The box's open mouth screamed.

Not sound—pressure, a force that punched through Elias's ribs and sent Lira skidding back on broken tiles. The cathedral's remaining stained glass exploded outward in a hail of shards as the Hollow King's laughter vibrated through the stones.

Father Mateo lunged forward, splashing the holy mixture across the box's gaping lid. The liquid sizzled, burning away the oozing blackness—for half a heartbeat. Then the darkness surged, swallowing the sanctified water like a throat contracting.

"Mine."

The word came from the box. From the cracks in the floor. From Elias's own mouth, his tongue moving without permission.

Lira grabbed his face, her palms slick with blood from a cut along her hairline. "Elias! Look at me!" Her eyes burned with reflected firelight. "Your blood. Not his. Yours."

A skeletal hand clamped around Father Mateo's calf, yanking him toward the fissure. The old priest barely caught the edge of a broken pillar, his fingers slipping on moss.

Elias fumbled for Lira's knife. The blade bit into his palm before he'd made the conscious decision to move. Blood welled—black at the edges, swirling with gold flecks where the box's corruption had taken root.

The moment his blood hit the box's interior, the world split.

—A stone altar under a blood-red moon. Twelve figures chanting in a language of cracking bones. The Hollow King (whole, human) driving a silver nail into the first guardian's eye—

—Eleven nails hammered. Eleven screams. The twelfth nail hovering above Elias's own eye—

He wrenched back to the present with a gasp. His blood wasn't soaking into the box—it was coiling, forming a thread of crimson light that stitched the lid shut inch by inch.

The red-masked man materialized from a cloud of flies, his stitched lips peeling back in a snarl. "Fool! You'd chain yourself to their fate?" His hand shot out, fingers elongating into bone spikes aimed at Elias's throat.

Lira intercepted in a blur of steel. Her knife sheared through three of the bone-spikes before the fourth grazed her collarbone, drawing a line of scarlet. She didn't flinch. "Mateo! Now!"

The priest dragged himself free, his voice rising in a chant older than the cathedral:

"By earth of the grave, by blood of the bound, I seal what was sundered!"

Elias's blood-thread pulsed. The lid slammed shut.

Silence.

Then—

A whisper from inside the box:

"You'll dream of me, Elias. And I always wake hungry."

The fissures sealed with a sound like grinding teeth. The skeletal hands crumbled to dust. Across the ruins, the militiamen lowered their weapons, faces slack with shock.

Lira pressed her sleeve to her bleeding shoulder. "Did we just... win?"

Father Mateo collapsed against a pillar, his hands shaking. "We delayed." His gaze locked on Elias's black-veined palm. "At a cost."

Elias flexed his fingers. The gold flecks in his blood glimmered under the dawn light.

Somewhere in the city, a church bell tolled—once, twice, then cracked on the third ring.

The red-masked man's laughter echoed from the empty streets:

"Tick-tock, little guardian. The King set His table... and you're the main course."