The tracks pulled him deeper into the trees.
At first, they were clumsy — boot prints pressed into damp soil, a few barefoot impressions scattered between them. Real, human weight.
But the farther he went, the less they made sense.
Some prints were half-faded, edges smoothed as if they'd been here for days. Others were crisp and sharp. A few so clear he could see the grain of the sole — yet they were in places no sane person would have stepped. On slick stone. At the lip of a drop. One set seemed to vanish into a wall of roots without disturbing a single leaf.
Ezra kept moving. Kept telling himself that tracks meant people, and people meant a higher survival rate. Except…
Tracks like these didn't feel random. They felt deliberate.
And if someone wanted to be followed in this place… there was a reason.
He didn't like that thought.
The air changed before the scenery did — heavy, humid, laced with something faintly metallic. It coated his tongue like old blood. The ground dipped without warning, then rose again, pulling him through ridges where the trees pressed too close together. The bark was cracked and blackened, almost like bone char.
That was when he saw it.
Light.
Not moonlight. Not the clean flare of his own resonance.
Firelight. Flickering between the trunks, distant but steady.
He crouched low, letting the slope hide him. Every part of him wanted to get closer — human fire meant food, warmth, information. But he'd been here long enough to learn: nothing that thrived in the Trial was normal.
When he got close enough to hear them, his instincts only screamed louder.
Not voices. Chanting. Low and rhythmic, carried on the wind in a language he didn't know. It wasn't conversation. It was ritual.
Shapes moved between light and shadow. Not frantic. Not wild. Slow. Deliberate.
He crept forward, letting the trees swallow him until a break in the canopy gave him a view.
A clearing.
A pit of fire at the center, ringed by dark stones. Figures knelt around it, heads bowed. Their clothing was scavenged — leather, scraps of cloth, bits of armor. Beast hide stitched crudely with sinew.
And all of them wore something else.
A mark. Painted black across their skin — on faces, arms, bare chests. A shape that coiled like a serpent eating its tail.
Ezra went still.
Not because of the mark. Because of how they moved.
They swayed, in time with something he couldn't hear. Or maybe they could hear it, and he just wasn't supposed to. Their bodies tilted like grass caught in a wind that wasn't there.
He told himself to leave. To backtrack quietly, vanish before they noticed.
But his eyes kept cataloging.
Some of them wore necklaces strung with small mirrors — fractured, rust-stained. A few had braided vines through their hair, the strands resembling snakes if he looked too long. In front of the fire, at the exact center, was a shape draped in cloth. It was hard to tell if it was a statue or a person kneeling perfectly still.
It was… wrong. He couldn't explain why.
These people weren't just surviving here. They were rooted in this place, like the forest itself had claimed them.
His mind flashed back to the whisper.
She sees you.
He had thought it was just another mind game from the Trial.
Now, crouched in the dark watching these people, he wasn't so sure.
Ezra stayed in the trees.
Far enough to vanish if he had to. Close enough to see.
The firepit in the center was ringed with stone so dark it seemed to drink the light. Each slab was carved with shallow grooves, worn down by years of touch. He watched one of the kneeling figures run their palm along the same groove again and again, as if polishing it with skin.
The chant rose and fell in no language he knew. It wasn't beautiful — too raw, too jagged — but there was a rhythm to it that worked its way into the bones. Each syllable dragged a little too long, ending in a sound that wasn't quite human.
He counted heads.
Fourteen. All moving the same way.
None of them looked at the fire.
Their eyes — when he caught glimpses between the sway — were fixed upward, toward a break in the canopy. Toward the sky.
Ezra risked a glance up.
Nothing there. No moon. Just black.
Still, they stared.
Now and then, a figure would rise from their place in the circle and walk to the center. Not hurried. Not hesitant. The others didn't break rhythm to acknowledge them. They would kneel before the draped figure at the center, press their forehead to the ground, and speak a single word. The cloth-covered shape never moved.
He couldn't tell if it was alive.
From here, it could've been a pile of offerings — he noticed bones, feathers, and strips of faded cloth laid out in front of it. Some of the bones were… too long to be animal.
Ezra's fingers twitched toward the spear strapped to his back. Instinct. Habit. Not because he planned to fight — even he wasn't that stupid — but because the urge to have it in his hands wouldn't go away.
Bits of the chant began to repeat. Short phrases, always ending in the same drawn-out sound. He couldn't translate it, but something about the way they lingered on that last note made the skin at his neck itch.
It wasn't until one of them turned that he noticed the pattern.
The black mark painted across their face — he had seen it before. Not exactly this shape, but close enough. In the Trial archives, among the forbidden sigils. The kind they told students never to touch, never to look at too long.
It was a coil. Not quite a serpent, not quite a spiral. A curve that seemed to pull the eye inward if you traced it with your gaze.
The next person turned, and he saw another variation. Then another. Each mark was slightly different — looser coils, tighter spirals, some broken by deliberate gaps. Like they were all pieces of something larger.
And each time the wordless figure in the center was addressed, the chant deepened.
Not louder. Heavier.
Ezra shifted his weight, careful not to break a twig.
He wasn't sure what this was — a cult, a tribe, survivors who had gone too far in adapting — but it wasn't desperate. It wasn't feral.
It was organized.