Lyra, knife in each hand, circled wide and pulled Thorin back. Nik went low, left hand shielding his eyes from the spray. The acolytes surged forward, arms extended, their fingers blackening and elongating as they moved.
The priest convulsed again. His spine rose, arched almost to the point of breaking, and the flesh at his shoulders rippled up, splitting the skin like a jacket too tight for its owner.
New arms unfolded, twitching and jointless, slick with birth-slime and studded with pale claws.
His head, now half-molten by Torgo’s powder, twisted 180 degrees, then another 90, so that the mouth faced Apollo directly, the teeth clicking and gnashing in a sick, mechanical rhythm.
The acolytes wailed, but their voices blended into a single, choral whine.
They did not attack as a mob, but as a design: two flanking Lyra, two for Nik, one, heavier, stitched with old muscle, lunging for Thorin, who could barely stay upright.
Torgo raised his stick and swept it in a wide, showman’s arc; a fan of orange fire stitched the air and caught the leftmost acolyte full in the chest.
It burned like paper, crumpling inward, the smoke already thick with the promise of more.
Apollo gauged the distance: three meters to the priest, two to the nearest acolyte. He had no weapon.
He had only the ghost of a song, the lattice of gold just under his skin. He sang, not with his throat, but with the bones behind it.
A single, piercing note, thin as a razor.
The acolyte nearest him staggered, hands to its ears. Its face was melting, the eyes sloughing downward in slow, viscous tears.
Another step, and it collapsed, kneeling, then vomiting up a fluttering cloud of black moths that evaporated before they touched the ground.
Apollo felt it in his jaw: the note cost him a molar, maybe two, but it worked.
Lyra’s fight was ugly and fast, one acolyte went down with a knife in the eye, the other caught her by the braid and nearly took out her throat.
Nik intercepted, breaking its jaw with the hilt of a pew candlestick, then twisting the head until the neck splintered with a wet pop.
The body kept moving, arms windmilling, but Lyra swept its legs and pinned it down with a knife through the wrist. It shrieked, the sound like a child’s first breath.
The priest had finished his transformation. He stood twice his original size, spine bowed by new bone, limbs reworked into a grotesque symmetry—three arms per side, all ending in claws. His robe was an afterthought, the flesh beneath it changing color as if in anticipation of the next blow.
He reached for Apollo. The arm extended impossibly, fingers splayed for the whole width of the nave.
Apollo ducked, barely, but the claw caught his shoulder and flung him ten feet down the aisle. He landed hard, vision blacking for half a second.
Torgo, cackling, lofted another handful of blue powder at the priest. This time the monster dodged, the powder hissing against the floor, eating through stone.
A single drop splashed onto an acolyte’s bare foot, and the flesh popped and vanished, leaving only a stump and a cloud of hissing vapor.
Lyra and Nik worked in tandem now, clearing the acolytes with a brutality that bordered on play.
The dog, a surprise to everyone, maybe even itself, had found a bite on the Achilles of the slowest, dragging it off-balance long enough for Nik to finish the job.
The priest lunged again, but this time Apollo was ready. He called up the gold in his veins, let it flood the ends of his fingers, and as the claw reached for him, he jabbed the palm straight into the center of its slick, jointed hand.
The effect was instant: the gold flared, the hand shriveled, and for a moment the priest howled with a voice that was all the lost children of the city, the hunger of every winter, the sound of famine as it learns to speak.
Apollo reeled, every nerve singing with aftershock, but he did not pass out.
The priest reeled, too. Two of its arms hung limp, dead as rope. The face, what was left of it, bore a look of recognition, Apollo’s own, he realized.
The thing had recognized him. It knew exactly who, or what, it was fighting.
It spoke, something that was almost a word: "Sun—" but the rest was lost as Nik hurled the remains of the candlestick through its eye.
The priest staggered back, then toppled, the body spasming, the claws gouging long, shallow cuts in the stone.
The remaining acolytes scrambled, some for the door, others to the ruined altar, but only a few made it before Lyra and Torgo finished them.
Silence, finally, except for Thorin’s ragged breathing and the drip-drip-drip of blood, or whatever took its place, from the altar to the stone floor.
Apollo leaned against the first pew, panting, the gold in his arms gone cold. He did not feel victorious. He felt empty, as if the transformation had stolen something from him, too.
Lyra approached, blood streaking her hands and face. "You alive?"
He nodded. "I think so."
Torgo dusted his hands and surveyed the carnage with a craftsman’s pride. "Could have gone worse."
Nik spat, then squinted at Thorin, who had slumped against the wall, his face ashen but his eyes focused. "You dead, old man?"
Thorin grimaced. "Not yet. But I’ll haunt you proper if you leave me behind." His voice was steadier than Apollo expected. The dwarf would survive, at least another day.
Apollo looked at the remains of the priest. The body was already dissolving, the flesh unspooling into a froth of white and red that soaked into the cracks between the stones.
He looked to the altar, to the cups, to the basin still brimming with the iridescent liquid.
He touched the gold in his wrist. It pulsed, once, and he understood: the rite was not a poison. It was a catalyst.
The temple wanted to make him into something, to use him as a vessel for its own memory, its own hunger.
He turned to the others. "We need to be gone before the next group arrives."
Nik nodded, but Lyra lingered. "What did you see, when you touched it?" she asked, voice flat.
Apollo hesitated, then shrugged. "Myself. But not quite." He tried a smile, but it cracked.
They left the temple behind. The dog trotted at Apollo’s heel, tongue lolling. As they passed the last of the boundary stones, the sun broke through the clouds, just for a heartbeat, and the gold in Apollo’s arms flickered in the light.
He ignored it, and kept walking.
But he knew, now, that it would never leave him. Not entirely.