The Communion of the Silent Cross & the Birth of Ritual Black
I. The Retreat That Smelled Like Graves
They called it a wellness sanctuary.
Online, the Communion of the Silent Cross looked like a place for the lost and forgotten. In today’s modern era, it seemed all too easy to get caught up and think one way or another. Unfortunately, for some, when you go to places like this, you’re rarely ever the same and in many cases, never seen again.
To the outside world, it was a modern spiritual retreat for young adults drowning in depression, addiction, and loneliness.
To the inside world, it was like a lot of things in life, not as advertised real fast.
Abby Lund arrived with a suitcase, a headache, and a small metal crest her grandmother had given her four days before she died under mysterious circumstances. Skeptical but wanting to belong, Abby already understood that whatever lay ahead, backing out was no longer much of an option.
The compound itself sprawled along a private slice of coast a central mansion surrounded by smaller dorms and hall structures. From above, the layout would have looked obscene: like a bone laid flat upon the earth, its spine the main hall, its “White Cross” swallowing the mansion décor, and its “forbidden” fenced-off area perched near a cliff that stared down at the sea.
No one mentioned the fenced-off section during intake. No one explained why the basement windows were bolted shut from the inside. No one dared speak the name of whoever ran this place. They didn’t bother asking Abby’s name either they simply branded her with a meaningless number and moved on.
They told her the divine had chosen her and that her suffering was proof she belonged here, with them, in their holy communion of the broken. Accept the Cross, they said, and become one flesh, one breath, one purpose.
Yet in the solitude of her dorm, the truth hit her like a blow: nothing in her life had mattered, and no one remained to pull her back. She was a ghost in her own skin.
Clutching her grandmother’s crest like a lifeline, Abby wept until sleep finally dragged her under tears drying on her cheeks like the last traces of a life already being erased.
II. Abby, Reina, and the Infection of Hope
Abby awoke to yet another new day. As she started getting ready, she found herself gazing deeply at the crest she held so close.
A blackened, coin-sized piece of metal some sort of cursed artifact a skull motif carved into dark metal, heavy and colder than anything around it. It had always felt eerie, yet strangely comforting, especially since it was the last thing her grandmother ever gave her.
The first communion Abby attended was unnerving to say the least. Hooded men gathered in huge circles, chanting in low, rhythmic tones that felt far more cult-like than spiritual.
Outside the chapel, a sermon echoed across the courtyard promising purpose, belonging, and “transcendence.” They didn’t push a religion so much as a lifestyle of blind obedience, their doctrine delivered only by the hooded figures and no one else.
Newcomers were labeled Inducts; they were love-bombed with compliments, group hugs, communal meals, and rehearsed testimonies about “how the Cross saved their lives.” Everyone spoke like they were reading from the same invisible teleprompter.
Finally, after the communion, Abby and the other Inducts were sent to the mess hall for dinner, told they needed an early night for “studies” in the morning.
As another day dawned, the Inducts were sent to the library hall and paired with study partners. By fate or design, Abby met Reina Sato that morning. They were polar opposites in personality, yet their shared wounds were carved from the same place enough to make them instant friends.
Reina was the kind of quiet that wasn’t shy just tired of pretending. Black hair, eyes that looked like they’d memorized every exit in every room, a presence balanced somewhere between dangerous and already dead inside. She didn’t laugh often, but when she did, it sounded like she didn’t trust it.
The two were placed in the same dorm hall, shared almost identical schedules, and attended the same healing circles and study blocks.
Over the next couple of weeks, a bond between them grew fast fragile, genuine, and deeply needed.
As each passing day went by, week after week, everything became much clearer. A pattern formed quickly: Step one — break you down through kind gestures and confession sessions.
Step two — rebuild you with hope and false promises, training you to obey every request without question.
Step three — convince you that without them, you are nothing; that they are your family, your salvation, and your masters overall.
Abby was getting more worried with each passing minute. Nothing could be done to leave or reconsider she wanted to stay, if only because at least it was something but she didn’t want to find out what a step four or five might look like. She and Reina had grown too close by this point, and Abby refused to abandon her.
Reina, on the other hand, felt indifferent. She had clearly grown attached to Abby, but she couldn’t reveal her whole self to anyone especially not someone she actually liked having around. She lived in a constant state of paranoia and depression, but she didn’t want to vanish like the other girls had since their arrival. More than anything, she needed to uncover the truth behind the Cross before it swallowed them whole.
III. The Silent Cross and Its Missing Daughters
The Cross preached that the world was nothing but disease, corruption, and loneliness. Only through the Cross itself—through devotion and obedience could anyone become a “vessel of true purpose.”
