Oswald manages to pull Zoe safely out of the way of the collapse.

(Mordred keeps freezing up when bad things happen and that's fine when the bad thing is that there's a mouth in front of him but it's really bad when the bad thing is falling rocks.

He's not going to think about that right now. Instead he is going to wish that they had taken the door. It would be so fucking stupid if they died due to roof collapse before they even got to the mouth.)

"Wow. Uh. Thank you."

"So I guess... maybe not that path."

He chuckles weakly, staring at the wreckage.

"Is there... still a way back up to the catacombs through that?"

"No idea."

"Given that none of us have any engineering knowledge at all," Mordred says, "I think we might just have to run across as fast as we can and hope we make it before it collapses."

Oh he hates this idea.

They almost get to the edge of the hall safely.

But Oswald runs into a post and it collapses onto both him and Mordred.

Their arms and legs are covered with bruises and it hurts to move, but fortunately there aren't any broken bones. 

Are any of them bleeding, Mordred is very specifically concerned about broken skin.

Well, Zoe was already a little scraped from the well incident, and Mordred and Oswald are also scraped up from this. They get each other and themselves bandaged up, and then,

"Okay. We're probably not coming back this way. But. One more room and we're there."

It still hurts a lot to move, but he's had enough time to start thinking through the pain, at least.

"There really isn't anything we can do about the nectar except make sure not to swallow it, is there."

"Don't think so. At least everything's bandaged?"

The catacombs here are flooded to a depth of about four feet with dead people, brackish seawater, filthy mud, and rotten bones.

The smell is horrifying. Zoe retches, then vomits. It doesn't make a noticeable difference in how disgusting the water is.

Oswald is in TOO MUCH PAIN to process any of this. It's all deeply disgusting on a primal level and he is protesting every moment he spends anywhere near here but he just needs to keep telling himself to move forward and eventually they will be out.

As they draw nearer to the warehouse, the surface of the water gains a weird, oily, orange sheen.

Great. Eldritch spit. That's what this water needed.

Nectar? Don't swallow it, part of him remembers, which since he absolutely was not planning on swallowing it mostly makes him involuntarily imagine how horrible drinking this would be.

A fragile wooden wall blocks passage leading to the warehouse. A trickling stream of raw Nectar flows down the slanted floor, under the wooden wall.

"There it is. We ready for what's next?"

Deep breath of -- nope nope nope absolutely zero deep breaths of resolve.

"As much as we can be."

Yeah. That. "Ready."

Time to pry open the false wall, then.

The room was once some kind of shrine or sanctuary, constructed of the same sturdy brown stones as the passage outside. The walls are adorned with flaking plaster painted with a stylized mural of the Knights of Malta battling the Ottoman fleet during the Great Siege.

The sunken floor is flooded knee deep in raw Nectar. A foul, frothy soup that overflows the room and goes flowing down towards the tunnel. Your feet squelch as you walk. It oozes around their thighs.

They’ve all seen a Major Mouth before, but nothing can prepare them for its appearance. It grows, like a living thing, out of the center of the arched ceiling, fleshy and unmistakably physical. It must be thirty feet wide. Its teeth are broken and yellow; its tongue flicks out like an enormous tentacle. It belches and spews Nectar forth.

Mixed in the smell of Nectar, they can smell something light and floral. Perfume?

He walks through the false wall and tries to take in a proper deep breath and instead chokes on it and then cannot, cannot, cannot stop choking, it feels like the entire world is that mouth and not even the fresh air brings any physical relief because his lungs are full of the smell of nectar, is this panic, he thinks he might be panicking--