The corridor was eating itself.
Lyria led their desperate sprint, dodging chunks of ceiling that dissolved midair into swirling darkflame. Behind them, the temple's pulse accelerated - learning, adapting, reshaping itself to trap them.
Therion's breath came in ragged gasps. "It's herding us!"
Ardyn risked a glance back. The scholar wasn't pursuing. Elias knelt where they'd left him, his form dissolving into the hungry walls, his remaining human eye locked on them with desperate focus.
"Left!" his voice echoed unnaturally through the stone. "The left passage!"
Lyria didn't hesitate. They plunged down a side tunnel just as the main corridor imploded behind them.
The new path was narrower, its walls weeping black fluid that sizzled where it touched skin. Ardyn's aether-sickness flared with every step, frost patterns spiderwebbing up his neck.
"It's using him," he realized aloud. "Elias - the temple lets him help just enough to make the hunt interesting."
A thunderous crack split the air. The tunnel convulsed, its geometry shifting - walls bending inward at impossible angles. Therion yelped as his next step landed on what had been ceiling moments before.
"Space is broken here," he gasped, spatial energy sparking uselessly off his fingertips.
Lyria skidded to a stop before a dead end. "Or we are."
Before them, the corridor terminated in a smooth obsidian wall - except it wasn't a wall. It was a surface of the same liquid absence churning in the altar room, its edges blurring reality like wet ink on parchment.
Therion grabbed Lyria's wrist. "We go back-"
"No."
Elias's voice came from inside the wall. His face pressed against the nothingness like a diver against ice, features distorting.
"This... is the only way," his words bubbled through. "The Path must be walked... to be escaped."
Ardyn's stomach dropped. "He wants us to go into it."
Lyria's knife flashed. "Like hell we-"
The temple answered with a roar. The floor dissolved beneath them, the walls surging forward like a closing fist.
Therion's spatial energy flared wild and bright -
Then darkness.
Silence.
The scent of burnt parchment.
And somewhere in the nothing, Elias's fading whisper:
"Remember... the steps..."
Ardyn's Horror: The Song of Drowning Minds
Ardyn's aether-sight made him the first to truly understand.
Where the others saw black veins, he saw words—Covenant scripture unraveling into screaming filaments. The walls weren't just pulsing; they were reciting, each throb another syllable of some profane liturgy. And the scholar...
Oh gods, the scholar.
Elias Veyth's body was a living palimpsest. Through Ardyn's sight, layers of the man flickered like dying candle flames:
The Prodigy (Age 22): Sharp-eyed and whole, fingers ink-stained from transcribing sacred texts
The Experiment (Age 28): Skin cracking like dried parchment as darkflame veins burrowed deeper
The Prisoner (Now): A writhing mass of eyes and mouths where his joints should be, each whispering different years of his torment
"It's singing my thesis back to me," Ardyn realized, frost blooming across his cheeks as his sickness flared. The temple wasn't just digesting Elias—it was performing his life's work using his unraveling flesh as its manuscript.
A wet pop echoed as one of Elias's clustered eyes burst, leaking black fluid that crystallized midair into tiny, perfect numbers. Ardyn vomited.
Therion's Horror: The Fracturing Self
Therion's spatial sense had always been chaotic—but now it betrayed him.
Every attempted phase left parts of himself behind:
First Jump: A lock of hair remained frozen in air
Second Jump: His left pinky finger phased a second slower than the rest of him
Now: His reflection in the black veins didn't follow when he moved
"It's learning me," he gasped, watching his own afterimages get trapped in the temple's pulsing veins. His magic wasn't failing—it was being collected, each attempt teaching the darkflame how to better dismantle him.
When Elias turned his weeping gaze on him, Therion saw the truth:
The scholar's right arm wasn't there anymore—not gone, but spread thin, his hand reappearing three feet away to clutch at nothing, his elbow embedded in the ceiling. The Path had taken his spatial integrity first.
"Run," Elias's disembodied hand signed in Covenant battle-code. "Before it wants you like it wants me."
Lyria's Horror: The Knife That Could Not Cut
Lyria Lancaster had never felt helpless until today.
Her knife passed through the darkflame without resistance. Her taunts earned only echoing laughter. Even her shadow didn't behave right here—stretching toward Elias like it wanted to join him.
Then she noticed the blood.
Not hers. Not her boys'.
Elias's.
Droplets of crimson swam through the black veins, forming words only she could read (because the temple knew she'd understand this language):
"HELP ME" in shaky, desperate strokes.
"DON'T LOOK BACK" in harsher lines.
"PLEASE" in a child's scrawl—his first remembered word, now used to beg for death.
Her hands shook for the first time in years.