The doctrine of the Cross was a tangle of half-remembered scripture, counterfeit mysticism, and psychology bent into suggestive ideas but its foundation was disturbingly simple:
The young are closest to creation.
The wounded and fearful are the easiest to “purify.”
And devotion is proven through suffering, sacrifice, and surrendering every last piece of yourself to the Silent Cross.
Once someone finally proved themselves in the eyes of the masters, an Induct was allowed to “graduate”… or else.
Those who submitted became Initiates, hollowed, obedient shells who walked the path without question. These girls often disappeared for days or even weeks at a time, and in some cases returned bearing a child.
This was the final stage of devotion within the Cross, and the thought alone made Abby and Reina sick to their cores.
Those who questioned, or those who faltered, became Reths.
Once branded a Reth, a daughter of the Cross was condemned to face the wrath of the god they whispered about the goat demon Bezlo.
After that, they vanished entirely.
No farewells. No bodies. No truth.
Just absence, and the quiet reminder that the Cross always collected its due.
The mansion basement was always heavily guarded. Silent men stood watch with long ceremonial blades at their sides, never speaking, never shifting, except when the sacred ceremonies began — and one was rumored to be coming in the next few nights.
Candles burned endlessly beneath the floorboards; low chanting drifted upward like smoke, threading through the halls. And sometimes only sometimes a scream would rise with it.
Those were the moments that made every girl who heard them tremble.
IV. Special Forces and the Girl with the Rifle
At the beginning of this story, another thread was unfolding within the same walls that held Abby and Reina.
While the Silent Cross curated its social media presence and spread lies to any survivors who dared speak up, someone in a government office followed the wrong paper trail and didn’t like what they found.
Multiple missing-person reports all ended at the same address.
Phrases repeated across every file: “last seen heading to a spiritual workshop,” “sent us photos from a retreat, then vanished.”
Even those who managed to escape could never describe what had happened in any real detail. They were paid for their silence, cornered into fear-based obedience, and most of them carried babies or small children when they finally resurfaced.
Financial transfers, NDAs, medical notes scraps of evidence, but enough.
Enough for someone to decide this needed to be investigated to the fullest.
Arisa Takahashi was chosen to lead a task force assigned to uncover the truth behind the cult, the disappearances, and everything rotten festering beneath the Silent Cross. Young, but already at the top of her division, she climbed the ranks with unnerving speed disciplined, sharp, and dangerously skilled at reading patterns.
She wasn’t broken like the “daughters” of the Cross, but she still wanted more from life. She had a good upbringing, a family, and people who loved her yet something out there kept calling to her, a pull she couldn’t ignore. She wanted to know what it was, no matter the cost.
Arisa’s mission was straightforward on paper: establish the squad for when they were needed, go in deep undercover, and avoid unnecessary contact until the time was right. She was to confirm and document criminal activity, identify the leaders and their motives, wait for the signal window, and then in one decisive sweep bring the hammer down.
By the time she entered the retreat, around the same period Abby and the others were being inducted, Arisa had already gathered most of what she needed. All that remained were the final pieces of damning evidence. Once those were in place, she could finally call for backup and set the bust into motion.
The compound saw only a hopeful, serious girl searching for purpose.
They had no idea she’d memorized the entire building layout within days.
When Arisa finally reached the fenced-off back field and the patch of disturbed earth beyond it every remaining doubt vanished. She didn’t have to dig far before bones surfaced in the dirt, and with them, the final pieces of the truth she’d been assembling.
V. The Feast of Renewal
It was finally time for Abby and Reina to attend their first ceremony the “higher rite,” a passage all Inducts were expected to face. Submit and obey, or be branded a Reth and cast out one way or another.
Both girls had been chosen as guests of honor, their supposed “devotion” singled out by the Cross. It meant they were among the ones selected to receive the rite itself.
Gathered from their respective dorm rooms, they were led by robed men who spoke no words only pointed in the direction the girls were expected to walk.
Abby and Reina descended into the mansion’s basement, finally seeing past the areas that had always been kept hidden. Both of them knew instantly what this meant: death, and nothing more than another disappearance.
The deeper they went underground, the more the space shifted. It felt less like a ritual hall and more like a slaughterhouse pretending to be a chapel.
The final room came into view after they’d walked the underground halls for what felt like nearly an hour.
Inside, the chamber opened wide. On one side stood a chapel lined with candles, an unconscious girl laid out like an offering, and robed men circling her as they chanted “Bezlo” over and over again.
