The final tunnel led to a cavern unlike anything they had seen before.
They stepped into a vast, hollow chamber where the very air bent around the silence. No wind. No dripping water. Just stillness—as though time had been banished.
In the center, she lay.
Mara.
Her form was colossal, curled in slumber like a mountain sunk beneath the soil. She wasn't stone, nor flesh—a being of bark, bone, and shadow, her body twisted and tangled in branches thick as towers. Roots coiled around her limbs, some vibrant, green and alive. Others—black, gnarled, rotting—pulsed with unnatural corruption.
Leaves adorned her hair like a dying crown.
And though she slept, her presence filled the chamber.
They felt her.
Not a mind. Not a voice.
A weight.
A pressure in their lungs, a chill in their veins, as if death itself breathed beneath the earth.
Khoryv fell to one knee, head lowered.
"I never thought I'd stand here again."
He turned to Lybid.
"Ask him. Rod. There must be a ritual… to weaken the seal, at least."
Lybid gripped the Staff of Verdance and whispered a prayer—low, ancient, spoken in a tongue that echoed in the stone.
But nothing came.
Khoryv's voice was quiet. "Ah, yes. It won't work. The seal doesn't just keep her in—it keeps everything else out. Including the voices of the gods."
They stood in silence, until Khoryv looked to Methodius.
"What was your plan?"
Methodius stepped forward, Bible in hand.
"We were to purify the river's mouth. Let the Blessed Waters flow through the roots. Let it carry His light into her body. Create a divine web. A sanctified crucible."
He paused.
"A Lumen Conflagratio—a holy conflagration of light."
Khoryv nodded slowly.
"Hm, just like Constantinople…It might work," he said. "But not with scripture alone. This ritual… it needs an anchor. A body of divine essence. A martyr."
He looked at Methodius, who was shocked by how much Khoryv knew.
"Yours."
Lybid gasped. "There must be another way."
Methodius didn't flinch.
"If my death purifies this land… if my sacrifice sets her in peace, then let it be."
He opened the Bible.
The Latin was soft at first, then stronger. A prayer so old even the saints might have forgotten it.
"Fiat voluntas Tua, sicut in caelo, et in terra…"
The runes on the walls lit one by one.
The staff glowed.
And then the entire chamber was filled with light.
Warm.
Blinding.
The kind of light that dared to push back death.