The walk to the cathedral took an hour.
An hour of bone-dust crunching beneath our boots. An hour of that eternal hymn growing louder with each step. An hour of stone hands reaching past us toward the eclipsed sky, their shadows stretching across the fractured ground like grasping fingers.
The red light made everything feel like we were walking through an open wound.
Elara led in silence. Her four companions walked behind us—not threatening, but present. Watchful. I could feel their essence signatures in my detection range. All of them hovering around eighty-five percent corruption. Still conscious. Still human enough to think.
But barely.
"How long have you been here?" Lucy asked after the silence became unbearable.
"Three years," Elara replied without turning. "Give or take. Time gets strange under the eclipse. Days blur together. You stop counting after the first hundred descents."
"A hundred?" Gery's voice was sharp. "You've survived a hundred times?"
"Hundred and forty-three. Not all of us." She gestured vaguely at her companions. "These four are the latest survivors. Most last ten descents. Maybe fifteen if they're smart and lucky. After that, the Angel's judgment finds them. Or the world does."
She stopped walking. Turned to face us. The eclipse pattern in her eyes seemed to pulse with the hymn.
"You want to know the real horror?" Her voice was soft. Almost gentle. "It's not the descents. It's the waiting between them. Three days. Four days. Five days of knowing it's coming. Of hearing the Choir. Of watching the eclipse pulse. Of wondering if this time, you'll be the one judged unworthy."
She smiled that sad, knowing smile again.
"Eventually, some people just walk toward it. Accept the judgment. Choose erasure over the waiting."
I felt Lucy shift beside me. Felt the tension in Gery's stance. Heard Somi's tactical mask hum as it processed probability calculations that probably didn't favor our survival.
But I just looked at Elara's eclipse-marked eyes and saw the truth beneath her words. She was warning us. Trying to prepare us. But also testing us. Seeing if we'd break before we even reached the cathedral.
"We're not here to survive," I said. Hunger pulsed in my grip. "We're here to end it."
Elara studied me for a long moment. Then she laughed again—that exhausted, desperate sound.
"We'll see. Everyone says that. Right up until they hear it descending."
She turned and kept walking.
The Cathedral of Hands appeared on the horizon like a monument to divine madness.
It rose from the bone-ground in impossible architecture—no foundation, no base, just erupting from the earth like it had been forced up from below. The structure was massive. Easily as large as the Mother of Limbs' mountain. But where the Mother had been organic, alive, this was frozen. Crystallized. Dead and beautiful and terrible all at once.
The walls weren't stone or metal. They were hands.
Thousands upon thousands of stone hands pressed together, fingers interlaced, palms facing outward. Each one was carved with such detail I could see the lines in the palms, the creases at the knuckles. And they were all reaching. Grasping. Pleading.
The hands formed walls that curved inward and upward, creating a dome structure that must have been three hundred feet tall at its peak. And at that peak, suspended above everything, floated a crystal replica of the eclipse. Black center rimmed with gold. Rotating slowly. Casting shifting red shadows across the entire structure.
"Holy shit," Gery breathed.
That about covered it.
As we got closer, I realized the hands weren't just decorative. They were structural. Weight-bearing. The entire cathedral was held together by the desperate grip of ten thousand stone prayers.
And carved into each palm was a name. Different languages. Different scripts. But all names. All people. All forgotten.
"The Archive of the Fallen," Elara said. She'd stopped at the base of the structure, one hand resting on a stone palm the size of her torso. "Every person who died in the Crimson Sorrow is recorded here. Their name carved into a hand. Their final prayer preserved forever."
She traced the name carved into the stone. "This was Marcus's brother. Died in the seventy-third descent. Judged unworthy. Erased. But his name remains."
Lucy stepped closer. Touched a smaller hand—child-sized. Read the name carved there. "Sarah Chen. Age twelve. What was a twelve-year-old doing in a death game?"
"The system doesn't care about age," Elara said flatly. "Just survival capability. She lasted six days."
The hymn was louder here. Much louder. I could distinguish individual voices now—hundreds of them, maybe thousands, all singing in perfect harmony. The sound came from inside the cathedral.
"The Choir?" I asked.
Elara nodded. "They sing the Angel's lament. The song it sang when it fell. They've been singing for longer than I've been alive. Some say they were the first to arrive here. The original challengers who failed the Angel's first judgment but weren't quite dead. Just... trapped between."
