The elevator doors slide open with a soft ding, spilling its dim light into the long hotel hallway. Something about it feels so old to the nine-year-old in her pale winter coat, her long dark hair hanging heavy past her waist. She moves forward, urged on by a stern woman at her side with tight lips that do nothing to hide the vicious words that could slip from them, her thin, bony fingers resting at her waist. One step behind, the girl's mother walks like a ghost, present only in body.

Others fill the corridor as they approach a massive painting on the wall. Everyone wears black, mourning garb. This is a funeral, but the dearly departed still stands among them, her purple school uniform peeking out from beneath her winter coat. The stern woman stops in front of the painting. It depicts a woman bound to a pyre, flames licking at her. She shoves the child forward in a sharp motion, slipping into the faux-sweet falsetto she always uses with her younger sister.

"You may go now, Dahlia. We fight the sin, not the sinner." There is something so awful in that voice, something holy and violent at once, that a sharp panic surges through the child.

The painting swings open, and in that instant, she understands. She turns to her mother, shouts for her, reaches, but Dahlia does nothing as her daughter is dragged away, hands hanging limply at her side.

The chamber beyond is crowded. Everyone wears the same black, but there's a feverishness here that feels like hunger. An excitement. No one even glances at the child with pity. In the center of the room, a brazier glares, far too large for any domestic purpose, its coals a fierce white-red. Countless candles stand in staggered rows, some melted down from repeated use. Chains dangle from the ceiling, suspending a circular metal seal rimmed with two sets of shackles.

A man with wide shoulders lifts the child without ceremony as the woman, their priestess, slips on a purple robe stitched in gold. He pins the girl to the cold seal and snaps the shackles around her wrists and ankles. She shrieks. She sobs. Her small body strains against unyielding metal, back arching.

The now-robed woman gestures, and the man guides the seal toward the brazier, the metal groaning as the heat touches it. The child's cries warp as the heat begins to lick at her, from thin and watery to wild, raw, and worn—already threatening to die on her. No one blinks. Over the burning and sobbing, the woman in robes speaks, shouting above the child's screams as the acrid scent of burning wool and hair fills the room.

"Weep not for the demon, once again locked in mortal battle!" Joy lights her face as she sweeps her arms wide, a priestess in her element, guiding her flock the way she believes God intended. "Praise God for our clarity!" she cries, and the flock repeats her in a choir that cannot drown out the child's ragged screams. "Praise the innocent for their sacrifice!"

The fire consumes more than just her clothing, her hair, and her flesh. It eats away at every good thought, every bad thought. Every desperate wish. Burns every word away except one: why.

When the pain shifts, when the agony turns to something distant, something inside her gives way. The feeling is like a cracking, like the brittle snap of bone. It is as if every thing she had been, every tenderness and every fear, splinters and pours out through the seams of her skull. The metal chain that holds the seal creaks as if in response, and then it snaps with a violent, metallic scream.

The seal swings. The brazier tilts. And the room erupts with chaos.

Finally, they scream.