I am the answer to the prayer you never knelt for.

I'm opening the airlock now. Not because he's forcing me. Because for the first time in my life, I want to know what's on the other side of the name.

When the lights returned, Aris was standing at the observation window, staring down at the abyss. His lips were moving silently. The sonar operator later swore the shape beneath the wreck had moved .

"You think we found Him," Saul said, his voice layered with a second, deeper register. "But He found the crack. Every unanswered prayer is a door. Every forgotten god is a hallway. And humanity? You've been apologizing for existing for ten thousand years. That's not humility. That's an invitation."

Dr. Thorne, still clinging to rationality, recorded everything in a log that grew increasingly frantic.

Day Four: Mori claims she remembers dying. Not once—seven times. Different centuries. Different bodies. She says Hilixlie showed her that every cross ever erected was a piece of his skeleton. We’ve been crucifying ourselves on him since the first tree fell.

And it is learning to walk.

Hilixlie Ehli Cruz was found carved into the keystone of a submerged archway, three hundred meters below the Philippine Sea. The letters were not Latin, but they translated with unnerving precision: "The Hollow Cross that Walks."