Black.
A voice that belongs to no one—too soft to command, too persistent to ignore—threads the dark like a needle.
There was once a man who despised the underworld.
Light skims in, not color but pressure. A single panel opens: a barefoot figure sits at the lip of a metal catwalk. The world around him is ribs and pipes and crystals grown where condensation never learned its lesson. Above, the ceiling is an idea—distant, spiked with conduits, flickering with a pale imitation of day. The man stares upward the way a starving dog stares at a locked door.
Each night he looked up—toward the place he believed was the surface.
He begins with his hands. Wood scavenged from pallets, girders bent with a prayer and a hammer, rope braided out of line used to hoist the rain-buckets. He builds the first rung, then the second, and the world notices only when the ladder becomes a horizon. With every brace fastened the background brightens, as if the air itself were grateful for his stubbornness.
He built a ladder so long the sky would have to answer… or so he believed.
He climbs.
Under him, the city of caverns and scaffold dissolves to a gray tongue of noise. Rungs groan. Bolts complain. His breath measures distance; his fingers read scripture in splinters. He climbs past the level where children hold bowls. He climbs past the level where men trade blood for valves. He climbs into a zone where sound is a rumor and gravity is a contract he refuses to sign.
He rose and rose… until the underworld was only a shadow.
Midway, the world remembers itself. A sound like a sentence breaking—metal giving up its faith. The ladder bows, gasps, and comes apart, an unspooling of effort. His hand leaps on instinct toward the bright smear above. For a sliver of time he is a hinge between two truths.
Then he falls.
But in the middle, the ladder failed. And the man fell back into the deep.
Darkness is not cruel; it is merely thorough. He wakes in a rosary of bruises, the taste of old iron on his tongue. Around him are the remains of intention: skewed beams, a noose of rope, a rung with his thumbprint fossilized in tar. His eyes still hold something that didn't belong to this place.
He begins again. Not a ladder this time, but a skin: fabric stitched from tarp and trash, ribs bent from conduit, a burner he coaxes out of a stove's last dignity. He builds a balloon like a lie told lovingly enough to become a truth.
He did not surrender. He devised a vessel to bear him upward.
When the balloon finally swells, it does so with a sound not unlike hope inhaling. He rises through steam and flecks of soot, through air that has never been touched by weather, past lights that think they are stars. Heat paints his cheekbones in the color of fever. He smiles, because a body cannot contain a victory and survive as if nothing happened.
And he ascended—through vapor and dark—until he reached the ceiling.
He reaches it, and the ceiling is not a veil. It is a wall: steel on steel, riveted certainty. His knuckles strike it until the skin opens. His voice cracks and folds in on itself, a bird hammered flat. The balloon presses against the metal with the intimacy of a kiss that will not be returned.
There he found no sun—only a sheet of iron.
He lands without ceremony, a tangle of cloth and resolve. The ladder's corpse lies to his left; the balloon's to his right. Above him, the same old dark. He takes inventory of his capacities and discovers he has none left to sell.
He had nothing left to give. Only himself.
Rain finds him. Not the scheduled sort—this is the other kind, the kind that escapes accounting, beads on edges, turns dust to paste. He sits before a pool a handspan deep, the surface black as lacquer. A knife—small, workmanlike—waits in his palm with the patience of tools. Tears make their coarse bargain with the rain and disappear without receipt.
In the water, a light stirs: not reflection, not electricity; a suggestion.
He thought to cross over—if not in body, then with his soul.
A hand breaks the surface of the light. Not the pool—the light itself. It reaches without urgency, the fingers slender, the skin like the memory of touch. He has never believed in miracles. He does not begin now. He simply acknowledges the geometry of it: his hand, the other hand, the distance between.
But before he did, someone offered him a hand.
He looks up. The figure is neither old nor young; the face is both stranger and intimate, as if carved out of the same patience that made the pipes. A soft radiance outlines the shoulders and dims the background in deference. The eyes carry the gravity of someone who has already forgiven him for not understanding.
A human—or something human-shaped—helped him ascend.
They go up. No rungs. No rope. Light learns to be a staircase just long enough. Fog parts like a congregation. The air warms to the idea of being breathed. Layers of city unpeel. Shadow resigns. The ceiling that was a wall is now a window, and through it they slip as easily as a thought.
And above the darkness they found the light: a place without hunger, without pain.
The surface is not dirt and sky. It is a city made of decisions: structures that hum with a music too simple for ears, avenues walked by figures whose wings are not feathers but vectors—shapes of force attached to backs so gracefully that the word attached is an insult. Everything is white, not the sterile kind but the kind that includes the memory of all colors; it hurts nothing to look.
There lived the angels—completed beings, freed from what binds us.
They touch him. Not many. Two, perhaps three. Palms like mild weather press lightly against his chest, his brow, the old scar on his knee. His skin loosens from its duty. Light wells through it, a spill you cannot mop, only marvel at. He thinks of the ladder, of the balloon, of the pool; the memories float, then shine, then vanish into the brightness the way sugar does in heat.
He, too, became one of them.
A wide panel now, a breath held across two pages: the angels at the lip of a great gray chasm—our chasm—looking down. The underworld is a bowl someone forgot to put away, its rim bristling with pipes and rails, its inside glowing in household patches. From this height the rain looks like silk shredded on purpose. Their faces are calm. Their concern is gentle and absolute and impossible to touch.
From above, they watched over the people, in endless peace, in finished silence.
The legend ends as legends do: by indifference to the small economy of proof. The angels' city softens at the edges, chalk smudged by a tired sleeve. The man who climbed is either among them or he is not; his name either echoes or it fell with him and dissolved in the underworld's old water.
The last panel is sky. Not blue. Not black. A white that erases without cruelty. The voice returns once more, cool and kind and unhelpful.
So they say. But no one knows if he truly arrived.
Silence. Then the kind of sound that isn't—paper turned in an empty room—suggesting a story after the story.