A deep creak, thunderous and alive, rolled through the cathedral like a final breath drawn through ancient lungs. The gears—buried, forgotten, never meant to move again—screamed as they tore against rust and time, shredding centuries of silence in seconds.

The priest’s whispered plea—“What more do you require of us?”—was met not with words.

Only collapse.

A groan rose from the stone beneath them—not a crack, not a fracture, but a full-bodied wail of earth and steel. The kind of sound that shouldn’t exist. The kind that hurts to hear.

Then the first pillar gave way.

The snap was deafening, like a mountain breaking in half. Marble split clean down the center, the massive column crashing down in a storm of dust and debris. Worshippers screamed. Some scrambled to move. Others simply froze—unable to process the sacred being torn apart.

The dust was instant. Blinding. Suffocating.

And then came the stained glass.

Every window shattered at once. Not cracked—shattered. Images of saints, of Crests, of heirs once praised as divine—gone in a rain of color and razors. Holy figures once worshipped were reduced to fragments, littering the floor like forgotten lies.

A wooden beam snapped with a sound like thunder. Then another.

The ceiling groaned. Buckled.

Marble cracked. The altar split down the center.

The chandeliers dropped next.

The chains, slick with old oil and rust, broke one by one. Massive iron frames fell like stars plummeting to the earth, slamming into the marble below. Screams erupted—real screams. Not fear. Not panic. Pain.

Bodies were buried under shattered pews and fallen stone. Blood seeped into the cracks. Smoke began to rise from the braziers kicked over in the chaos, their fires licking at the tapestries that hadn’t yet fallen.

The air burned to breathe.

Pillars snapped in rapid succession, whole sections of the cathedral giving out like a dying heartbeat. Rows of pews turned to splinters as the floor cracked beneath them. The foundation had stopped trying to hold. It was giving up.

A final warning.

A last breath.

The great doors groaned as priests shoved them open, dragging survivors out into the light. Some didn’t make it. Some never stood.

Others were crushed before they could even scream.

The priestess stumbled, covered in ash and blood, her voice barely rising above the roar.

“It’s—” she choked, grabbing the elder priest’s sleeve. “The forbidden tower—its mechanisms—we have to go!”

But the sound was already changing.

The gears were awake now.

Grinding. Spinning. Raging.

What had once moved like a funeral bell now howled like a war drum. No longer ancient. No longer dormant. It was alive.

And it was moving with purpose.

The twenty-eighth tower was waking.

And it remembered nothing of mercy.