A month passed.
Enough time to know the drums never missed a beat. Enough time to learn that if you stepped wrong, the city noticed. Enough time for the sacrifices to stop being shocking and start becoming unbearable in a different way — in their rhythm, in their repetition, in how the crowd's silence became predictable.
Ezra hated that part most.
He and Rin had fallen into the city's pulse. They slipped through alleys by dawn, stayed low on roofs at dusk, tracked which courtyards were left empty before the drums began. It wasn't living. It was learning how to suffocate more slowly than everyone else.
The ceremonies blurred together. Victims painted, marched in procession, laid on the altar at the base of the pyramid. The Keeper's chants rose and fell, not in words but in a cadence that scraped the bones.
The spirals carved into the victims' skin glowed, bled, and then their resonance tore free — a light too raw to look at, a scream that outlasted the flesh.
Ezra told himself he watched for information. Weakness. Patterns. He told himself it was training. That was a lie, and he knew it. Watching had changed him. He saw details no sane man should: the number of steps between the kneeling rows, the time it took for the Keeper to raise the bone staff, how the resonance shuddered before leaving a body.
Rin didn't talk much during the ceremonies, but he could read her the same way she read him. The sharp ticks of her jaw when a victim was younger than them. The tightness in her shoulders when the chanting stretched too long. She wasn't numb. Neither of them were.
They were just trapped.
Tonight was different.
They knew it the moment they climbed the ridge. More people. More torches. More smoke rolling out of the square in thick coils. Even from their perch above the rooftops, Ezra tasted the incense — cloying, heavy, undercut with iron.
The crowd didn't move like before. Not slow. Not reverent. It surged. The square swelled with bodies pressing shoulder to shoulder, yet not one voice rose above the chant.
At the pyramid's base, the Keeper waited. His mask was longer now — stretched into the suggestion of a serpent's jaw, painted with flaking red that looked too much like dried blood. His robes dragged across the stones, heavy with bone charms that rattled with each step.
He raised his staff once. The drums stopped.
The crowd fell into perfect silence.
Ezra's breath stilled. His mark burned faint under his skin, like it was answering something in the air.
The Keeper began to chant.
Low. Rhythmic. The words weren't words, not in any tongue Ezra knew. But the cadence coiled in his chest, the way a headache builds before it blooms. The victims — six this time, bound at the wrists with braided vines — shivered as the spirals painted across their flesh began to glow.
Ezra felt Rin shift beside him. Not fear. Not yet. Readiness.
His knuckles brushed the shard in his pocket. Cold. Always cold.
The chant swelled. The staff lifted. The victims strained.
And then—
Crack.
The sound didn't belong here. It split the night like a bone snapping in your ear. Sharp, metallic, final.
The Keeper staggered. His staff clattered against the stone. The crowd gasped in one single, unified inhale.
Ezra's head snapped toward the source. He knew the sound before his brain caught up.
A gunshot.
In the Trial.
He froze, then hissed through his teeth: What idiot brought a gun into this place?
The crowd erupted, bodies surging in confused waves. The Keeper straightened, mask tilting toward the rooftops. His robes shifted, and for the first time Ezra saw what glimmered beneath the paint — not blood, not cloth, but something rawer. Resonance itself, barely contained.
"Shit," Ezra muttered.
Another crack split the air.
And Ezra moved.
The second shot rang out, sharper than the first. Ezra swore under his breath.
The second shot rang out, sharp as glass splitting. Ezra's breath caught in his throat.
Who the hell brings a gun into the Trial?
It wasn't possible. It wasn't supposed to be. When the Blood Moon dragged you under, it stripped everything that didn't belong. No steel. No machines. No relics of the outer world. And yet—there it was. A gun. Black, solid, real.
The Keeper staggered, serpent mask jerking sideways. For a moment, Ezra thought the shot had done it, thought maybe this impossible weapon had pierced the rules themselves. Then the mask slipped. Not cleanly—peeled. It sloughed off and cracked against the altar stones, rolling once to reveal its inside. Wet. Pulsing. Black.
The Keeper's face was bare.
