Judd made a last effort to recover. A violent contraction shook his chest, breath returned to his lungs, bringing back his strength. He opened his eyes and glanced about. An amorphous light dimly illuminated the damp darkness, it permeated the thick atmosphere for miles. Instead of relief, terror seized Judd again: there was not air around him--he was floating underwater. Instinctively he started tossing, sure that he was going to drown, but his mouth filled with the taste of oxygen. He panted for a while, but soon calmed down.

He could breath.

There was something wrong with his neck though. Judd lifted his hands where the High Priest had driven his fingers. He searched his throat and found the four deep wounds and felt the large edges of skin flapping loosely. They were too deep, he thought, he should have...The edges of skin began to throb rhythmically under his fingers. They moved. They opened and closed at his breath pace.

He should have died, but he had not. Instead, something worse had happened.

Gills, gills have opened up in my neck! he thought. Paralyzed with fright, Judd stared into the haze, when, out of the blackness an enormous horror loomed forth.

Transfigured by some occult force, Bahamut swam by. It was leviathan, greater and vaster than any whale of the innumerable oceans. The wake of his passage dragged Judd in vortices towards the bottom.

Opposing the terrible force of the rip current, Judd managed to stop. He floated confused for a moment, then glanced about: the phosphorescence permeated the water for miles. Beneath him, lit by that haze, titanic ocean trenches stretched out of sight. There Bahamut halted, raising its head. With swift and precise maneuvers, it steered the obscene appendage that should have been a tail into a perfectly shaped vertical chasm, then. sank slowly through the pit, turning increasingly diaphanous. Nearly transparent, it started to pulsate in an unhealthy light.

Judd could now see through the monster's organs. Through its skin, he caught a glimpse of some inscriptions engraved on the walls of the pit. They looked more than ancient, yet still perfect. Judd watched Bahamut leaning against those hieroglyphs so different--adhering to them--and suddenly understood: It was the same as in the liturgical litany: 'Bahamut, which was both the key and the lock', it fitted that pit as a key in the right lock.

The leviathan entered completely. Its eyes lost vitality and turned over. A quiver ran through all its limp body. It seemed as if its consciousness was descending through the whole length of its deformity. The misshapen angel woke up, stretched its jointless limbs and immersed them into the pit's shadow beneath. Deaf and spineless, its arms started to flutter around, searching inside the pool of blackness as if probing the inner cogwheels of a giant strongbox. Half way through one of its inordinate movements, the angel's body suddenly stiffened. A vibrant phosphorescence burst through Bahamut's body, flooding the hollow with vermillion light. A deafening howl flung open the angel's mouth. Like a glove, the limp limbs turned inside out through its mouth and slipped into the cylinder of flesh without organs that was its body. The god's fish head jaws gaped and ejected its own flesh, like the spring back wave of a stone into water. Its shape unfolded like a fan and alighted effortlessly on the ocean floor.

Under the weight of such a gigantic body, the seabed sank into impenetrable pitch darkness. Like a circular lake, that liquid shadow waved slowly, deeper than the ocean. Suddenly, out of the blackness loomed a behemothic luminous appendage, sweeping away the dark with its sick glare. Then two dreadful eyes emerged, aimed at Judd with bestial intensity.

Judd felt annihilated. The monstrous face gazed at him--translucent and colorless, identical to that of the deep ocean monstrous dwellers that toss and turn, blind and hungry for flesh, in lightless abysses. Below the hallucinating luminous appendage, something human interrupted its features: an inexplicable symmetry in those dark and sodden eyes, in those wrinkles, on the forehead. The rest of that offense to nature was an obscene bag of flaccid skin from which hung inert, atrophied limbs in an embryo stage.

The words of the Ordeal started to ring through Judd's mind: 'It ascends, silently, from depths unfathomable to the human mind... God of amorphous and impossible realms.' Then silence fell into Judd's mind, and a single thought extended to infinity: God, God is swimming before me!

He was just a speck of plankton in the sight of Its resplendent immensity. Anchored in an endless wait, he longed for death. The enormous eye of God approached until it almost touched him. It gazed at him, with the stare of another world. Terror ran through Judd like a blind wave. His body contracted with unprecedented violence. His muscles stretched like steel cables, and a ferocious vitality invaded him. He swam towards the surface with an unthinkable strength. An unknown force overwhelmed him. He did not think; he only swam without looking back. His body did not seem to lose his strength, while the current tore his clothes. Judd saw a faint light in the distance and threw himself forth with renewed vigor. The skin on his face nearly came off through the unbelievable friction. Then He reached the light in an instant.