The ancient battlefield offers no welcome.

You smell it before you see it — cold ash and something older, something that has no name in any living tongue. The trees thin at the edge of the field and then stop entirely, as if even they refuse to go further. Before you stretches a place where the ground remembers war. Shattered stone. Bones half-swallowed by earth. The ruins of walls that once meant something, now standing only out of habit.

Above you, the sky is a void. No moon tonight. The Weaver couldn’t wait for the solstice — you made sure of that. So he chose the new moon instead, the one night each month when darkness is as complete as it ever gets. When the veil between worlds grows thin enough for a desperate man to tear.

He is already here.

At the far end of the field, where the ruins cluster closest together, light that has no business being light twists in the air. Blue-white and wrong. A circle of crackling energy, ten feet across and growing, etched with symbols that seem to shift when you look directly at them. Around it, the ground is scorched in patterns that radiate outward like cracks in ice — the shape of something ancient being forced open from the other side.

The ritual has already begun.

Somewhere in the darkness above the portal, you catch movement. A shape. Watching.

He knows you’re here.