JEREMY POV
The cold wasn't the worst part. It was the rhythmic, wet thud of something heavy hitting the stone floor far below.
In my mind, we had made it. I could still taste the night air, still feel the frantic, adrenaline-fueled sprint back to the safety of the gilded district. I could see Sarah's face as we reached the car, the way she'd looked at me with a mixture of terror and relief. I had been the hero. I had led us out of the abyss.
But the taste of salt in my mouth wasn't the sea. It was copper.
My eyes flickered open, but the world was upside down. The "exit" I remembered was gone. The open doors, the mist, the streetlights—they were nothing but a cruel, psychic sedative injected into my brain by the thing at the altar. A cold sense of hope, manufactured just to make the eventual harvest taste sweeter.
I tried to move my arms, but they were pinned to my sides by translucent, pulsing threads that felt like living ice. I was suspended forty feet above the church floor, dangling from the rotting rafters like a piece of meat in a smokehouse.
"Sarah?" I croaked. My voice was a dry rattle, stripped of all its noble polish.
I twisted my head, the movement sending a flare of agony through my neck. To my left, Sarah was hanging in a similar cocoon. Her eyes were open, staring at nothing, her skin the color of old parchment. Beyond her were the others—all six of my team, the "Elite Seven," arranged in a grotesque circle. And between us, the spies I had sent in earlier were interspersed like filler, their bodies already hollowed out, their faces sunken into permanent masks of shock.
We weren't the vanguard. We were the surplus.
A sharp, searing pain bloomed in my femoral artery. I looked down—or up, in my inverted perspective—and saw a thick, violet vein burrowed deep into my leg. It was pulsing. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. With every beat, I felt a piece of my life, a spark of my Blue Impulse, being sucked away.
The Nun was standing directly beneath us.
She wasn't looking at the altar anymore. She was looking up, her head tilted at an impossible angle, her hands still interlaced over her face. The violet light oozing from her was no longer a flood; it was a feast.
"You have such a beautiful cadence, Jeremy Klice," she chimed, the sound vibrating through the very vines that held me. "The hope I gave you... it made your blood so vibrant. It made your core bloom one last time before the frost."
"Let... them... go..." I gasped. I tried to flare my Impulse, tried to summon even a spark of the Blue light that had made me a god in Jorgen City. But there was nothing. My core felt like a cold, empty hearth. The "Nothing" had already moved in.
"I didn't take them," the Nun whispered, her voice a haunting melody that seemed to come from inside my own skull. "The deep took them. I am merely the vessel that carries you to your new home. Did you really think your 'authority' mattered to the tide? The ocean does not ask the sand for permission to rise."
A drop of something warm hit my cheek. I realized it was blood. My blood. It was leaking from the wound where the vine entered my skin, dripping down to the floor to join the puddle that was already forming around the Nun's feet.
The reality hit me with the force of a physical blow. We were dying. We were the "prodigies" of the Council, the future of the Northern Continent, and we were being drained like livestock in a forgotten chapel. No one was coming for us. The Sentinels wouldn't look here. The Elders were too busy with their maps.
And the spies... the men I had sent to their deaths... their eyes seemed to mock me in the twilight. Welcome to the top of the food chain, Jeremy.
"It hurts..." Sarah whispered from her cocoon, a single, crystalline tear tracking across her waxy temple.
The Nun let out a soft, melodic hum—a lullaby for the dying. "The pain is just the light leaving, little bird. Once the light is gone, there is only the quiet. And the quiet is very, very beautiful."
I felt my vision beginning to gray. The rhythm of the pulse in the vine was slowing down, or maybe I was just getting used to the emptiness. I looked at the stained-glass windows, the plywood blocking the world I thought I owned.
I had been so arrogant. I had looked at the twins in the mall and seen "wild dogs." I had looked at the "mice" and seen insects. But as the last of my Blue Impulse was sucked into the violet void, I realized that I was the smallest thing in the room.
The Nun began to sing, a wordless, haunting chime that echoed through the rafters. It was the song of the Rift. It was the sound of the door being unlocked.
"The sun and the moon..." I whispered, remembering her words from the hallucination. "They aren't... yours..."
"No," the Nun replied, her fingers finally beginning to part, revealing the screaming, beautiful abyss of her true face. "They belong to the end. And you, Jeremy? You are just the fuel for the journey."
My heart gave one last, stuttering thud, and then the quiet she promised finally took hold.