She pulled her hand away from the stone.
"They're inside. At the center. You'll see them when we reach the Reliquaries. And you'll understand why some people choose to fail the judgment. Being erased is mercy compared to becoming Choir."
The entrance to the Cathedral of Hands was a massive archway formed by two enormous stone hands pressed together in prayer. The space between the fingers created the doorway—maybe twenty feet tall, ten feet wide.
As we approached, I felt it.
Essence. Concentrated. Divine. Corrupted.
My Essence Detection was screaming. This wasn't like the Flesh Cradle where essence was organic, flowing, alive. This was crystallized. Frozen. Like someone had captured divine power mid-scream and locked it in stone forever.
Hunger pulsed in my hand. Eager. Hungry. The sword could feel it too—all that power, all that essence, just waiting to be consumed.
"Easy," I muttered to the blade. To myself. To whatever part of me was excited by the prospect of feeding.
We stepped through the archway.
And the world changed.
Inside the cathedral was light.
Pure, golden, beautiful light that shouldn't exist in a world drowning in red.
The interior was hollow—one vast chamber that rose all the way to the peak. The walls were hands on this side too, but they glowed. Soft, warm, golden light emanated from each palm, creating a constellation of prayer-lights that illuminated everything.
In the center of the chamber, suspended in midair by nothing visible, floated five spheres.
The Reliquaries.
They weren't like the Anchor Points from the Flesh Cradle—pulsing flesh and corruption. These were perfect golden orbs, each about the size of a human head. They rotated slowly, independently, each one surrounded by a halo of pale stone hands that reached toward them.
And the light. God, the light they emitted was almost painful. Pure divinity fighting against corruption. Holy power that had been stolen and trapped and twisted but still remembered what it used to be.
It was beautiful. It was heartbreaking. It was wrong.
And surrounding the Reliquaries, standing in concentric circles that filled the entire chamber floor, were the Choir.
Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. All facing the center. All singing.
They had been human once. You could still see it in their basic shape. But the corruption had changed them. Their skin was translucent, glowing faintly from within. Their eyes were gone—just empty sockets that wept light. Their mouths were open in eternal song, and when they sang, the sound came from everywhere at once.
They didn't move. Didn't breathe. Just stood and sang and wept light and sang and sang and sang.
"Jesus Christ," Lucy whispered.
"He's not here," Elara said. "Just what's left after he abandoned this place."
I couldn't look away from the Choir. From what they'd become. From what awaited anyone who failed judgment but didn't quite die.
My Truth-Seer activated involuntarily. Showed me what they were. Not human. Not monster. Something between. Consciousness trapped in bodies that wouldn't die. Awareness locked in an eternal loop of singing the Angel's grief.
And beneath their song, I heard something else. Screaming. Silent screaming. The sound of souls that wanted to stop but couldn't. That wanted to die but weren't allowed.
"Can they be saved?" I asked quietly.
"No," Elara said. "We tried. Killing them doesn't work—they just reform. The Archive says they're part of the world itself now. Extensions of the Angel's sorrow. They'll sing until the world collapses. And maybe after."
She walked toward the Reliquaries. We followed, stepping carefully between the Choir. They didn't react to our presence. Didn't even seem to notice. Just kept singing.
Up close, the Reliquaries were even more impressive. Each one pulsed with power I could feel in my teeth. Divine essence so concentrated it made the air shimmer.
"Five Reliquaries," Elara said. "Five fragments of the Angel's original power. Mourning. Judgment. Salvation. Remembrance. And Eclipse."
She pointed to each in turn. The orbs were identical except for the intensity of their glow. The Eclipse Reliquary burned brightest—almost too bright to look at directly.
"Binding to any of them grants incredible power. Tier 3 abilities. Transcendent capabilities. But it also marks you. Paints a target on your soul that the Angel can see from anywhere in the world. The more Reliquaries you bind to, the more Divine Corruption you accumulate. And the more the Angel will prioritize you during descent."
"What happens if someone binds to all five?" Gery asked.
Elara's smile was grim. "It's been tried. Twice. Both times, the Angel descended within hours. Specifically for them. They lasted maybe ten minutes."
She looked at me. At the sword in my hand. At my silver-white hair and grey eyes.
"You're already marked, aren't you? Already carrying power that shouldn't exist. If you bind to even one Reliquary, the Angel will know. It'll come for you."
"Good," I said. "I want it to."