And the short story winner is... Benorah by Zary Fekete!

DarkWinter Lit is thrilled to announce that Benorah by Zary Fekete was chosen during blind judging as the winning entry in our 3rd Anniversary Short Story Contest by judge Rod Carley! "Magical, haunting, and deeply philosophical, this story stays with you long past the end." Thanks to all who entered the contest this year--it was an extremely talented field!

Congratulations also to Harrison Kim, our second-place winner for the story Pushing Out The Snakes, and our third place winner Liam Hogan for the story Black Henry!

You can read Zary Fekete's amazing story below, and the rest of the shortlist will be featured on our special Shortlist Saturdays feature, beginning next week! Congratulations again to Zary Fekete! And a huge thanks to Rod Carley for doing such an excellent job!

Benorah

(Inspired by Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis)

The twelfth day climbing was when the sky turned the color of pewter—flat, dull, and heavy, like the back of an old spoon. The air stilled. No wind. No snow. Even the ravens were gone. We moved slowly, painfully, blistered from sun and ice, every breath like glass in the lungs. Our water was long gone. Our throats were dry and tight. We huddled beneath torn tarps and fraying blankets, some asleep, some in waking dreams, listening to the silence press against our ears.

We had not given up hope—but it had thinned, brittle as frost underfoot.

That was the moment it appeared.

There was no fanfare. Just a shift. As if our eyes, dulled by snow glare and altitude, finally remembered how to see. It had always been there, perhaps. Folded into the clouds like a coin tossed into white flame.

Benorah.

Not an island in the sea, but a summit hidden from the world by ice and veil and time. The mountains curved upward in gentle, breathing lines. No jagged peaks. No unnatural towers. It was a valley between peaks at the top of the world. Snow gave way to soft light. Trees clustered calmly, unmoved by wind, as though anchored deep into the spine of the earth. The stone glowed faintly pink from lichen and minerals. The entire realm seemed held lightly in the palm of God.

And then they approached us.

They emerged from among the trees, walking with ease on ground we had fought to reach. Robed ones, clothed in dark silver that shimmered as if lit from within. They came not to rescue or rebuke. They came to welcome.

They stepped among us with quiet assurance. They had calm eyes. Strong hands. And somehow, before they spoke, we understood. Or they understood us, and gave off such calm that it felt we had always known them.

The leader stepped forward and said one word.

“Peace.”

He didn’t whisper. He didn’t shout. The word settled like a blanket over a fretful child.

His face was aged by sun and time. His voice thrummed low, like a cello. It stirred something long dormant in me.

I stood on weak legs and stammered out a question. I asked if he believed in coincidence.

He didn’t blink. Just gestured to the valley behind him.

“I do not,” he said. “But I believe in architecture below the soil.”

Architecture. Not random. A design buried, unmoved by fire or storm. A scaffolding under all things. I understood he wasn’t only speaking of land.

They ushered us forward into the folds of the valley and brought us food—not feasts, but sustenance for kindred returned from war. Fibrous cakes, earthy and slightly sweet—like remembering something you hadn’t realized was lost. Wine that tasted like sunlight through stained glass after rain.

They prayed in a tongue I didn’t know. But one word I did: Jesus.

They said it not coarsely, not casually. But carefully. As though it was a weighty name. The skin on my face burned. I remembered the last time I had said His name—loudly, as a curse, when my compass broke on day seven. I had felt no guilt then. Only anger. But now, shame washed through me. Not the kind that drives you away, but the kind that makes you want to be different.

They had no altars. No preachers. But their faith was woven in them, like embroidery that reveals itself only when the light hits just so. Their God was not signage. He was heartbeat.

That first night we slept in cedar-scented rooms. Sheets soft as breath. Above each bed, a simple carving: a fish, surrounded by light.

By the fifth day, my vision sharpened. By the seventh, I no longer had dreams.

Each of us changed. The cook wept one morning and then wrote for five hours. The boatswain, who’d never gone to school, made songs from numbers. I, bursting, scribbled on scraps of paper in a language I’d never learned. I folded each scrap and inserted them into the mouths of empty bottles and let them bob away down a babbling mountain stream.

All because of Solomon’s House.

It was not just a place but a presence. Its hallways thrummed like veins, ideas growing in vaults and greenhouses, blooming in chambers of quiet.

I was granted one visit. I expected cold metal and sterile glass. But what I entered was more silent than a cathedral at dawn. This was not a lab. This was a church of hushed ambition.

Air hung with something sacred. Not holy because of discovery, but because of remembrance.

The robed man, still nameless, led me without hurry. Through stone and copper gates, under archways marked with symbols I could not translate. They weren’t letters. They were instincts. Hieroglyphs of stored humanity.

The light was neither electric nor natural. A living glow, as if atomic sparks were bundled and hung like sheaves behind gauzy vellum.

Winged creatures that had no names in the lower world floated through the glow. One moved on transparent leaves. One shimmered like firelight, all movement, no body. A gemlike dove hovered near my face, as if it were a scientist studying me.

