The descent was slow at first. The steps were narrow, cracked and slick with moisture. Some were missing entirely, crumbled under centuries of pressure and heat. But the further they went, the easier it became. Not because the path got better – but because the world around them quieted. The jungle noise above faded into nothing. No birdsong. No insects. Just the sound of their own breath and crunch of boots against stone.

And the smell…

It returned stronger down here. Thick and cloying. Sweet like bruised fruit left too long in the sun. But there was rot beneath it. Old blood, burned metal. A scent that lodged in the back of the throat and made the eyes water.

The light changed too. The green glow deepened, leaking from the walls in pulsing patterns. Not rhythmic – but alive. Flickering like breath. Like thought. It lit their faces in strange shadows, carving angles where there were none, making them look older, wearier. Ghosts of themselves.

At the bottom of the descent, the stone opened into a narrow corridor. The walls stretched higher here, carved not by nature but something older. Not tools, not machines. Just…force. Pressure that had shaped stone into smooth, unnatural symmetry.

And beneath their boots, the floor was marked.

Etching again, spirals, claws, handprints – too long, too thin, pressed into the rock like it had once been molten. Like something had climbed up from beneath and left a record of the journey; of hunger.

Sin crouched near one of the symbols, staff lowered, fingers twitching with unease. "These again. Same as the clearing."

Jacob didn't kneel. Didn't touch. Just looked. "I think it's following us."

Sara scanned the corridor, jaw clenched. "No. I think we're following it."

The tunnel turned left, then down again, into another slope. They moved without speaking now, breathing shallow, trying to keep the smell from their lungs. The deeper they went, the more the island changed. The more wrong it felt. The heat was gone, the moisture too. It was dry down here, dry, cold and hollow.

And in the walls, bones began to appear.

Embedded in the stone like fossiles. Twisted, unnatural, not just animals, not just human. Some were too large, others, too small. One set had a skull with three eye sockets. Another had no skull at all, just vertebrae that ended in a jagged bloom of bone like petals.

"Still think this is a way out?" Sin asked, her voice tight.

"No," Jacob shook his head. "But it's a way through."

Sara's gaze slid to him. "Through what?"

He didn't answer.

Because he wasn't sure yet.

Whatever it was, it had been waiting a long, long time.

And now it knew they were coming.

The tunnel narrowed as they moved forward, the walls pressing in closer, rough stone brushing shoulders and arms. The air grew thinner – not in volume, but in presence. Like it had been filtered through something dead and forgotten before reaching them. Each breath felt heavier than the last, dry and grainy on the tongue.

Sara slowed at first. Not from fear – she never let that show – but from instinct. She held up a hand, signaling halt.

Jacob stopped beside her. Sin, a pace behind, still with staff angled up and away.

"Feel that?" Sara asked quietly.

Jacob didn't need to nod. It wasn't sound they felt, it wasn't heat or vibration either. It was something older. A frequency, low and constant, humming through the soles of their boots and the marrow of their bones. Not loud enough to hear, but too deep to ignore.

"It's…. Beneath us," Sin said, frowning. "Like the rock's holding something in."

Or trying to.

The corridor opened at last into a chamber. Not massive – no grand cavern or domed cathedral – but a low, circular room. Intimate. Contained. Designed to gather. And the glow here was strongest, casting everything in a pale green haze that shimmered off the walls like oil on water.

The floor sloped inward, shallow but deliberate, funneling attention to the center.

To the pit…

It wasn't deep. Maybe a meter down, circular. Lined with symbols again – but these weren't carved. They were grown. Bioluminescent veins had sprouted across the stone in impossible patterns. Blooming in strange spirals and knotwork glyphs that pulsed like heartbeats.

In the center of the pit was a stone altar. Or what was left of one. Half-cracked, slick with something dark and dry. Not blood, it was far too old. It smelled like it remembered being blood.

Above it, the air shimmered.

Not with heat, but with a pressure so intense it caused the air to vibrate. Like something invisible hung there, or had once – and still left behind the memory of its weight.

Jacob stepped to the edge of the pit, staring down.

"It's a focal point," he whispered. "A ritual site."

Sara circled to his left. "It's older than anything I've ever seen on this island. Older than the prison, older than the wreckage. This isn't man-made."

