'It is a circle,' I realized, looking at the positions of the sigils in my mind. 'The monsters are not attacking us — they are herding us. The kills are waypoints. The sigils are markers. We are being guided.'
"Fuck," I said, clenching my jaw. "It is a trap."
I grabbed Seraphine's wrist. Then Elwen's. "We need to—"
The ground lit up.
The magic circle activated beneath our feet — a massive, glowing array that covered the entire clearing, the red sigils we had been walking over connecting in a single, instantaneous flash. The light was blinding, the heat was physical, and the world—
—vanished.
Black soil. That was the first thing I saw. Not the dark brown of forest earth or the grey of dungeon stone — black, ash-dark, the soil of a place that had been burned and burned again until nothing remained but the char.
We stood in the center of a coliseum.
