Page 90 of The Sin Binders Ascent

“Unless you want to climb a two-hundred-foot wall of carnivorous ivy behind us, yeah. Tunnel’s the best bad option.”

“Remind me again why you’re the voice of reason now?”

“I’m not. I’m the voice of deeply justified paranoia.”

She sighs, but moves forward, and I follow. Inside the tunnel, everything is amplified. The sound of our footsteps. The dripping. The low hum, not mechanical, not magical, just a natural resonance that makes your bones feel hollow if you focus on it too long.

The walls are warm. Not body-warm. Not inviting. Just not cold, which is somehow worse. I run a hand along one and feel it twitch. Not violently. Just enough to acknowledge I’m here. I wipe my hands on my jeans and keep walking.

The tunnel curves slowly, and after maybe a hundred feet, it opens into a chamber that steals the breath from my throat.

A cathedral. Not a literal one, but it feels like one. The space is vast, domed by layers of translucent vines shot through with veins of green light. At the center, a tree. Not one we’ve seen before. This one is metallic. Its bark gleams copper and black, its leaves a flat, colorless silver that quivers with every shift of air. Beneath it, the roots split and sprawl like ribs, and nestled between them is a shallow pool of liquid light. It doesn’t glow. Itshines.Like something poured from the core of a dying star and left behind to bleed.

Luna steps toward it, slowly. Reverent, almost.

“What is this place?” she whispers.

I don’t answer. I’m too busy trying to figure out how something this large, this ancient, exists untouched. There’s no rot here. No decay. Just stillness. Like this room isn’t part of the rest of the world. Like it was carved out and sealed off. Preserved.

She turns to me. Her eyes are darker now. Wary. Hungry in a way that isn’t just physical.

“You think that’s water?” she asks, nodding toward the pool.

“I think it’s not.”

“Are we drinking it anyway?”

I pause. Then, “If you’re brave enough to try, I’ll pretend to stop you.”

She looks back at it.

And I feel it. The pull. The ache. Not from the pool. From her.

This place doesn’t care about us. That makes it safe in a way that nothing else has been. Which means, finally, she might let herself come undone.

And that’s when I realize what scares me most. Not what’s in the pool.

But what happens when Luna stops pretending she can survive this without me?

She moves first, of course. Slow steps toward the water like she’s hunting it. Or maybe daring it to blink first. Her fingers twitch at her sides, not from nerves, but from calculation. She circles the pool with the same sharp gaze she’s turned on me more than once, looking for seams, lies, hidden teeth.

The light here isn’t from the sun. There’s no sun. Just that soft, muted glow coming through the dome of vines above, where translucent leaves hang like stained glass. Some are blue-green and soft-edged, others hard and jagged like coral. All of them shimmer faintly with the weight of moisture that neverfalls. The vines that make up the walls are pulsing, barely visible beneath the bark-smooth outer layers, as if they’re filtering something. Breathing, not life into the place, but equilibrium. It’s warm here, humid in a way that sinks into your joints and makes your shirt cling to your back. The air tastes like old metal and sweet rot. Not unpleasant, just… wrong in a way you can't name.

The copper tree stands to one side like it’s been here since the beginning of the world, bark grooved deep with the patterns of lightning strikes or claw marks, and I can’t tell which would be more comforting. Its leaves shift without wind, delicate silver fronds that never fall. The branches are too even, too symmetrical, like they were grown to some long-forgotten design. This place is a cathedral not because it mimics one, but because itdemandsreverence. You don’t belong here, and it doesn’t care. But you can look. You can kneel. You can drink, if you dare.

Luna crouches by the pool, her knees grazing the moss that’s grown thick at the edge, a soft black carpet speckled with deep purple spores that look like crushed garnets. She leans over the water, studying it. The surface doesn’t ripple. Doesn’t move at all, not even when she leans closer. Not even when her breath touches it.

“Try it,” she says without looking at me.

I raise an eyebrow. “Just like that?”

“If it kills you, I’ll know not to drink it.”

“I’m touched.”

She looks up, her expression unreadable. “You volunteered earlier.”

“I was being charming.”