As the two cultists leave to fetch Aldonza, the three furious and heart-sick ladies plan their strategy for confronting Aldonza and convincing her to stop supporting Nin's evil perversion of her worship of Artemis. They decide that while they don't want to impersonate Artemis herself (Helena is not a religious expert but feels this could have some unfortunate side effects), they do want to prevent the other cultists from interfering in their private conversation, so they plan to keep being impressive and lunar in the hopes that Aldonza's followers will listen to their orders only to speak to her alone. Helena dresses up in wrappings to disguise her identity and make her look official and ceremonial, and Valencia and Issy retreat down one of the tunnels to stay out of sight until Aldonza arrives. Helena successfully plays the part of a ceremonial herald and convinces the cultists when they return that Aldonza must come down alone, but when she does, Aldonza isn't fooled by the disguise and gets angry. Valencia and Issy make their grand entrance, and Issy yearns so hard for Aldonza to hear them out that she actually surprises her into letting go of some of her feelings of antipathy toward them, making her receptive to at least having a conversation, and all three of them do their utmost to assert their personalities and make Aldonza view them as the friends they want to be. They then stage an intervention, laying out for her the truth about Nin - that she's not a servant of Artemis but an interloper from another religion, that she is using the cult and Aldonza herself to do terrible damage to the world and to hurt the very moon Artemis so loves, and that she is perpetrating violence and danger upon everyone in the area. Aldonza doesn't want to believe that the woman she loves could do such a thing, of course, but is slowly and sadly coming around to their explanation as they try to soothe and comfort her... until the giant machine around them acts up again. Drawing on the combined lunar affinities of both Aldonza and Issy, it activates itself again, shuddering to life around them much to everyone's terror. Multiple things start happening all at once; the walls begin radiating blinding, scorching silver light, giving them something akin to radiation poisoning, while the deceased body parts of former sacrifices animate and begin to attack them, the silver frescoes in the main chamber come to life and begin to shoot at them, and the cultists above, alerted by the heaving of the ground beneath them, are coming down with weapons at the ready. As the main chamber and tunnels begin to thrash around, Helena suddenly realizes what the strange shape of the temple means - it's shaped like a giant uterus, with tunnels as fallopian tubes leading to the ceremonial rooms as ovaries, and figures out that they can leave the temple by breaking through the far wall where the birth canal would be - but that if they do, there will be strange changes to them as they are effectively reborn a second time. Aldonza, nearly paralyzed with guilt as she realizes how she has accidentally betrayed her goddess, becomes hysterical but attempts to help Issy fight off their many attackers, while Valencia gives them tactical directions and Helena tries to figure out how to shut down or control the moon machine before it kills them all. The radiating light not only hurts them but begins to cause serious changes to those stuck in the temple; Valencia and Helena fight off most of its effects, but Aldonza begins to turn silver, growing in size to resemble the Colossus that betrayed her, while Issy grows bovine horns and gains height as well, and even some of the cultists are affected, gaining a centaur-like horse body in one case and glowing eyes in another. Acting on Helena's information, Valencia directs Issy and Aldonza to batter their way through the wall to escape via the "birth canal", but an increasingly horrified Helena screams at them to stop, fearing that their transformations will be permanent if they exit that way. The only safe escape is back through the magical door she opened earlier... which lies on the other side of the attacking cultists.
