The granular statues stood perfectly still, a silent, faceless jury. The real horror wasn't their approach, but their infinite patience. They were waiting for the performance to begin. Their performance.
Lena’s whimper broke the trance. "Aris, my hand..."
He looked down. Her fingers, still pressed against the sealed door, were pale. Too pale. The texture of her skin was changing, hardening, taking on the dull, polished sheen of the temple's obsidian. The curse wasn't just psychological; it was physical, rewriting them to fit the narrative of stone and despair.
The phantom of Miller provided the script. His echo turned from the wall, his eyeless face a pit of darkness, and reached for them with a desperate, pleading gesture. Aris felt a corresponding pull in his own muscles, a compelling need to mimic the motion, to step into the role of the next supplicant.
"The heart!" Lena gasped, her voice raspy as stone dust filled the air. "The offering... it wasn't to appease it. It was to become it!"
The truth was a final, devastating blow. The faceless god wasn't a separate entity. It was the amalgamated form of every soul ever consumed, a collective of damned echoes given a singular, terrible purpose: to recruit. Aris’s own legs felt heavy, rooted. He looked at his hands and saw the same petrification beginning at his fingertips, a cold, numb sensation crawling up his wrists. They were becoming part of the temple's architecture, permanent players in its endless tragedy. The central deity raised its hand. The smaller statues mirrored the gesture in perfect, chilling unison. An invitation. A demand.
As the last of the light from their sputtering flare died, Aris’s final sight was not of darkness, but of the scene shifting. He saw the grand hall from a new, elevated angle, his vision stone-solid and eternal. Before him, two new statues stood frozen in terror—a man and a woman forever reaching for a door that never was. And in the shadows, he sensed a new echo flicker to life: his own, forever screaming, forever silent, waiting for the next audience to arrive. The temple had its newest relics. The show would go on.
