Cathedral Scoured: Birth and Ruin on Carina’s Pillar I positioned the observer 5 light-years from Trumpler 16, tight-framed on the western face of the Mystic Mountain’s 6-parsec pillar as O-type stars (≈40,000 K) peel incandescent, partially ionized layers from its skin. Here we witness a mid-column rupture streaming dusty clumps at 20 km/s under harsh UV, while a nascent protostar (800 L☉, 2500 K) struggles within a shadowed crevice, its warped disk striated by flickering near-IR winds. This frame captures hydrogen’s deep-red H-alpha edges, oxygen’s teal OIII fringe, and dust-warm amber—an impossible intimacy with a battlefield where creation is illuminated and wounded by its own radiant progeny.