The town breathed with a grotesque sort of cheer, its streets strung with bright banners and lanterns that masked the stench of blood lingering in the cracks between cobblestones. Vendors called out in singsong voices, their stalls piled with meats cut into smiling shapes, while painted facades grinned back with chipped, tooth-like windows. Demons laughed too loudly, too merrily, their sharp teeth flashing in the half-light like knives waiting for a throat. To any outsider it would look almost festive, until their gaze lingered too long on what hung from the hooks, or the stains that seeped beneath the boards.

Ombre slipped through the crowd like a shadow that didn't quite belong to anyone, his dark form drawing only half-glances; Enough for the cannibals to remember he was Alastor's, but not enough to question why he wandered. That was when he caught sight of her: a woman with no blood on her hands, no mask of cheer plastered across her face, standing too stiff, too clean for this place. She might as well have been a lamb dropped into a den of wolves. Instinct stirred in him, the rebellious urge to intervene pressing against the weight of his chains. He crossed the distance with an easy smile, voice softened with false familiarity, every motion carefully measured. To the watching crowd, he was simply greeting a friend. To her, though, the angle of his gaze and the shadowed tension in his tone carried the quiet warning.

"You don't belong here. If you want to survive, play along," he whispered to her in a greeting handshake, that false smile still in place to fool the cannibals. "We're old friends! Don't worry about her," he spoke out, hoping it was enough to make them look away. It was not. They drooled, eyeing her up and down like candy. Who knows? Maybe she was like candy to them. They needed to keep an act up.