form shimmering before her. For a second, Lyra saw an image in its glowing depths: herself, aged sixteen, sobbing into a pillow over a forgotten teenage betrayal, a sadness she thought she’d long since processed. She felt a phantom weight lift from her chest, a lightness she couldn’t explain.
“It’s the sexton’s other job,” Elias said, his voice soft. “Every living thing needs tending. Not just the buried.”
The Worm turned from them and drifted back towards St. Giles. As the first hint of dawn bruised the eastern sky, it coiled back onto its stone, growing smaller and smaller, its light folding in on itself until it was just a shimmer, and then nothing. The flat stone was once again just a stone.
The sun rose. A new day. The longest night was over.
Lyra walked back with him to the rectory, the duvet trailing behind her. The air felt different. Cleaner. As they reached the church steps, Mr. Henderson, a man known for his perpetual scowl, was walking his dog. He met Elias’s eyes.
“Morning, Sexton,” he said, and there was no edge to his voice. He even smiled, a small, rusty thing. “Morning, miss.”
Elias nodded. He handed his lantern to Lyra and picked up the old broom by the door. He began to sweep the steps, the bristles whispering against the stone. Lyra watched him, watched the first rays of the new sun catch the dust motes he disturbed, turning them to a brief, dancing gold. It wasn’t just a chore. It was a benediction.
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