The air curdled as the scholar emerged.
Not from a doorway or shadow, but from the temple's bleeding walls themselves. The black veins convulsed, peeling apart like rotten fruit skin to disgorge his shambling form. Ardyn's breath hitched - this wasn't a man walking toward them, but a corpse puppeteered by the temple's hunger.
Elias Veyth moved in jagged increments, each step a battle between bone and whatever dark will propelled him. His robes hung in tatters, the once-fine fabric now part of him, fused to paper-thin skin stretched taut over protruding ribs. The Covenant's silver-threaded insignia across his chest still caught the sickly light, though the embroidered stars had blackened like scorched parchment.
But his face...
Lyria's knife hand twitched. "Don't move," she warned, though her voice lacked its usual bite. Even she couldn't mistake the agony in his movements.
The scholar's face was a grotesque palimpsest of the man he'd been. One side retained remnants of human features - a high cheekbone, the arch of a fair eyebrow. The other side had split open like overripe fruit, revealing glistening muscle and too many eyes clustered in the hollow where his eye socket should be. Each pupil dilated independently, tracking their every flinch.
And yet...
Tears.
Clear, human tears carved paths through the filth on his ravaged cheeks.
"You... shouldn't..." The voice that emerged was a dissonant chorus - the scholar's fraying tenor woven with the temple's guttural hiss. His cracked lips trembled around each word. "This place... takes. Doesn't... give back."
Therion's spatial energy flickered wildly along his fingertips. "Yeah, we noticed," he spat, though his bravado rang hollow.
The scholar - Elias - shuddered violently. For a terrible moment, his remaining human eye rolled back, leaving only the clustered orbs staring blankly. Then with a wet gasp, he wrenched control back.
"I was... Covenant's pride," he forced out, each word costing him. His gaze locked on Ardyn, recognition flashing. "You... know my work."
Ardyn's stomach dropped. He did. Elias Veyth's treatises on aetheric resonance were required reading at the academy. The man had disappeared a decade ago during private research.
The temple walls pulsed hungrily around them, black veins writhing in time with Elias's labored breaths. Lyria shifted her stance, knife glinting. "Enough history. How do we get out?"
Elias's mouth twisted in something between a smile and a rictus. "You don't."
Then the screaming began.
Not from Elias. Not from the trio.
From the walls themselves - a chorus of anguished voices the children realized with dawning horror were Elias's own, echoing back from years of being digested by the Path's hunger.
"The Path... wasn't supposed to be like this."
Elias collapsed to his knees, his body jerking as if tugged by invisible strings. The black veins beneath his skin squirmed, bulging grotesquely before settling. When he spoke again, his voice had changed - clearer, more present, as if fighting through decades of decay to remember himself.
"It was meant to preserve knowledge. To store memories in darkflame - perfect, eternal." His remaining human hand gestured weakly to the walls. "We thought... if we could encode thought into the aether's absence..."
Ardyn's scholar's mind pieced it together faster than the others. "You tried to turn nothingness into a storage medium."
A wet, rattling laugh. "Bright boy. Yes. But absence... hungers."
The temple groaned around them, the black veins contracting suddenly. Elias arched backward, a strangled cry escaping as the corruption visibly pulsed through him. When he spoke again, the temple's voice had reclaimed most of his words:
"First it consumed our notes. Then our tools. Then... our dreams. Our skin. Our names."
Lyria edged closer to Therion. "It's eating his memories," she muttered. "That's why the walls whisper - they're full of chewed-up thoughts."
Elias's head snapped up, his clustered eyes focusing with terrible clarity. "It wants new voices. New... flavors." His gaze locked on each of them in turn:
"The thief's defiance." (Lyria's knife hand trembled)
"The mage's chaos." (Therion's spatial flickers stuttered)
"The scholar's... sweet, sweet aether-sight." (Ardyn recoiled)
With sudden violence, Elias slammed his own head against the floor. "RUN!" he screamed in his own voice, blood spraying from his nose. "Before it learns how to keep you!"
The temple answered.
The ground split beneath them, yawning open into a chasm where the altar had been. From its depths rose tendrils of pure absence - not darkness, but something worse: patches of nothing that hurt to look at, edges fraying reality itself.
Therion grabbed Ardyn's arm. "Phase?" he gasped.
Ardyn shook his head wildly. "It'll just learn faster!"
Lyria's boot skidded on crumbling stone. "Then we go through!" She pointed to the only intact corridor left - its ceiling already collapsing.
Elias's laughter followed them, equal parts mad and mournful:
"The Path always finds its walkers... in the end."