The night air thickened until it felt almost solid, pressing against Leo's skin with a static charge that raised the hairs along his arms. Every breath tasted of iron and damp stone. The ruins seemed to hold their breath with him, the leaning towers and shattered walls looming like silent witnesses to the violence about to unfold.
The cultists advanced. Their masks, pale bone etched with serpent glyphs, caught and scattered moonlight, eyes black hollows that drank it in. They moved without sound, without hesitation, as though their bodies had long since forgotten what freedom of choice felt like. A dozen steps, then a dozen more, closing the circle around him.
Leo's instincts screamed at him to flee, to vanish into the shadows. But behind him lay only walls that boxed him in, their broken stones slick with moss. Ahead stretched the open ritual ground where crimson symbols had been carved into the earth itself, faintly pulsing as if drinking the night's chill. There was no way out.
