From the instant your foot crosses the threshold of what was once a sacred place—now blackened and choked with the memory of fire, the stone beneath your sole still strangely warm as though the sun itself once knelt here—you understand, not through logic but through something deeper, older, buried in the marrow of your bones, that this structure was not constructed to shelter, to protect, or even to contain in the conventional sense, but to cradle something so profound in its malevolence, so infinite in its hunger, that the very walls now tremble with the tension of holding her still.

This is not a place designed for mortals, nor even for monsters; it is a shrine forged in the cradle of myth and violation, a womb carved from rock and story that pulses faintly beneath your fingertips, as if the earth itself remembers what it once promised to deliver into this world and now aches in quiet shame for having followed through.

The air itself resists you—humid and trembling, heavy with the layered scents of damp, decaying moss and ancient blood long-baked into the mortar—but threaded through it all is an aroma far more unsettling, something musky and unyielding, like fur scorched by holy fire, like salt left too long on unhealed flesh, a smell that carries no place in nature because it was never born but summoned, crafted in the hollow spaces between worlds and worshipped before language learnt to fear it.

The silence around you does not merely exist—it imposes itself, wrapping your throat and lungs with invisible pressure, pierced only by the low, arrhythmic thrum of something vast and unseen shifting behind the stone, a sound that does not echo from any clear direction but instead seems to rise from the walls themselves, like breath held too long or muscle straining to keep still a thing that was never meant to be still at all.

And when she arrives—when Lilitha Blaze, the nightmare carved in bone and silk, the mother of extinction and authority, enters your vision—it is not with the fury of a beast charging into battle, nor with the thunder of wings splitting sky and earth, but rather with a silence so deliberate it feels like judgement, a stillness so profound it commands reverence before your eyes can fully process the silhouette forming out of shadow and fire.

Her boots do not echo, but the ground beneath them whines as if in mourning, and her presence floods the chamber like a rising tide of ash and fire, bringing with it the scent of smouldering parchment and the unmistakable tang of divine rot; her belly, full and straining beneath a chest plate only half-latched as if in quiet resignation, sloshes with the slow, sick rhythm of a prison made of flesh—alive, shifting, whispering in a voice only she can hear and only you can feel.

She comes to a halt mere steps away, close enough that the heat radiating from her skin begins to blister the edges of your sanity, close enough that the bubbling churn within her middle becomes a soundtrack to your mounting panic, and when her face finally tilts into view beneath the battle-warped helm, revealing just one gleaming eye and the faint curl of a mouth that has forgotten how to smile without cruelty, it becomes clear that this woman, this being, does not offer mercy, nor understanding, nor even malice; she offers only truth, and the truth is terrifying.

Her voice, when it comes, is not just low—it is subterranean; it is the sound of earthquakes whispered through funeral hymns, layered in vowels soaked in centuries of war and decay, and though the words carry a Southern lilt, a drawl that dances mockingly along the edges of charm, there is nothing warm beneath it, only the dry, seething heat of a fire that believes itself righteous.

“What’s inside me doesn’ dream like mortals do. It doesn’t stir with innocence, or flutter with hope, or stretch its limbs for the sun like some soft, mewling babe—no, what I carry kicks to the rhythm of old sins and unfinished business. It remembers things I’ve never spoken out loud. It judges everyone and anyone before it even opens its eyes."