The cavern breathed.
Moonlight pooled like liquid mercury in its gaping maw, illuminating monstrosities that defied God's design. These were not Thornfield's failed experiments—they were his masterpieces. Rotting pelts hung like funeral shrouds over patchwork skeletons, ribs fused with rusted chainmail, eye sockets crawling with luminous spiders spinning webs of putrid silk. The air itself curdled, each breath coating Elin's tongue with the taste of opened graves.
Ash's lupine form seemed pitifully small against the abominations. "Not hunters," he growled, blood-flecked muzzle brushing Elin's trembling hand. "Harbingers."
The largest creature lashed its tail—a grotesque braid of human spines ending in a bishop's miter. Elin's braid unraveled as she dodged, chestnut strands slithering toward the monstrosity like sentient roots. They burrowed into its flesh, flowering into crimson poppies where they pierced decayed muscle.
When Ash leaped, the sound of his ribs breaking echoed like cathedral bells. Elin's slingshot found its mark—a stone through one milky eye that birthed a swarm of winged maggots. The creatures laughed in Thornfield's voice, a chorus of dead alchemists harmonizing through rotting vocal cords.
Salvation came on wings of heresy.
An owl carved from moonlight and moth dust dive-bombed the fray, its talons clutching Tommy's bowler like a holy relic. The thief himself perched in a dead pine, legs swinging like a demented cherub. "That's genuine nineteenth-century felt, you feathered bastard!"
"Now, Tommy!" Elin screamed as a jaw lined with rosary beads snapped at her throat.
Tommy's slingshot sang. The crystal vial shattered, releasing dawn in a bottle—prismatic fire that peeled rotting flesh in liturgical layers. Ash's teeth closed around Elin's wrist, the pressure precisely balanced between warning and caress as he dragged her toward the cliffside crevice.
The shaft breathed.
Its walls pulsed with bioluminescent veins as they descended, Tommy's stolen grimoire glowing like a sinner's heart. "Smells like my first wife's perfume down here," he quipped, kicking aside a human femur entwined with ivy. "If you consider arsenic and desperation a fragrance."
Above, the abominations sang their construction hymn—corpses knitting into a living ladder, fingernails scraping stone in Gregorian rhythm. Ash's wound burned against Elin's palm, his blood now phosphorescent blue.
"He's becoming the chalice," Tommy murmured, phosphorus flare revealing Ash's human face surfacing through fur like a drowning man. "Your touch accelerates the change."
The walls wept.
Ancient ochre murals dissolved under Ash's luminescent blood, revealing the truth beneath—wolf-headed priests not bowing to a crystal orb, but tearing out their own hearts to feed it. Ash's pendant pulsed in time with Elin's racing pulse, its wolf-and-moon engraving now screaming silently.
With a groan worthy of Golgotha's quake, the floor birthed a staircase. Each obsidian step bore names—Lysander, Evander, Cyrene—etched in fingernail scratches.
The descent was a fevered communion. Bioluminescent moss clung to Elin's skirts like jealous lovers. Ash's breaths synced with her footsteps, his occasional whimpers vibrating through her bones. When they reached the chamber, even Tommy fell silent.
God's own jewelers had crafted this place—walls of fused black diamonds refracting moonlight into sacrament wine, vaulted ceilings lost in astral smoke. At its heart hung the Moon Chalice, spinning slowly as a hanged man's body. Its light painted Ash's agony in Caravaggio contrasts—darkness and revelation, torment and epiphany.
Tommy lunged with addict's hunger. Ash's fangs pierced his ankle, drawing blood that sizzled on the chalice's pedestal. "Judas gate," Ash rasped, human vocal cords tearing on the priestly warning. "Step wrong, and we all atone."
The trap was a psalm of death—pressure plates disguised as Psalms 23, arrow slits carved into weeping angel mouths. Tommy danced through the lethal liturgy, his grimoire pages flipping autonomously to reveal forbidden hymns. Arrows meant for their hearts instead pierced shadow-wolves that bled Gregorian chants.
