The Ritual.

Vocal, I'm only adding this edit to the beginning because it won't let me resubmit it without any edits. Please don't refuse approval for this again and say it's detected as spam or undisclosed A.I. It is neither. I spent hours sat at my desk abusing the absolute hell out of a thesaurus to find a way to put this together properly and convey what I was trying to while using the Abcdearian format for the challenge. It is not A.I. it is hours of racking my brain and flicking through a book constantly.



Amidst the twilight a whisper weaves,

Beneath the veil of old oak trees,

Candlelight flickers make shadows grieve,

Dance of flames and sacred melodies.



Echoes bounce through the night unbound,

Fables from forgotten times and crumbled towns,

Granting Faustian dreams of jewels and crowns,

Heralded tales of souls now drowned.



In the groves, a sacrifice,

Just barely alive, still filled with fight,

Kaleidoscopic visions on every side,

Laughter cuts through the chants like knives.



Moonlight pierces the thickened air,

Nebulous mists concealing the sordid affair,

Orchestrating their unholy prayer,

Priests of cults, adorned with dirty robes and delusions of grandeur.



Quashed with the sacrificial knife,

Ritual's end, the once green grass now painted blood red with a taken life,

Silence falls where echoes had thrived,

Turned on their sides, the pyre now lit by flames that once belonged to candlelight.



Under bowed heads the cadaver contorts,

Voracious tormentors observe, filled with glee at new fools to extort.



Xylographic carvings presented high from ages long gone,

Yarns spun in ancient timber of the ritual's promised glories,

Zealous for the dark, back into night, the occult scurries.