"Yeah, there was a group -- Winston and Henslowe and, I don't remember who else, those were the survivors -- that's what our group was originally hired to look into, actually. Finding out what Walter Winston had been trying to stop."

"That is good. I-- would not like to see the Mouth present in the world."

"What... would happen. If they had succeeded fully."

"I do not know."

"...fair enough."

"In my meditation, I have found that the mouths... are connected to a Maw. I do not know what would happen if the Maw came to exist on Earth. It would not, I fear, be good for us."
 
 
 
 

"Uh. Speaking of the ritual. I realize you were not present for it but, but, would you happen to have come across anything at any point that might explain, um --" very quickly: "Lev was the conduit for the ritual and he's been in supernaturally perfect health for ten years and it keeps feeling like the other shoe is going to drop and this will turn out to be really bad but maybe not?" Is this good news or horribly insensitive??? Good thing he's not tracking any of that!

"...I have no idea. ...I would not expect this to be an effect of the summoning?" He looks at Lev more closely. "...have you aged? You look as you did when I left you. Somewhat thinner."

Ahahahha that's not terrifying or anything.

"I... don't know?"

(He is suddenly remembering Lev saying in a sense he was going to die at age 26. It was more metaphorical at the time.)

"That's still not... necessarily bad. I think."

"If the ritual has long-lasting magical effects... it may not be as disrupted as we hope."

"There have also been... mouths forming in walls, people with biting compulsions, voices... but nothing so obviously linked to the ritual itself as that."

"...also the ritual summoned a horrifying mouth beast and then afterward there were giant Mouths which secreted way more Nectar than the previous cult had ever had."

Ayers looks extremely concerned.

"Are you planning to fight it?"

"Yes. Of course we are."

He nods.

(The mouth looks... more colored than it was before. And almost moist.)

"I have thought... that there is a way that a Mouth could be destroyed."

Okay so there is torturing a man via extensive questioning and there is actually killing him and he thinks they're getting closer to the latter but-- "Go on?"

"The Rituals of Self-Denial allow you to neutralize a Mouth. If there were a larger Mouth... as I had seen on the Dallol dig... Perhaps one could perform the Rituals of Self-Denial until their own body could neutralize it. And throw themselves inside, and perish. It is, I think, how the Mouth in Dallol was calcified, thousands of years ago."

".....and if there were a smaller Mouth, something like a crucifix, over which someone had done rituals of self-denial for years --?"

"Perhaps."

"No, that's -- that worked. Back in L.A. A very Catholic man threw his crucifix into the mouth that had opened in the garden and it calcified."

"...Is that why you both have crucifixes."

"I mostly have a crucifix because my best friend is very Catholic and he worries about me. But yes, I was asking if that was why what happened in LA worked."

"He gave it to me." He rubs the back of his head self-consciously. "I thought, y'know, he must have figured something out. Or, he gave it to -- Mordred, technically? I think? But--"