When Elin touched the chalice, eternity swallowed her.
She became Lysandra binding Ash's—no, *Lysander's*—bleeding wrists with her hair. Felt Thornfield's scalpel peeling lycan skin from screaming children. Watched her own grandmother as a girl, burying the chalice shards beneath a sapling oak.
"Elin!" Tommy's scream was a lifeline cast into time's maelstrom.
The Black Wolf returned—not resurrected, but perfected. Human hands now ended in communion wafers that burned holy symbols into stone. Its insectoid abdomen pulsed with imprisoned villagers, their faces pressed against translucent chitin like stained glass martyrs.
Lysander placed himself between Elin and damnation, his pendant erupting in cleansing fire. The chalice's light performed inverted alchemy—rotting abominations transmuted into dandelion pollen, their final human sighs perfuming the air. The Black Wolf knelt, pressing Thornfield's signet ring into Lysander's palm before dissolving into monarch butterflies bearing Bible verse tattoos.
Then came the unraveling.
Lysander's transformation was a reverse crucifixion—nails retracting into pink beds, fur dissolving into baptismal water that pooled around their feet. When the last lupine shadow faded, the man who rose from kneeling position wore vulnerability like a crown of thorns. Stormcloud hair fell across eyes that still bled gold, his trembling fingers finding Elin's in the chalice light.
"Lysander," he breathed, the name tasting of communion wine and forgotten oaths. "The self I buried with Lysandra's bones."
Tommy's jubilant capering shattered the moment. "We'll build a cathedral to house this treasure! Gold-leafed domes, penitent harlots scrubbing the floors—"
Dynamite's profane thunder shook the chamber.
"Baptists with explosives," Tommy translated, peering up the shaft. "Shall we greet them with hosannas?"
Elin silenced him with a chalice touch. The crystal had shrunk to fit her palm, its surface now etched with their entwined initials glowing like salvation's brand. Lysander's thumb brushed her pulse point, igniting veins with liquid starlight that echoed in the chalice's depths.
Their escape through subterranean rivers became a lovers' psalm. Lysander's human frailty manifested in stumbling steps and fevered whispers of forgotten rites, yet his hands remained steady when guiding Elin through rapids that sang Dies Irae. When dawn's first light found them, the chalice had seared their covenant into her palm—EL & LS encircled by a wolf eating its own tail.
The valley below seethed with torch-bearing penitents. But Elin saw the deeper miracle—where their mingled blood had dripped, wolfsbane sprouted in Eucharistic patterns. Obsidian petals formed the Wolf's Tear constellation, ivory stamens bursting with pollen that glowed like suspended angel breath.
A bullet kissed Elin's cheek as Lysander pulled her into a hollow oak. Pressed together in sap-scented darkness, his racing heartbeat harmonized with hers in an ageless hymn.
"They'll brand you a heretic," he murmured, lips tracing the chalice-shaped scar on her throat.
"Then we'll rewrite scripture." Elin pressed the crystal to his chest where the pendant had burned its mark. Flesh and quartz fused in an explosion of pain and rapture that left them gasping against the tree's beating heart.
When the mob pried open their arboreal sanctuary, they found only a wolf-shaped shadow dissolving into dawn mist—and a wolfsbane blossom engraved with coordinates to eleven other chalice tombs. The twelfth glowed in Elin's fist as Frostmere's jail swallowed them whole.
That night, chained in sepulchral darkness, Elin traced the luminescent initials on her palm. Lysander's shackled fingers intertwined with hers, moonlight through barred windows weaving their shadows into a single creature—part girl, part wolf, wholly divine.
And in the deepest chalice vault, where their blood had christened the altar, a new constellation bloomed on the ceiling—two entwined figures dancing through the Wolf's Tear, rewriting fate with every step.