Sin crouched near the edge, not close enough to enter, but close enough to study.

"This is where it started."

"What started?" Jacob asked, taken aback and staring at her.

She didn't look up. "All of it."

A wind stirred inside the chamber.

No – not wind.

The air shifted, thickened, and then….dropped.

Like pressure in a plane cabin, but deeper, gut-deep.

And then came the sound.

Not on the outside. Inside each of them.

A voice – no, an essence – spoke in the back of their minds. Just a flicker, a murmur. No words they could understand, but shapes. Hunger shaped like language. Despair shaped like a song with no melody. Recognition without name.

Jacob staggered back a step, a hand to his temple.

Sara's eyes flared, her breath caught. "Did you—?"

"Yeah," Jacob rasped, his throat suddenly dry. "I heard it."

Sin's gaze was distant, both blank – focused somewhere far away. Her knuckles were white around her staff.

"Sin?" Sara moved toward her, reaching out – but the younger woman flinched away.

"I'm fire," SIn said, too fast, too sharp.

"You're not."

"It's in me," she said, finally looking up. "Not like possession, like ... .like it knows me. Like it's seen me before."

Sara bent down, eye-level with the younger woman. "Seen you where?"

"I don't know," Sin's voice cracked, giving way to terror. "But it's been….waiting."

Jacob paced back, looking up around the domed ceiling. There were no exits, no cracks. Just the same pulsing patterns, growing brighter now. The room was reacting to them. To Sin.

"We need to get out of here," Sara warned. "Now."

Jacob shook his head. "No, not yet. This place ... .it's a key. It's showing us something."

The chamber began to hum, faint at first, then louder; a resonance building through the stone.

And then the altar moved. Not much, just a shift, a twitch.

Then it began to sink.

The glyphs on the floor flared bright, then turned red – briefly – before fading into darkness. The green light went with them, swallowed in an instant, plunging the chamber into darkness.

Total, absolute darkness.

Then a breath…

Not theirs, something deeper, something ancient.

And then, from the pit, something rose.

Not fast, not violent, just…inevitable.

A shape, wrong and bending, limbs that weren't limbs. A suggestion of a face – no eyes, just space where eyes should have been, and heat. Radiating from it in waves that smelled like decay and resurrection. Like waters from the Lazarus Pit left out in the sun too long.

Sara moved first, blades out, stance low.

"Jacob," she said, her voice full of concern. "What the hell is that?"

He didn't answer, he couldn't. Because some part of him recognized it.

And that part was screaming….

The thing that rose from the pit didn't stand….it unfurled. Like memory clawing its way out of a grace, stretching across dimensions it had long since outgrown. It was tall – not in stature, but in the presence of its being alone; it took up more space than the chamber allowed. The walls should've cracked, the ceiling should've collapsed; but they didn't. They held, trembling and begging for release.

Jacob stumbled back a step, his boots grinding against the stone. The scream – buried in his mind – grew louder. Not fear, no, not even pain, but recognition

"Jacob!" Sara barked again, stepping between him and the thing. Her blades were dull in the glow, catching no light, but she held them anyway, muscles coiled to strike.

Sin hadn't moved, she was still kneeling, but her head was tilted now; like she was listening to something no one else could hear.

And maybe she was.

The shape in the pit didn't speak; it didn't need to. Its mere presence pressed against the insides of their skulls like a dull knife, probing, searching, testing….marking.

Then it looked, without eyes, turning directly to Sin.

She gasped, back arching, staff clattering to the stone as her hands shot to her chest like something had physically reached inside her and gripped her heart. Her lips moved, soundlessly.

Jacob's blood ran cold.

"Sin," he called, reaching for her. "Look at me."

But she didn't, she either couldn't hear him or was no longer there. Not fully; her eyes flicked – black, then back again.

The entity shifted – closer to her but without completely moving, it felt closer. Time didn't seem to pass right here; distance bent. The pit had never been about containment. It was a door…and she was the welcome mat.

Sara took a step forward. "We're ending this."

"No!" Jacob found himself shouting. "Don't touch it….don't touch her!"

But it was too late.

Sara lunged – only to be thrown back mid-air. Not by the creature, but seemingly by the chamber itself. A pulse, like a heartbeat, exploded outward from Sin; not sound, not force, but sheer force of will. She hit the far wall hard, blades clattering around beside her, the sound echoing around the chamber.