Machines turned quietly. Gears spun. Levers shifted. Pipes of glass carried liquid light in soft, pulsing hues. It wasn’t noise. It was a whisper. A conversation. With stone, with air, with memory.

The robed one led me through a doorway without a door. Inside: scent. An entire chamber dedicated to it. No seats. Just levels of air. Plants in patterns. Bowls of glowing resin and crushed petals. A breeze lifted cinnamon. Then salt. Then almond. Then rain on stone. Each breath brought something familiar and buried. I wept—not from sadness, but from recognition.

And there, the maiden. She stood beside a plant that pulsed like a star turned inward. Red hair veiled her face as she whispered something I couldn’t hear. The flower answered. Not with sound, but a ripple. A hum that traveled through my feet to the crown of my head.

It was holy.

When we left, the robed man waited until we were under open sky before he spoke.

“We do not create here,” he said.

Silence. Like a thread waiting to be tied.

“We recall what the world below has forgotten.”

I asked, “What is this place?”

“It is an ark. Not to bear us from the water—but from the noise. We remember God. And we listen.”

That night, we were given a choice. No summons. No speeches. Just a knowing passed like wind: stay, or go.

All chose to stay. Except me. Why I asked for passage home, I don’t fully understand. Maybe it wasn’t fear. Maybe it was calling. The robed one walked with me to the edge of the valley where the slopes veered back down to the world far below. No disappointment in his face.

Only mercy.

“You will forget us,” he said.

I opened my mouth to protest.

“Gradually,” he continued, “like a man forgetting the shape of his childhood room.”

“I’ll write it down,” I said.

He smiled. Once. Not encouragement. A blessing.

They gave me a craft, shaped like a leaf from a holy tree. It has runners that slid over the snow like silk. It bore me down past icy cliffs and mountain storms but I was untouched by ice or cold in its cradle.

Eventually I fell asleep as gravity pulled me downward. I woke to sunlight, and saw I was in a wide field at the edge of my own country.

---

It’s been six years.

I live quietly now. Janitor at a small college behind weathered sycamores and an out-of-tune bell tower. I told myself I wanted anonymity. But truthfully, it was the science wing. The light in its corners. The echo in its halls. Something in it remembered Solomon’s rooms.

On Tuesdays I sweep the physics lab. On Thursdays, botany. After hours I linger by the planetarium. I write in a notebook. Not poems. Not equations. Thoughts that slip out before I can stop them. Sometimes numbers form sequences. Solutions appear in margins I don’t recall solving.

I never spoke of Benorah.

Then the bottles began to arrive. The first one arrived quietly in my mailbox one morning.

Small. Ordinary. But its scent, cedar and salt, rose like confession.

Inside: a slip of paper. My handwriting.

“Do not forget the flower that speaks.”

I read it three times before I sat down. The words stirred something. Not memory. Something older. Like a truth knocking from within.

Weeks later, another:

“He was a gardener before he was a king.”

It made me cry. They arrived irregularly. No more than one a month. I stopped trying to predict them. They came when I needed them most. When the noise grew too loud.

Each written in my hand.

And yet, I didn’t remember writing them—until I read them. Then I’d remember the ark. My knees folded, bottle between them, scratching words onto parchment with ink that smelled faintly of honey.

One read:

“Noise is not truth.”

I carried that one in my pocket for a week. The ink faded in sunlight. These words insisted on privacy. I learned to read them in stairwells, closets, quiet corners.

---

A war has arrived. The papers denied it for week, and then suddenly it broke like it was all the world ever knew.  Sirens bleat like the city is weeping in Morse code. Ash falls. The sky is smeared red. Buildings collapse. Voices scream. Whispers of enemies who have crossed the river. Men with no faces.

I wake on the final morning and stand just in time before the wall behind my bed explodes. Shards of brick fly by my eyes like crimson sparrows. I vault down the stairs, taking them by twos.

The campus is nearly deserted. The dean scrambles for the exit, a briefcase clutched in his hands. A shell lands next to him and he disappears in a red mist.

I turn and flee, past the statues and the green houses. There is only one path open, the one that leads back to the open field. I run out to the middle of the grass and am about to turn back to see the destruction when I stop.

There it is. The last bottle. It is nestled down in a hollow of soil. I reach down and uncork it. A slip of paper slides out.

Inside, my writing:

“Take the craft. Sail until dawn…”

And one more line. My heart beats as I read it.

A final instruction.

I look up. The sledge is there. Curved, dark, waiting. Beyond the field, the world has twisted to an ungodly height, bent by the nuclear blasts that have warped the faults below the earth’s crust and mantle. A slope of impossible grade veers up until the land disappears into the clouds above.

I step forward and sit in the craft. I do not look back at the red glow behind me where the city has melted. I am not Lot’s wife.

Instead, I read the last sentence again from the crumpled paper in my hand:

“Build a new ark.”