"Sarnyx!" I call across the perimeter. "We need a path to the northeastern face. Ground level."
She doesn't turn around. She changes direction, her thorns carving through two constructs without breaking stride. The defenders follow her like a blade cutting through dense material. The corridor she opens is narrow, violent, and exactly where I need it.
We run.
The ground between the second-ring wall and the Cathedral is torn earth, gray where the Cathedral's root-legs have stripped the life from the soil. The sky overhead pulses with the Bloomfall Moon's light. Petal-mouths on the Cathedral's surface track our movement, opening and closing, releasing targeted bursts of corrosive pollen that Vashael's toxins barely neutralize. A tendril lashes down from the vine armor, and Sarnyx severs it midair; the cut so clean that the two halves fall separately.
We reach the northeastern face. The root-legs are moving. Each one is as thick as a tree trunk, tearing free from the dead earth with slow, sucking pulls, then resets in a rhythm that creates a gap between the second and third leg. The gap lasts about four seconds before the leg comes down.
"On my mark," I say. The root-leg lifts. "Now."
"CHARGE!" I hear Peeble yell from somewhere nearby. I didn't even realize they were still with us.
We run through the gap. Thalia first, then Elle, then me. The root-leg slams down behind us, close enough that the impact shakes through my boots and sends a spray of dead soil across my back.
We're inside the Cathedral.
The interior is worse than what I saw in Iteration Fourteen.
The vine armor forms a cavern around us, the walls layered in living plant matter that shifts and breathes. The air is thick, warm, smelling of sap and decay, like something organic that reminds me of rotting flowers. Bioluminescence pulses through the vine walls in slow waves, casting the space in a sickly green light that makes everything appear submerged.
And the bodies.
I saw them in Iteration Fourteen, suspended in amber sap. The ones here are different. Not preserved. Integrated. The vine walls have grown around them, absorbing them into the structure. I can see faces pressed into the living wood, mouths open, eyes closed, their features blurred where the plant matter has consumed the boundaries between flesh and vine. Some of them are old. Decades old, maybe longer. Others are recent enough that I can still make out the living-wood armor they were wearing when they entered.
These are the people who tried before. Fighters who made it through the outer shell and never came back. The Cathedral didn't kill them. It kept them. Built itself around them. Used them the way it uses everything: as material.
Elle's hand finds mine in the green light. Her fingers are cold. She's looking at the faces in the walls, and I can see her processing what they mean. Not just the horror. The stakes. If Thalia's anchor fails, if the core resists, if the plan doesn't work, this is what happens. We become part of the wall.
"Don't look at them," I say.
"I need to look at them." Her voice is steady. "I need to remember what I'm growing toward."
"Ew, definitely don't look at them, Elle," Peeble adds. "You don't need that kind of disgusting negativity in your life."
Thalia walks ahead of us, her marks lighting the way. She doesn't look at the walls. She's been here before. Not inside the Cathedral, but close enough to know what it contains. This is not new information to her. It's old grief wearing a new face.
We reach the central cavity.
The space opens suddenly, the vine-walled corridor widening into a chamber fifty feet across. The ceiling is high, the vine structure arching overhead in ribs that look disturbingly like the inside of a chest cavity. And at the center, the core.
It's not what I expected.
I expected something massive. A concentrated mass of Root matter, a fortress of vine and thorn, something that looked like power made physical.
The core is a man.
He sits in the center of the cavity, cross-legged, on a seat of woven root that has grown into and through his body. Vines run from his arms, his legs, his torso, connecting him to the Cathedral's walls in a web of living tissue. His skin is more plant than flesh; the corruption marks so deeply fused with the Root matter that I can't tell where one ends and the other begins. His hair is long and matted with vine growth. His build is mine. His face is mine.
Iteration Fourteen's Kaelren. He's still alive. His chest rises and falls in a rhythm that matches the Cathedral's pulse. His eyes are closed. The vine connections running from his body into the walls pulse with each breath, carrying his consciousness outward, distributing his mind throughout the entire structure. He doesn't just control the Cathedral. He is the Cathedral.
"Oh. Oh my," Peeble says with a gagging noise. "Kaelren. That look. It's a real choice. You should really take better care of yourself. Elle, we can definitely do better."
I push past to get a better look, and my corruption marks flare. Not in response to a threat. In recognition. The same pulse I felt in Iteration Fourteen when I watched this man climb the Bloom-core with bare hands. Every version of me across every timeline, drawing the same breath at the same time.
I know him. He's what I become without her.
"Thalia," I say. "Now."