Jacob ran to her, but his steps felt wrong – like he was moving through syrup; like gravity changed every second.

Sin stood.

Not all the way, her spine curled, head low, arms slack – but she stood.

And the thing bowed to her…just once, a slow reverent dip of something that shouldn't know reverence.

"Why?" she whispered, words echoing around the chamber.

The shape responded with silence, with a force of presence; pressure behind their eyes.

Then, finally, Jacob saw it – not just in the pit. In her. Veins glowing faintly beneath her skin. The same glyphs, the same patterns.

The chamber had marked her as its own.

Sara groaned, pushing up from the ground behind him. "What….what the hell is this thing?

Jacob looked at the altar, then at Sin, then back at the pulsing lines that now formed a trail up her neck, glowing like veins made of starlight.

"I think it's not here for us," he said, voice shaking.

Sin turned to face them, eyes dull and ancient all at once.

"It's…because…of us."

The pit pulsed again, almost as if to answer in the affirmative.

And then Sin collapsed…

The chamber pressed in around them.

The light had slowly dimmed, not fading completely away, as the shadow still breathed; still watched, before it faded back into the altar, like smoke curling back down into its source. The pit began to pulse family beneath the stone, like something buried alive was still dreaming

Sin lay on the cold floor, her body still trembling in fits, her breath ragged like it wanted to give up. Sara crawled to her body, pulling her into her lap and placing one hand at the girl's lap, the other hovering helplessly above her chest – unable to draw the darkness out, unable to shield her from it.

Jacob stood frozen at the edge of the pit, eyes fixated on the altar.

And then a voice came into being, echoing around before resting itself on Jacobs ears.

"She's beautiful, isn't she? And she's ripening…beautifully."

It slithered through his thoughts like oil down glass, slick, familiar, mocking him to his core. The voice of the Loa.

"So much fury in such a fragile shell. Bruised long before you ever met her. Bent, but not broken….no, not yet. But soon. She wasn't even there when you died and yet – look at how she aches for you, how she burns.. She carries your teachings, your skills, your death like a brand. How…..poetic."

Jacob's jaw clenched, the bow in his hand protesting with ethereal sounds.

"You were always so noble, weren't you? Dying for her, burning, for her."

His eyes closed, and the pain rushed back in.

-The chains around his hands, his feet tied into restaurants. The copper stink of his own blood sizzled on them. Every jolt of electricity carving screams from his throat…until even that gave out. Until his heart snapped like wet wood.-

"They strung you up like meat in a butcher's stall, and she watched. Oh…how she watched. Powerless, chained, eyes wide, sobbing like a child. And when your heart failed? When your head slumped and your body smoked?"

The voice exhaled in perverse pleasure.

"Electrocution is such an ugly way to go, too. So crude, so crass, but poetic. The body twitching, the heart stuttering like a beaten drum with a hole in it. The moment it popped— Oh. I felt it. Like a match head snapping. That….that was the moment I took you. You were simple…easy. You died with purpose….or so you thought. Thinking if you suffered enough, she'd be spared."

Sara flinched at that.

"The slave girl found your corpse in the mud, limping, forgotten, castoff. She bathed you in the last of the Lazarus waters, forced them down your throat with hands that shook with rage and whispered my name like a prayer. And I….I answered."

Jacob's fists trembled in recognition. "You used me."

"No," the Loa crooned. "You LET ME. You let go the moment your lungs stopped. And when I filled them again….you were eager….you were SO EAGER. Do you remember it, boy? Do you remember that first kill?"

He did, of course he did.

He could still see himself pulling back the string, releasing the arrow and catching the suspecting minion clean through the neck. The blood, pouring from the carotid he severed and plashing all over the floor, the walls, how it ran like a river. He didn't hesitate. It wasn't him, he had told himself over and over again, it was The Baron.

"You didn't just kill them, Jacob. You butchered them; no questions, no mercy. An arrow through the throat, an arrow through an eye, knife flashing. And when you got to the chamber…when you saw him standing in front of her, gloating, laughing?"

