When the old man's staff struck the ground, the square answered with a single terrified shiver.
Riku stood at the rear of the kneeling crowd with snow melting down the back of his collar and the two strangers at his sides. The shift from his own voice to the frozen, uncertain distance in his head felt almost physical, as if the boy who had stumbled out of the forest had already taken half a step away from himself.
Lantern light trembled across the square. Wooden houses ringed the clearing like silent witnesses, their roofs bowed under snow. No one looked at the sky. No one looked at the mountains. Every face was turned toward the elder and the ritual circle scratched into the packed white earth.
The man beside Riku folded his arms. "I expected gloomy," he murmured. "I did not expect worship."
The woman balancing the unconscious girl on one shoulder did not look at him. "Keep your voice down, Kagen."
Kagen only smiled wider. "If these people had any pride, they would not be kissing ice."
Riku almost laughed from nerves and immediately hated himself for it. The sound of the village was wrong. Not quiet, worse than quiet. It was a silence stretched so tight that every breath felt like a crack running through glass.
At the front of the square, the elder lifted both hands. His fur cloak stirred in the wind like old bone-white feathers.
"Tonight," he said, and his voice reached every corner of the village, "we offer obedience. We offer fear. We offer the vessel that winter has returned."
A murmur passed through the kneeling villagers.
Vessel.
Riku's pulse stumbled. He did not understand how he understood that word mattered, only that it did. He looked down at his own hands. Pale skin. Cracked knuckles. A thin white scar crossing the right thumb. None of it felt unreal. That was the worst part. This body was strange, but not dreamlike. It hurt when the cold bit it. It trembled when fear struck. It belonged to the moment too well.
Then a new voice cut through the square.
"Pathetic."
Heads lifted. So did Kagen's amused brows.
A girl stood near the front, the only villager still on her feet. A red scarf snapped at her throat. Dark hair had been tied back in a braid, though the wind had already started pulling it apart. She could not have been much older than Riku, yet she wore defiance with such effortless authority that even the adults around her recoiled.
"I don't care what your dead books say," she called to the elder. "If this so-called Winter Demon comes tonight, I'll kill it myself."
Outrage rippled through the square.
"Akari!"
"Lower your head!"
"Do you want us all to die?"
She did not flinch. If anything, the condemnation fed something brighter in her expression.
Kagen chuckled under his breath. "There. Finally. One person in this place with a pulse."
The unconscious girl on Shino's shoulder stirred faintly, but did not wake.
The elder's staff struck the snow again. "Akari Hayase," he said, voice rough with anger, "your pride will ruin you before the demon does."
Akari folded her arms. "Then I will ruin myself standing."
Riku looked at her too long. It was not just that she was brave. It was that she was the first person in the village to look like she belonged to the same species as him.
The elder turned away from her as if the decision had already been made elsewhere.
"Begin."
The villagers bowed lower. Their chant rose all at once, thin at first, then steady, then terrible in its desperation.
Riku did not know the language, yet the meaning crawled under his skin.
Return. Descend. Answer.
The air changed.
Frost spread outward from the elder's staff in branching white lines. Lantern flames dimmed to a sickly blue before shivering back toward orange. The wind thickened. Riku felt something inside his ribs pull tight, as if a hidden hook had caught in his blood and begun to reel.
He took an involuntary step back.
Kagen noticed at once. "Easy, kid."
Riku barely heard him. The chant was inside him now. Every repetition struck some buried place he had never known existed. His breath came fast. His fingers ached. Pale mist curled from his lips in heavy bursts.
Across the square, Akari's eyes found him.
Unlike the others, she was not looking with worship or fear. She was looking with the sharp, unnerving concentration of a hunter who had just heard movement in the brush.
The elder raised his staff high enough for everyone to see.
"Winter Demon," he cried, "descend upon us!"
The world lurched.
Riku bent double, one hand flying to his chest. Cold flooded through him so violently his vision flashed white. Something ancient stirred in the hollow behind his heartbeat, something patient and starving and old enough to remember the shape of storms.
Not yet, he thought wildly.
But the chant only grew louder.
And in the center of the square, with the whole village trembling around him, Riku understood one thing with absolute clarity.
If the ritual went on, whatever they had called would answer through him.