The thing that had been Emily lunged from the dark, its needle-teeth glinting.
Jacob barely twisted away in time, but Eleanor wasn't fast enough—the creature's claws raked across her cheek, peeling back a strip of flesh. No blood welled. Only thick, black smoke curled from the wound, carrying the scent of burnt sugar and rotting feathers.
Eleanor screamed, but the sound distorted, warping into something inhuman as her mask shattered completely. Porcelain shards embedded in Jacob's forearms, hot as embers. Beneath the broken mask—
Nothing.
Where her face should have been was a yawning void, darker than the tunnels around them. Only a single crow's eye floated in that abyss, its pupil contracting as it fixed on Jacob.
"You made me forget too," the void whispered—but the voice was still Eleanor's, frayed with grief.
The Emily-thing giggled, the sound skittering like rat claws on stone. Its form flickered—one moment a child, the next a skeletal thing with too many joints, its ribcage split open to reveal a nest of squirming, featherless chicks.
The Hollow Priest emerged from the shadows, his wooden mask now split clean down the middle. The left half remained blank, but the right half had morphed—carved itself into a perfect replica of Jacob's own face, down to the scar cutting through his eyebrow.
"Cycle after cycle," the Priest sighed, his voice now a grotesque amalgam of Jacob's baritone and Emily's childish lilt. "You always choose the knife over the key."
Jacob looked down at the rusted key still clutched in his burning palm. The metal pulsed like a heartbeat, its teeth stained with old blood—his blood, he realized. The same pattern as the scars on his arms.
A memory tore through him—
—Young Eleanor pressing a blade to his forearm, carving sigils into his skin as he sobbed. "It's the only way to make you remember next time," she whispered. Outside the cellar door, something scratched and giggled.—
The walls breathed.
Stone cracked open like eggshells, revealing veins of pulsating black roots that seeped a viscous, tar-like substance. The roots twitched toward Jacob, drawn to the key's metallic stench.
The Priest tilted his head, the Jacob-half of his mask smiling. "The Crow doesn't want you dead, little liar. It wants you hungry."
Then the Emily-thing pounced.