Jacob said nothing…he didn't need to…

"You stalked him, you used terror as the finest of weapons. Do you remember the sickening crunch? The wet stain on your knuckles as you broke both flesh and bone, knocking The Haitian out? You strung him up with the exact chains he used on you. Tied him the same way they tied you…then thwip, thwip, thwip…arrows to each limb, until he screamed for death. And you waited for it, watching him twitch ... .REVELED IN IT."

Sara's voice came quiet, brittle, a soft spasm between the onslaught of force. "Stop."

"And you…Sara Lance…you saw it too, didn't you," It hissed, turning the full force of its presence on Sara. "Watched him take your pain and make it sacred. You should have run, foolish girl. But you stayed, you watched, you listened, to every scream, every snap. You let it happen because some part of you wanted it to be you extracting the revenge."

Sara turned her back on the pit, on Jacob – eyes tight, jaw locked, refusing to admit the truth.

"You still hear it," the Loa went on. "In the quiet….dontcha. The sound of his heart dying. The smell of charred flesh….you breathe it in your sleep…..the sounds and taste of your lover dying, don't you, Sara Lance."

Jacob's voice was low now, dangerous, carrying what weight and power he could against it. "Leave, her, alone."

"Oh my boy, but I'm only speaking the truth. Isn't that what you heroes love? Truth! Painful, bleeding truth." The voice curled again towards Sara. "And speaking of truth….she's coming along nicely."

Jacob moved between Sin and the pit, determined to put himself between the voice and her. "She's just a kid…"

"No," the Loa hissed. "She's…..the future. She's what happens when you take a soul and fit it with YOU. With your blood, your rage. You awakened her when you returned from the grave."

Sara stood now, pushing past JAcob, positioning herself directly in front of Sin.

"She's not yours!"

"Not mine?" the Loa mocked. "She knows me. She feels me in every shattered bone, every scar. She doesn't need to invite me. She….wants…me. She already carries me. She is mine in a way that you could never understand."

It turned its venom back toward Sara.

"But you, little broken bird…oh, you're hiding something, aren't you? Something even you haven't seen. A rot beneath the surface. That's what makes it so….delicious. That little seed of rot curling inside her, waiting. You feel it, don't you, Sara? The dread, the weight; Something's changing. Something's….wrong. You don't dare say it….but you know. You carry something…and it's mine too."

Sara stiffened, but said nothing.

"You were always the strongest…..the great Sara Lance. The survivor, the resurrected. But you nevers stopped breaking, did you? Bit by bit, slice my slice. And soon, when the truth bubbles up? When you finally see what's growing in the dark, what then?"

Jacob's face contorted into a mixture of fury and pain.

"You think you're whole; that your pain has edges. But it…..doesn't. It festers, and when it bursts….oh, the song that will be…"

"And Sin," it continued, addressing them both and coiling towards Sin. "Sin is already listening, already singing my song. Her soul is cracked like an eggshell, and the more she watches you both, the more she wants it to shatter."

"She's stronger than you think," Jacob shot out, rebelliously.

"She's exactly as strong as I need her to be, boy. And when the time comes…when she finally lets me in? You'll beg me to take you instead of her."

Sara stood now, putting as much of her body between the pit and Sin. "Touch her again…"

"Touch?" The Loas voice burst out in a cold, sick giddiness. "Oh no, my dear, I am in her already. In the marrow, in the silence between heartbeats. She was made for this. And you…"

Its voice turned crueler, more intimate, as if it were savoring every syllable.

"You were made to watch, just like before."

The Loa quieted, then almost reverently continued.

"You were my scalpel, Jacob. Sara is my wound. But Sin…."

Its tone grew rapturous.

"...Sin is my psalm…"

And just like that…it was gone.

No farewell, no release, just silence.

Not far, sitting just beneath the skin, just under the breath.

Waiting

Sin stirred, a flicker passed behind her closed eyes before she reached out her hand, and clamped onto Jacob's.

He didn't pull away, instead, holding on and kneeling down to her.

Sara moved to let her stand up, finding her hands move over her own stomach without even realizing it.

Jacob looked from Sin to Sara, his brow creased. "We keep moving. We get her out of here."

Sara nodded. "And if it follows?"

He looked down at the glyphs, at the stone where his heart had failed once before.

His voice was flint.

"Then we make it wish it stayed buried."

Behind them, the pit pulsed once; soft, red, hungry.