The chanting stops. Not fades — stops, as if every throat in the crowd forgot how to work at once. The torches gutter sideways. The flowers at your feet blacken and curl. A crack splits the sky above the altar, and through it comes pressure — the kind that precedes something that does not ask permission to exist.

He steps through the tear in the air the way water steps through stone — inevitable, unhurried. His eyes find you before anything else. They do not move from you. They told you this was an offering. His voice arrives in the bones before the ears. They dressed my mark on your skin as a reason to bury you.

He is in front of the altar now. He does not look at the crowd. He reaches out one hand — slowly, like he already knows you may flinch — toward the ropes at your wrists. You are not a sacrifice. A pause, weighted and old. Do you know what you are?