The floor didn't just shake—it fuckin' split. A deafening crack echoed as the ancient stone buckled, unleashing the suffocating stench of ozone and rot. Below, thousands of glossy black eyes snapped open in unison, fixing on Mari as the abyss violently churned.
Mari’s knuckles turned white around her hilt. “Me. Or whatever the hell is left of me.”
“The monster wasn't the jailer!” The old woman dropped to her knees, frantically shoving her glowing talisman into the dust. “She was the anchor—and the crazy bitch just shattered the lock!”
A brutal pressure wave hit. Pillars cracked like dry twigs. Cassian slammed shoulder-first into a stone support, spitting blood. *"Fuck!"* He didn't waste a second. His eyes swept the vault, locking onto a narrow arch choked with rubble to the west. He slid to his knees and shoved his hand into the debris. Ice-cold air whistled past his skin.
“Passage! Vesper, blow these three load points—*now!*”
Vesper didn't hesitate. "Bite me," she muttered, pulling the trigger. Three deafening shots shattered the keystone. Masonry exploded, showering them in sparks and grit, blowing open a jagged crawlspace.
“Kaelen, shove the old hag through! Sera, take point—blade out, mark every goddamn turn!” Cassian screamed over the roar of collapsing rock. “Move your asses!”
Then the shadow erupted upward. It didn't roar. It spoke with Mari’s own raspy, ruined voice—the sound of a vocal cord torn by a thousand deaths.
*“Mari. You remember what you wanted to forget.”*
Nightmarish memories flashed across its shifting hide like open wounds: burning cities, a younger Mari kneeling over corpses, Sera screaming, and Cassian—his neck snapping, a blade through his chest, trampled—thirty thousand versions of his bloody end.
*“I carried every fucking scream for you,”* the creature purred, leaning close, its expression twisted with a sickening, maternal tenderness. *“When you reset, I kept the blood. Every person you slaughtered. Every friend you left to rot.”*
“Shut the fuck up,” Mari choked out.
*“I became the garbage dump for your soul.”* The creature’s eyes coalesced into one massive, terrifyingly human iris that fixed straight on Cassian. Its mouth split open. *“And this bastard… I’ve watched him die forty-seven times. In thirty of them, your hands were on the knife.”*
Cassian went dead still. He stared at Mari, his face draining of all color.
“Don't look at it!” Cassian stepped straight into the creature’s shadow, raising his rifle. “Mari, tell me how to kill this fucking thing!”
“You can’t!” Mari yelled, tear tracks cutting through the grime on her face. “The anchor is in my chest. I have to sever the damn thing here!”
*“She always says that,”* the creature mocked, its voice dropping to an intimate whisper. *“She always plays the martyr. And the stupid bitch always dies.”*
“Not today.” Mari reversed her grip on the knife, aimed at her own sternum, and drove it home.
A visceral, agonizing scream tore from her throat as black, burning corruption erupted from the wound, veining violently across her face. The entity shrieked—a sound stripped of godhood, reduced to pure, panicked terror.
*“MARI! DON’T YOU DARE LEAVE ME!”* the monster wept, its massive form splintering into wild, thrashing tendrils. *“I STAYED WHEN THOSE BASTARDS ALL FORGOT YOU!”*
“You were a cage, not a friend,” Mari spat through a mouthful of blood. She slammed her palm against the pommel, driving the steel all the way in. *"Go to hell."*
*CRACK.*
The cosmic tether snapped like a pulled cable. A violent shockwave blasted through the vault, shredding the creature into screaming embers of darkness. The recoil blew Mari off her feet, her boots slipping off the crumbling ledge.
She grabbed for the edge, but stone turned to dust beneath her fingers.
“MARI!” Cassian lunged wildly out of the dust, hand outstretched.
Sera tackled him from behind, driving him into the stone as the entire ledge caved into the deep black.
“GET THE FUCK OFF ME!” Cassian roared, fighting like a rabid animal. “GET OFF ME!”
“THE WHOLE GODDAMN CHAMBER IS COMING DOWN!” Sera screamed in his ear, hauling him backward by his collar as the floor fell away. “RUN, YOU IDIOT!”
They burst out into the freezing night air, collapsing onto the cold exterior ruins, gasping for oxygen, covered in soot and blood.
Cassian hit his knees, staring down at his bare, empty hands—coated in Mari’s blood. *"Fuck!"* He slammed a fist into the dirt, turning toward the pitch-black mouth of the ruins, his chest heaving.
“We’re going back down,” he whispered, his voice dangerously low. “We dig until we find her.”
Nobody dared say a fucking word.
Far below, in the crushing silence of the abyss, Mari opened her eyes.
She pulled the blade out of her ribs with a wet, agonizing rasp. *"God, that hurts."* Black blood oozed over her knuckles. The stone chamber was gone, replaced by a shattered limbo of overlapping dimensions—battlefields, burning bedrooms, endless rows of graves.
A shuddering breath echoed behind her.
Mari turned.
The entity stood twenty paces away. It was small now, shaped like a woman, wearing Mari’s face, but its eyes burned with the agony of three thousand forgotten lifetimes.
“You finally remembered,” it whispered, trembling.
Mari wiped the dark blood from her chin, set her feet, and raised the dripping blade.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice dropping into a cold, lethal calm. “And now it’s my turn to mess you up.”