They didn't act on it immediately.
In the Trial, rushing was the fastest way to bleed out — from a mistake, from an unseen corner, from something you didn't know was hunting you.
So they watched.
The next two days blurred into a pattern of shadows and narrow streets. Rin knew which alleys could be crossed without drawing attention, which rooftops stayed low enough to give sightlines without exposing their silhouettes.
They learned the city's rhythm.
At dawn, the streets filled with slow-moving lines of people carrying baskets of fruit with blue skins and cracked shells. At midmorning, artisans emerged, hanging fresh banners painted with spiral motifs and the same serpent-eyed faces. And every afternoon, before the sun had fully dipped, the air would shift — subtle at first, like a change in the wind's taste — and people would begin moving toward the pyramid.
Ezra noticed the inner courts weren't part of the public flow. The stone corridors leading there were always flanked by archways deep enough to hide three men in shadow, and the people who passed through wore heavier paint, thicker spirals winding up their arms.
Once, from the edge of a roof, he caught a glimpse of them escorting something between the walls — a litter draped in black cloth. He couldn't see who was inside.
Rin told him the inner courts were the place of the "keepers," those who prepared whatever — or whoever — would be presented at the top of the pyramid.
And once, she said, she'd seen them carry in an outsider.
Not painted like the rest.
Golden hair that caught the torchlight even under the cloth.
Ezra didn't ask again if it was Silas. The image stuck too cleanly in his mind.
They began mapping approach routes — lines between crumbling rooftops, collapsed walls, narrow channels in the stone that could lead to the courts if you moved at the right time. Every night they returned to the broken chamber Rin called temporary, trading notes in low voices.
Rin thought they could get close enough to see inside within three nights, maybe four. Ezra didn't like the maybe, but he didn't have a better number.
And through all of it, the drums kept time — not for them, but for something above them.
On the third night, Ezra saw the mask again.
It wasn't in the streets this time.
It was in the wall.
They were cutting across a narrow causeway — one of Rin's "quiet paths" — when his eyes caught on a recessed alcove carved into the stone. Most were filled with bone charms or small idols. This one was empty, except for a face staring out.
White. Featureless, except for two narrow slits where eyes should be. The edges were cracked, like it had been dropped once, hard.
Rin didn't see it. She was already a dozen paces ahead, scanning the next turn. Ezra lingered, pretending to shift the strap of his spear, but his attention was locked on the mask.
It moved.
Not much — just a subtle shift of shadow inside the eye slits.
Someone was wearing it.
By the time he blinked, the alcove was empty.
He didn't tell Rin. The mask had followed him before. He didn't know why, and he didn't like the thought of how it might change her plans if she knew.
The weave was coarse, frayed at one edge, stiff in the middle where something dark had long since dried. It had been left for him days ago — a silent marker from the mask, tucked into the hollow of a tree on the city's edge.
He didn't know why he'd kept it.
Maybe because throwing it away felt like breaking some unspoken pact.
Maybe because it was proof he hadn't imagined the first encounter.
Rin glanced back. "You coming?"
Ezra slid his hand free of the cloth and adjusted his spear, nodding once.
He kept his pace steady, but his mind wasn't on the route.
—
That night, the drums rolled once, deep as thunder, and then fell silent.
Rin lay curled on the mat, her breath steady, her back to the wall. Ezra sat awake across from her, elbows braced on his knees, the strip of cloth wound tight between his fingers.
He had told himself a hundred times to throw it away. It wasn't even useful — no food, no weapon, just an old rag stiff with something black that might've been blood. But here he was, worrying it like a talisman, thumb rubbing the same frayed edge until the fibers began to split.
His mark pulsed faintly under his shirt. Once. Twice.
Ezra hesitated. Then he pressed the cloth to his chest.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the weave shivered.
Not wind. Not his hand. The fabric itself trembled like something inside it was breathing. Heat bloomed across his sternum — not pain, but pressure, as though the cloth wanted to sink past his skin, stitch itself to the mark burned there.
Ezra yanked it back. His palm tingled. The strip now carried a faint shimmer, threads of gold woven where there had been only dull red.
He stared.
Resonance. The thing was holding resonance. Not a fragment — not raw, unstable power — but something contained, like a reservoir.
A key. Or a leash.
"Fuck," he muttered under his breath.
Rin shifted in her sleep, brow twitching, but didn't wake. Ezra wrapped the cloth tight again, forced it deep into his pocket. His pulse was still hammering, his ribs aching from where it had pressed.
The mask hadn't just been watching him.
It had marked him.
He didn't sleep. Every creak in the stone, every scrape of wind outside their alcove set his hand drifting toward his spear.
When dawn came, it was the silence that woke Rin. No footsteps outside.ata No chatter. Just the hush of a city holding its breath.
They ate in quiet — stale fruit she'd scavenged, half-rotted but still edible. Ezra chewed without tasting.
Rin studied him once, sharp-eyed. "Did you hear something last night?"
He shook his head. Too quickly. "Just couldn't sleep."
She didn't press, but her gaze lingered a moment too long.
By the fourth night, the silence had frayed him raw. Ezra lay half-dozing when he felt it.
Not sound.
Not sight.
That weight.
The same weight from the alcove, from the first time in the woods — the sensation of being observed from just beyond the corner of his eye.
His hand tightened around his spear. Slowly, he sat up.
The chamber was dark except for the pale spill of moonlight through the torn cloth that covered the entrance.
And there — at the threshold — something lay across the stone.
