The storm outside the ruined church at Sorrow Creek had transcended weather, breathing with the ragged lungs of drowned civilizations. Lightning etched geometric impossibilities across the sky—fractal scars that folded dimensions inward, buckling reality under the weight of what clawed through from beneath. The church groaned like a beast in labor, its walls pulsing with veins of shadow that traced underground rivers, converging on the Bermuda threshold: a stained-glass window bleeding unnatural light. On the way into Sorrow Creek the Family saw a Clocktower dripping oil into the river.
Maryanne stood at the edge, her bone blade humming with desperate warmth, its edge etched with the faint glow of ancestral wards. The Abyssal Mirror lay shattered at her feet, its shards scattering like frozen screams across the floor—each pulsing with residual power, reflecting not light but darker echoes: memories of futures devoured, psyches fractured into infinite voids. Carrying the sweet and sour sorrow scent of songs. They had to cross a Bridge made of teeth, that was both visible and fading in and out of existence. Each step felt guided by a rhythm only the abyss knew
Marietta convulsed against the far wall, her water-sense—a cursed inheritance—surging like tidal waves crashing within her veins. Corruption traced beneath her skin, pulsing in rhythm with the storm, as if the Crowned-Deep's hunger had forced a doorway wider. "It's... in me," she gasped, her voice layered with harmonics of a drowned choir, echoes bleeding through. "Every soul the Covenant claimed—they're not dead. instead, there trapped in this Church, she stumbles across the bridge." The bridge vanishes then a millisecond later, it reappears beneath her feet in an instant.
Anne Faith followed beside her, the silver pendant around her neck burning. Through her spiritual sight, she saw the infection rewriting their bloodline—consolidating every possibility of Marietta into a single point of corruption, a liminal feast of darkness swallowing light. The teeth gnaw at Anne Faith's Love with temptations "You will suffer. There is no escape."
The shadows coalesced with nightmare slowness, birthing forms that rattled chains like Mortifiers emerging from hell's landscape. Their hooks glinted, drawn by the Mirror's beacon, feasting on the suffering that bridged worlds. The church was no longer sanctuary; it was threshold, alive with the Crowned-Deep's adaptive pulse.