Candle Face Victim #23: The Preacher Who Lost His Faith

April 2, 2024

Main Subject: Candle Face

I’m slumped on the couch tonight. I’m tired, tired of these nightly visits from souls in torment. I’m starting to think I’m not who they need anymore. Maybe it’s time to stop. Candle Face must be pleased, using my weaknesses against me so easily. I feel spent, and whatever faith I had in myself is running low.

Just as that hopelessness was about to take over, I heard music drift through the room. It came from the far corner, and when I looked, I saw a figure stepping out of the portal. He was dressed like a man of the church, but an inverted cross hung around his neck. He motioned for me to stay quiet, as if he wanted only my attention.

So, I said nothing. My heart was pounding when he began to speak.

I thought my faith was unshakable. I built my life on it, helping people through the worst moments of their lives and always telling them, “Never lose faith.” It was part of who I believed I was. But I never imagined that faith would be tested this way.

One evening, after a late service, I was on my way home when I felt it. The air was too warm. I tried to ignore it, but then she appeared.

She stepped out from behind a flickering streetlight. Her face was burned, hollow, and twisted. But her eyes struck me hardest. They looked straight through me and pulled at something deep inside me.

Fear took hold of me, but I held to my faith. It was all I had.

“I don’t fear you,” I said, trying to sound brave.

At first, she only stood there and watched me. Then she spoke, her voice low. “I come to challenge your faith.”

Our nightly arguments started there. She used scripture like a weapon, twisting it to weaken what I believed. “Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light,” she said one night. “How can you trust what you see or what you believe?”

I answered her with the words of Christ. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

Every time she came back, she pressed harder. “Why do you cling to faith when it blinds you to suffering?” she asked. “Faith without works is dead.”

I answered as best I could. “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”

But her words began to work on me. Doubts I had never allowed myself to entertain pushed their way in. She found every weakness in me and kept pressing until it opened wider.

Then one night she asked a question I had no answer for. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” she said, and her form grew larger, more threatening. “Yet here I stand, against you. Does that not make you wonder?”

And it did.

“I... I don’t know,” I said.

Her smile twisted with triumph. “Then you are mine.”

A burning pain went through my chest, as if my soul were being torn open.

She broke my faith from the inside.

Now I’m trapped in her Lair, tending to a different flock. The Lost Souls here still look to me for guidance, but the sermons I give are no longer about God. Candle Face twisted my role. Now I preach her mercy, a dark promise and the only comfort she allows me to offer.

The man I was is gone. What I regret most is losing my own faith and pulling others down with me.

She let me see my church one last time.

I sat in the pews, a spirit unseen by my own congregation. The church that had once been full of light now felt heavy with doubt.

I listened to them speak.

“He seemed troubled,” one said. “Like he was fighting demons.”

“His sermons lost their fire,” another said. “It was like he doubted the very words he was preaching.”

Their voices were low and bitter. “He led us to believe, only to lose his own faith,” someone said.

My death split them apart. The church that had been my life’s work now bore the mark of my failure.

As the vision faded, the last thing I saw was the empty pulpit.

Now I’m another soul in her collection, a preacher turned into a pawn, forced to serve the evil I once stood against.

I used to think my faith couldn’t be broken. Now I know how fragile it was.

After the preacher finished, he began to fade back into the corner he had come from. Before he disappeared, he paused and looked back at me one last time. I could see conflict in his face, resignation mixed with some last trace of duty. He told me quietly that he hadn’t abandoned his calling. Even in Candle Face’s Lair, he still tended a flock.

Then he stepped into the portal and was gone. I sat there and tried to take in what I had heard. A preacher who had once lived by faith was now forced to comfort the damned under Candle Face’s rule. That alone showed me how far her power could go.

Personal Note to My Readers

Candle Face used doubt against the preacher and took his soul. When his faith gave way, she twisted his role into something ugly, forcing him to preach her name as a source of mercy in a place where mercy doesn’t exist. That’s one of the clearest examples yet of how she works. Her violence reaches beyond the body. She goes after what holds a person together.

Still, facing something like Candle Face isn’t as simple as telling yourself to believe harder. She uses fear, doubt, and even sacred words against people. Any real resistance has to start with knowing your own weaknesses.

That’s what makes the preacher’s story so painful. Even when we question ourselves, we have to hold on to whatever ties us to good. It may be the only thing standing between us and something like Candle Face.

I don’t think doubt can be avoided. But it can’t be surrendered to, either.

The investigation continues in the three most recent entries below. Each adds to the record on Candle Face (Isabel), the Lost Souls, and the Fugitives. You’ll find every entry to date in The Journal.