The chalice's light bled through Elin's petticoats as she pressed against the ossuary wall, its glow painting Lysander's human face in sacred geometry. He smelled different now—less wolf musk, more myrrh and burning parchment. Tommy's stolen coat hung loose on his frame, revealing collarbones where silver chains had once chafed.
"Judas comes," Lysander breathed, his new human tongue caressing each syllable like a communion wafer. The chapel doors exploded inward in a shower of stained glass apostles, revealing Mayor Hawthorne haloed by twenty-three rifle barrels.
Tommy's betrayal was a Baroque opera. He pirouetted into torchlight, stolen grimoire pages fluttering from his sleeves like absolution slips. "Behold the wolf-whore and her demon paramour!" His wink at Elin glinted with stolen chalice shards sewn into his eyelids.
Chaos erupted in canon rhythm. Lysander's attempted transformation dissolved into divine comedy—human knees buckling beneath phantom wolf weight, sending him crashing into the reliquary. Marble saints toppled, their stone eyes tracking Elin as she unleashed the chalice's light.
Blue fire cascaded like baptismal waters. Rifles aged centuries in seconds, walnut stocks sprouting funeral lilies, steel barrels rusting into sacramental wine. The mayor's silver dagger liquefied, its mercury puddle reflecting his dawning revelation.
"Lycan priest..." Hawthorne trembled, brandishing a shield carved from his father's tombstone. "Your fangs tore out his throat during vespers!"
Elin's counterstroke was pure heresy. The chalice projected Lysander's ancestral memory across the chapel walls—wolf-headed priest in alb and chasuble, leading Thornfield's hounds away from starving villagers. The vision ended with the priest's howl of consecration as silver blades pierced his heart.
"Lies!" The mayor's roar shook votive candles. Yet when Lysander lunged, their collision became a twisted pieta—hunter and hunted rolling through shattered stained glass, blood and wine mingling on the altar steps.
Moonlight chose its martyrdom.
A shaft of crimson light pierced the rose window, igniting the chalice in Elin's hands. Lysander's scream harmonized with the chapel bells as claws tore through human fingernails. Elin's scarf—still scented with his wolf musk—blinded him mid-transformation.
"Behold your true scripture!" She thrust the chalice toward Hawthorne. The mayor's shield dissolved to reveal its origin—a child's coffin lid. Lysander's claws stopped millimeters from his throat, quivering with centuries of pent-up vespers.
Tommy's betrayal came as poisoned communion.
The thief materialized like a blasphemous angel, chalice shards reforged into a dagger dripping black chrism. "Forgive me father," he purred, plunging the blade toward Lysander's heart.
Elin's scream unleashed the chalice's final miracle. Light tore through Tommy's corporeal form, reducing him to a constellation of floating shards. The fragments burned through Lysander's shirt, fusing with the scar over his heart to form a pulsating stigmata.
Lysander rose transfigured. Emerald flames birthed a spectral wolf-priest halo behind him, its paws resting on his shoulders like sacred vestments. Hunter's silver melted to holy water, Hawthorne's dagger regressing to a choirboy's butter knife.
"Fear not," Lysander murmured, his voice weaving through octaves—wolf growl, priestly baritone, and something disturbingly divine. His healing touch left glowing vines curling up Elin's arms. "The curse now sings in minor key..."
The chapel tilted like Golgotha's hill. Through fractured domes, the blood moon glared—an engorged pupil dilating three days early. Lysander's stigmata pulsed in dreadful syncopation.
"Thornfield's requiem begins."
Their escape through the necropolis was Dantean theater. Forests bent in genuflection, oaks dripping candlewax tears. Streams congealed into communion wine gone brackish, their surfaces reflecting wolf-men regressing to foaming beasts. Tommy's stolen map disintegrated in Elin's grip, its ink transforming into wriggling scripture worms.
"Catacomb entrance!" Lysander roared, shouldering aside a tombstone engraved *Requiescat in Tenebris*. The chalice leapt from Elin's grasp, projecting star charts onto moss-covered mausoleums. Constellations rearranged into the wolf-priest's sigil—a crescent moon impaled on a Latin cross.
The catacomb air smelled of frankincense and opened veins. Lysander carried Tommy fireman-style, the thief's pockets jingling with stolen sainthood medals. Behind them, the forest birthed new horrors—trees sprouting reliquary boxes in their boughs, each containing a still-beating hunter's heart.
When the ossuary door exploded, time stopped.
Archivist Greeves stood bathed in sacrilegious moonlight, his librarian's shawl dissolving to reveal vestments woven from children's hair. The staff he leaned on was no ordinary wood—a femur topped with Lysander's sister's skull, its eye sockets leaking black gospel.
"Welcome to my vespers," the lich-priest crooned, thornfield's crest glowing where his tongue should be. "Five centuries I've waited to complete the—"
Elin's chalice strike was a psalm made flesh. The crystal pierced the wolf-priest's tomb, unleashing a geyser of hallowed light. Lysander's spectral double merged with the crumbling statue, their combined howl shaking loose five hundred years of damned souls.
Greeves' disintegration was a reverse transubstantiation—flesh to dust, dust to parchment, parchment to screaming psalms that swirled around the chalice. The resurrected wolf-men froze mid-snarl, their eyes clearing to reveal farmers, mothers, children—all Thornfield's stolen lambs.
Dawn's first light found them kneeling in the necropolis. Lysander's stigmata had birthed a new crystal pendant—the chalice's essence fused with his heartbeat. Tommy vomited up a corroded locket containing Greeves' final secret: a vellum map to eleven other cursed monasteries.
"Lunar communion every three nights," Lysander warned, fingers lingering over Elin's chalice-branded palm. "The transformation... it demands reciprocity now."
Elin's smile held dangerous faith. "Then we'll share the—"
"Treasure!" Tommy erupted from a grave mound, waving parchment stained with funeral wine. "The Cobalt Abbey's catacombs hold Thornfield's—"
Lysander's face palmed with martyred patience. Yet Elin's eyes reflected chalice-fire reborn, her fingers already tracing nautical charts hidden in the map's watermark.
Their farewell to Frostmere was an inverted procession. Lysander wore his wolf-priest mantle like a cardinal's cope, Elin's hair braided with sacramental silver. As they vanished into the weeping forest, the sea answered the chalice's call—tidal waves exposing a submerged basilica's bronze doors, its drowned bells tolling the Dies Irae.
In the sacristy shadows, Tommy pocketed a blood-soaked rosary. The beads contained Lysander's stolen fur and Elin's childhood teeth—a reliquary for the new age.