Ezra's throat went dry. He didn't move.
No figure. No mask. Just the gift it had left behind.
A shard of bone, smoothed flat and painted with the same spiral sigils the tribespeople wore on their arms. Except these spirals weren't black. They were white. And they pulsed faintly, like veins.
Ezra didn't touch it. Not yet.
He only sat there, breathing shallow, staring at the offering in the moonlight.
-
He didn't touch the shard again until morning.
Rin had already slipped out, muttering about watching the market flow before the first drumbeat. Ezra stayed behind, crouched in the half-light of their broken alcove, the bone piece sitting where the masked stranger had dropped it—like a pale, patient animal waiting to be picked up.
It looked harmless now. Just bone, flattened and smoothed by time.
He lifted it.
Cold sank into his fingers, the kind that reminded him of Blackspire's glass frost before the Trial—too clean, too deliberate to belong in air this warm. When he turned the shard one way, the light dulled. When he turned it back, the glow sharpened, the spirals tightening until they looked like veins.
A compass, he thought, bitterly. Or a leash.
He held it at arm's length and turned in a slow circle.
The glow waxed and waned, brightest when the shard angled toward the pyramid. Of course. Always the pyramid.
He slid it deep into his wrap, where even a careful hand wouldn't find it. He told himself he was being prudent. He told himself it was better Rin didn't know. Both felt like lies.
Trust was a currency; he was too broke to spend it.
They fell into the day's rhythm the way a man slips into cold water—slowly, braced for pain. Ezra followed Rin's "quiet paths," the alleys where banners stiff with old paint stared down with serpent eyes, the covered walks where wind couldn't carry a loose whisper.
At dawn, the people flowed like a tide with baskets of blue-skinned fruit and cracked shells, eyes forward, steps measured. At midday, artisans hung fresh cloth faces with spiral pupils and slit mouths. At dusk, the air shifted—just a taste in the wind—and the city bent toward the pyramid like iron filings to a magnet.
The first break came at dawn, and the city swallowed it whole.
They were crouched on a roof with a view of a long street where the procession moved, a hundred bodies breathing in one lung. One man drifted a single step onto the wrong path; his basket shifted. Ezra opened his mouth—
Rin's hand clamped over it, her gaze never leaving the flow below.
A ripple went through the crowd. Backs straightened. Baskets sagged. Heads bowed. Silence rolled forward like a falling wall.
The man looked up, eyes widening, and ceased to exist.
No struggle. No sound. Just a curl of ash spirals where his chest had been and fruit rolling across stone with small, domestic thumps. A breeze they hadn't felt a second before carried the ash away.
The procession bowed. Then it moved again.
Rules, Ezra thought, heat sticking behind his eyes. Invisible. Absolute.
The shard in his wrap pulsed once against his ribs—cold, approving, like a hand on the back of his neck.
He didn't touch it.
By dusk, the drums started again.
He'd learned to hate that sound. It wasn't loud. It throbbed low and steady, like a heart beating under stone. It set the teeth on edge without ever raising its voice.
The city converged. Always toward the pyramid. Always in silence.
Rin didn't need to tell him to follow. They'd mapped the approach over the past two days: broken roofs with low ridges, collapsed walls that still held a man's weight, alleys that let shadows cling to ankles. Ezra slipped into her wake, but his eyes stayed on the flood below. The painted moved as one. No laughter, no talk, not even the thrown glances of people who shared a city. Just the dignified inevitability of water.
They move like they've already agreed to die, he thought. Or like they think they can't.
The plaza opened—a flat slate of stone too smooth for this climate, lined with gutter channels that had forgotten how to be shy. The pyramid cut up through the center like a blade driven to the hilt. Torches bracketed each flight of steps. Their flames burned blue, not gold, and the light made the paint on human skin look wet and scaled.
They took a perch at the lip of a broken wall. Incense pushed a sweet film over his tongue. Under it: copper. Always copper.
A line formed at the base of the steps.
A woman went first. Her eyes were clear, but empty; her feet walked like someone else had borrowed them. Two keepers guided her—arms spiraled in paint so thick it looked like porcelain. A knife of polished bone appeared in one keeper's hand, small as a child's toy.
The altar wasn't stone.
Ezra realized that only when the torches spat and the blue light glazed its surface. Bone. Polished, layered, fused into a slab that hummed at the edge of hearing. He could feel the note in his jaw.
The drum rolled once—just enough to push breath back into the crowd.
The bone blade kissed the woman's chest.
Not a deep cut. Barely a scratch.
Light seeped out of the wound.
Not red. Not the gold he knew. White—thin threads first, spider-fine, slipping under skin, tracing veins, pooling in the hollows of the throat and joins of fingers. The woman's mouth opened in a scream Ezra couldn't hear; the world had already decided sound was unnecessary.
He flinched anyway. The brand over his sternum pulsed in answer, a slow ache, like a chain tightening.
The threads climbed.
They pulled up out of her in delicate strands that should have broken and didn't. Paint cracked on her skin as it tightened over bone. Her fingers curled. Her cheeks collapsed. She dessicated in neat, careful inches while something above the pyramid drank.
Ezra dragged his eyes upward. The apex was lost in pale haze. The torches guttered low, and the air smeared light. But something moved there—suggestion more than shape. Not a body. A weight. A mouth that didn't need form.
They're not killing her, he thought, the words landing dull. They're stripping her resonance. Feeding it up.
When the last filament left, the husk slumped. A keeper swept it aside with the offhand grace of practice.
The next victim stepped forward.