The storm outside
the ruined church at Sorrow Creek had transcended weather, breathing with the
ragged lungs of drowned civilizations. Lightning etched geometric
impossibilities across the sky—fractal scars that folded dimensions inward,
buckling reality under the weight of what clawed through from beneath. The
church groaned like a beast in labor, its walls pulsing with veins of shadow
that traced underground rivers, converging on the Bermuda threshold: a
stained-glass window bleeding unnatural light. On the way into Sorrow Creek,
the Family saw a Clocktower dripping oil into the river.
Maryanne stood at
the edge, her bone blade humming with desperate warmth, its edge etched with
the faint glow of ancestral wards. The Abyssal Mirror lay shattered at her
feet, its shards scattering like frozen screams across the floor—each pulsing
with residual power, reflecting not light but darker echoes: memories of
futures devoured, psyches fractured into infinite voids. Carrying the sweet and
sour sorrow scent of songs. They had to cross a Bridge made of teeth, which was
both visible and fading in and out of existence. Each step felt guided by a
rhythm only the abyss knew.
Marietta
convulsed against the far wall, her water-sense—a cursed inheritance—surging
like tidal waves crashing within her veins. Corruption traced beneath her skin,
pulsing in rhythm with the storm, as if the Crowned-Deep's hunger had forced a
doorway wider. "It's... in me," she gasped, her voice layered with harmonics of
a drowned choir, echoes bleeding through. "Every soul the Covenant
claimed—they're not dead. Instead, they're trapped in this Church, she stumbles
across the bridge." The bridge vanishes, then a millisecond later, it reappears
beneath her feet in an instant.
Anne Faith
followed beside her, the silver pendant around her neck burning. Through her
spiritual sight, she saw the infection rewriting their bloodline—consolidating
every possibility of Marietta into a single point of corruption, a liminal
feast of darkness swallowing light. The teeth gnaw at Anne Faith's Love with
temptations, "You will suffer. There is no escape."
The shadows
coalesced with nightmare slowness, birthing forms that rattled chains like
Mortifiers emerging from hell's landscape. Their hooks glinted, drawn by the
Mirror's beacon, feasting on the suffering that bridged worlds. The church was
no longer a sanctuary; it was a threshold, alive with the Crowned-Deep's
adaptive pulse.