The entrance was hidden behind a boarded-up deli in Midtown.
No signs. No symbols. Just a rusted cellar door sealed with a chain that looked newer than it should've.
Reya crouched beside it, brushing ash from the concrete with her sleeve. Her fingers found a groove—subtle, like a whisper etched in stone. She muttered something under her breath, and the air around them twitched.
The chain unraveled on its own.
Jace didn't speak. He just watched. Focused. Whatever was beneath that door… it had called to him in dreams.
He could still hear her voice—Find me.
Lena cracked a flare and handed it over without a word. The red light made her jaw look sharper, her freckles like blood spots under the glow.
"Doesn't smell like a church," she muttered.
"No," Reya said, stepping down the crumbling stairs first. "It smells like a wound."
—
The descent was suffocating.
Steps twisted downward in unnatural spirals. The walls bled old hymns. Graffiti tags and ancient carvings overlapped in layers—gang signs and warding sigils all mixed into the same desperate language.
Jace traced one with his fingertips. "This is Sumerian."
"You read it?" Reya asked, pausing.
"No," he said. "But I understand it."
The mark translated to: Do not wake the buried light. It remembers your face.
Farther down, water dripped in uneven rhythms. The flare hissed against the damp, painting the hall in shifting shadows. Something moved ahead—just a shape, too fast to catch.
Lena raised her gun. "We're not alone."
Reya tilted her head.
"That's the point."
—
They reached the nave twenty minutes later.
The room opened like a cavern—wide, domed, and filled with broken pews. A fractured altar stood at the far end, its marble cracked straight down the center. Candles, long-dead, still stood in perfect rows. And above it all, a stained-glass mural glowed faintly, though no light touched it.
It depicted a woman chained in the stars.
Her face was scratched out.
Jace's heart dropped.
"That's her."
Reya stepped forward, eyeing the rows of empty pews with suspicion.
"Churches this old," she said, "were often built to contain things. They held relics. Sacrifices. Sometimes… prisoners."
Lena crouched near the altar, brushing debris aside until she uncovered something—a sigil scorched into the stone, matching the one on Jace's thigh.
She looked up, voice tight.
"You've been here before."
Jace nodded, slowly. "In my dreams."
The floor suddenly shivered.
A long, low groan echoed through the space.
Something below them stirred.
Not just movement—breathing.
Then came the voice. Not from one mouth. From hundreds, overlapping, wrong.
"He walks in flesh but remembers fire."
Jace spun around. Shadows lengthened across the pews.
"He wears the Hollow's scar and opens what must never be touched."
Reya stepped in front of him, her body tense. "Don't answer it."
"Why?"
"Because it's not talking to you. It's talking to what's inside you."
The altar cracked.
A massive hand—black, stone-like, veined in glowing gold—burst up from beneath it, fingers outstretched and twitching. It didn't grab. It just reached.
Jace staggered back.
His mark seared white-hot.
He heard her scream—the girl, somewhere far beneath, locked away—and it felt like a knife in his chest.
Then—just as suddenly—it stopped.
The hand froze, then crumbled to dust.
Silence returned.
But something had changed.
The air felt emptier. Like something had slipped through.
Reya looked at Jace with hard eyes.
"You need to learn how to shut the door behind you."
Jace clenched his jaw. "I didn't open it."
"Then something else did."
Lena stood, her flare dying in her hand. "What the hell was that?"
Jace stepped toward the altar. His body buzzed. His pupils dilated. Something beneath the shattered marble called to him.
He reached down.
And from the rubble, he pulled out a small shard of obsidian—cold, impossibly heavy for its size, and carved with the same chained-woman sigil from the mural.
As soon as he touched it, he saw her again.
The girl.
Soaked in shadow. Screaming in silence.
And this time—she wasn't chained.
She was running.
From something far worse.
Jace snapped back, gasping.
Reya looked at the shard.
"That's a key," she said.
"Key to what?"
Her expression darkened.
"Not what. Who."
The air shifted again. This time colder. Still. Warning.
They weren't alone.
Lena turned toward the hallway. "We've got company."
From the stairwell, they heard the low clink of steel against stone.
Boots.
Dozens of them.
And then—
A voice, cold and amused:
"Found you, pretty boy."
Jace froze.
He recognized that voice.
The Thorn Order.
Cultivators in suits. Necro-lords with fake smiles. Mercs trained to kill anything even whispers of the Hollow God.
They weren't here to pray.
They were here to clean up.
Reya smirked.
"Took them long enough."
Jace pocketed the obsidian shard and drew his blade.
His voice was steady.
"They can try."