Escalera Al Cielo Capitulo 1 — Trusted & Trusted

Ahead, the staircase stretched without end, each step faintly translucent, like frozen moonlight. And on the wind that blew downward, he heard voices—not human, but familiar. His dead father’s laugh. His mother’s voice, young and strong, calling his name.

Mateo hesitated. The stone in his hand pulsed with a faint, feverish heat. He thought of his mother’s face before the machines—how she’d laughed when he fell learning to ride a bike, how she’d held him after nightmares. How she’d whispered, “Mi cielo, my sky.”

Behind him, the first step reappeared on the jungle floor—empty, waiting for the next desperate heart.

Mateo tightened his grip on the stone, took a breath, and climbed. escalera al cielo capitulo 1

Mateo, seventeen and restless, wanted to laugh. The village of Lucero had many legends—about conquistadors’ ghosts, weeping women, and a staircase that supposedly rose from the jungle floor and vanished into the clouds. He’d heard them all since he was a boy. But tonight was different. Tonight, his mother lay in a hospital bed three hundred miles away, her breath a shallow, mechanical rhythm. The doctors had used the word matter of hours .

He left the village just before midnight, following the overgrown path behind the abandoned chapel. The jungle swallowed the moonlight. His flashlight cut a trembling cone through the ferns and lianas, and the stone grew warm in his sweaty palm. He’d expected ruins, maybe a mossy pyramid. Instead, he found a single step.

The world inverted. The jungle noise—the crickets, the dripping water, the far-off howl of a monkey—collapsed into a single, sustained note. When he opened his eyes (had he closed them?), he was no longer in the mud. He stood on the second step. And the third step had already appeared ahead, leading upward into a silver mist that glowed as if lit from within. Ahead, the staircase stretched without end, each step

“Someone who took the first step fifty years ago,” the boy said. “And never found what I was looking for. But you—you brought a stone. Good. That means you might actually have a chance.”

“One rule,” the boy said. “Don’t look back. And whatever you do, don’t step off the path.”

“Who are you?” Mateo whispered.

“You’ll know when you reach the bottom,” she whispered, her breath smelling of mint and centuries.

Just one. Carved from black obsidian, jutting out of the mud like a dark tongue. It was polished, impossibly clean, and on its surface, a single word was etched in a language he didn’t know but somehow understood: DESIRE .

The old woman’s hands were maps of a life fully lived. Veins like river deltas, knuckles like worn pebbles. She placed a small, smooth stone in Mateo’s palm and closed his fingers around it. His mother’s voice, young and strong, calling his name