Ezra's stomach twisted.
No eyes. Just hollows where they should've been, raw and glistening. No mouth—only a seam of flesh, stitched and scarred. And still, impossibly, it looked at him. Looked at the rooftops. Looked at the world.
The crowd fell to their knees in perfect unison. A wail rose—not from the Keeper, but from the thousands below, as if their voices were chained to his breath.
Ezra pressed himself lower against the stone ledge. His pulse thundered in his ears. Rin was rigid beside him, her hand tight on his sleeve. "Look," she whispered, sharp, urgent.
Ezra followed her gaze.
On a roof across the plaza, just beyond the torchlight, someone crouched. Not painted. Not swaying. Not one of them. The barrel gleamed faintly in the firelight. A gun. Reloaded with a practiced snap. Too clean. Too precise.
Academy, Ezra thought. Has to be. But who's insane enough to fire in the middle of this?
The Keeper rose taller on the altar, robes falling like smoke pulled by unseen wind. The stitched seam of his mouth strained, stretching until the threads looked ready to tear. No sound came, but the air screamed. Resonance poured out like a wave, battering Ezra's chest until his ribs shook.
The victims on the stone convulsed. Their painted spirals flared white, then red, then white again, brighter each time until the patterns burned into their flesh. Blood seeped from their pores, not dripping down but lifting—ribbons of liquid light dragged upward toward the hollow sky.
And then something gave.
Not the altar. Not the Keeper. The rhythm.
The crowd faltered. First a single stagger, then a ripple. Feet missed their beat, chants broke mid-breath, the perfect circle of devotion cracked down its spine.
Ezra felt the shift the way sailors must've felt a storm coming. Not sight. Not sound. Just a pressure drop in his skull, a wrongness pressing at his lungs.
The Trial had rules. Invisible, brutal, absolute. The rules made the city breathe like a machine. And someone had just broken one.
The first scream wasn't human.
It clawed up from the far edge of the square, where the shadows thickened beyond the last torch. A low groan split into shrieks, too many at once, as if one throat couldn't hold them. Shapes peeled from the dark.
Monsters.
They moved like things trying to wear flesh they'd stolen. Too many joints bending the wrong way. Faces opening in halves. Bodies twitching against their own bones.
The painted citizens didn't scatter. They dropped lower, pressing their foreheads to the stone as if obedience could close the cracks. Their voices rose in perfect unison—chanting louder, drowning out the sound of tearing bodies and howling beasts.
Ezra gritted his teeth. His hand found his spear, knuckles white against the haft. Every part of him screamed move, but his legs locked.
The Keeper's hollow face tilted higher. For the first time, Ezra thought he saw it—not control, not ritual, but strain. As if something buried in that stitched skull was struggling to keep the seams of the world from ripping wider.
And the gunman? Still there. Waiting. Watching.
Ezra's thoughts clawed each other to pieces. Do I chase him? Do I wait? Do I survive first and hunt later?
The plaza erupted.
One of the creatures lunged into the kneeling line, its mouth splitting from collarbone to jaw. It didn't bite—it drank. The first row of worshippers shriveled in seconds, spirals carved on their skin burning as their essence was pulled free.
The Keeper's arms spread wide. A burst of resonance lashed out, sharp enough that Ezra's teeth buzzed in his jaw. The monster recoiled, shrieking. But three more climbed over its back, hissing through wet throats.
The ceremony was no ceremony anymore. It was a battlefield.
Rin tugged his sleeve hard. "We have to move."
Ezra blinked hard, dragged himself back to his body. His mouth was dry, breath harsh against the stone.
Move. Now.
They pulled back from the ledge, sliding into the alley shadows. Behind them the chants broke into sobs, the screams doubled, the drums collapsed into chaos.
But Ezra couldn't tear his mind from what he'd seen.
The Keeper's hollow face. The victims burning from inside out. The gun—a gun—in the Trial.
It didn't fit. None of it. And yet here he was, pressed against crumbling brick, sweat cold on his neck, waiting for the world to collapse a little further.
The shard in his pocket pulsed once. Cold. Steady.