On the opposite side sat a man dressed in a white version of the robes they knew all too well, seated upon what could only be described as a throne made of bone, silently observing the rite.
As Abby and Reina stepped into the chamber, the man in white lifted a hand and motioned for them to approach.
Whatever the ritual claimed to be purification, sacrifice, “transformation” the truth was simple: girls disappeared because they were commanded to surrender everything they were, inside and out.
When Abby and Reina approached the man in white, he lifted his hand and ordered the ritual to halt. His eyes lingered on them with a possessive certainty as he spoke.
He told them he had been watching them both for some time and declared that he wanted them as his wives holy devotees bound to him, representatives of the Cross’s “divine purpose,” tasked with spreading its doctrine and serving as instruments of Bezlo’s will.
To him, it was destiny.
To them, it was a sentence.
Within a single minute, a highly trained strike team breached the perimeter in coordinated silence, executing the infiltration pattern Arisa had designed herself.
Shadows with rifles and night-vision gear swept through the compound, dismantling a cult built on lust, debauchery, indoctrination, and sin.
At the exact moment the man in the white robe reached for Abby, the basement door exploded inward — a deafening crack that crushed whatever he intended to do next.
Armed officers flooded the chamber. Within seconds, the man in white was forced to the ground and dragged away in cuffs, along with the other high-ranking figures of the Silent Cross.
For a moment, the entire compound seemed to hold its breath.
The powers that had ruled through fear and obedience were dismantled in minutes. Girls who had been trapped for years staggered into the halls, finally able to breathe, finally able to run, finally allowed to imagine futures they were never meant to have.
For the first time in years, the compound heard a sound it did not control: the sound of people being rescued.
The Silent Cross had fallen but one question lingered untouched. Who was Bezlo, and why hadn’t he “saved” his flock from destruction?
During her investigation, Arisa uncovered documents older and more authentic than any of the fabricated doctrine the cult had pushed. Bezlo’s name appeared everywhere in those files, threaded through symbols, rituals, and warnings.
It left her wondering if the ritual had been a test… or if the demon the Cross worshiped had wanted the man in white removed all along.
What mattered for now was simple: the daughters were safe.
Abby and Reina were safe.
And Arisa who didn’t believe in anything spiritual couldn’t shake the feeling that something supernatural had been watching the whole time.
Abby and Reina stumbled into the night beneath blinding floodlights, wrapped in emergency blankets, their lungs burning with cold air that didn’t belong to the Cross.
They were free.
Physically.
Finally.
VI. The Breaking Point and the Girl in the Wrong Place at the Right Time
After the dust settled, the scene twisted into something chaotic and grimly organized: ambulances lined the road, FBI agents barked clipped orders, military officials moved in tight formations, and a hungry media presence swarmed the perimeter. Everyone was scrambling to sort survivors, improvise plans, and get statements from anyone coherent enough to speak.
In the middle of it all, Abby noticed something she had never seen before.
Her crest, the one her grandmother had given her, pulsed with heat and flashed once, just for a blink.
Reina saw it too and hissed, “What the hell was that? Why is it doing that?”
The flash faded, but the heat remained.
Later, after they found space on the back bumper of a police van, Abby stared down at the crest again. It was burning so hot it felt like a second heartbeat trying to punch its way out of her palm.
Reina sat beside her, trembling.
Not from cold.
Not from shock.
But from the heavy, crawling sense that something was coming and the unknown terrified her more than anything they had just survived.
Arisa watched from a distance, arms crossed, unable to shake the instinct that she needed to keep her eyes on Abby and Reina though she couldn’t explain why. She’d done her job. She’d saved who she could. By every metric, she should have felt victorious…
Instead, she felt hollow.
She had just dragged monsters into the light.
But deep down, she knew these weren’t the end — only one nest in a world full of others. Something larger was moving beneath the surface, something she couldn’t name yet.
A bigger picture.
A new path.
Something beyond the tidy hero narrative her life had been built around.
Somewhere in the chaos, someone shouted for more medics.
Sobs. Flashlights. Police tape.
Normal human attempts to fix something that was never built to be fixable.
And then..
A girl just showed up.
No seriously she walks up out of the nearby forest, like she’d been out for a midnight stroll in hell. She moved straight through the cars, the officers, the paramedics, everyone — like they were fog instead of people and headed directly toward Abby and Reina.
Pink hair. Tattoos. Hoodie. Sneakers.
Eyes red as the devil’s something..
She kept her eyes a little too wide, like she was seeing more layers of reality than anyone else. And she was trying badly not to look totally fried.
The shifting tattoos didn’t help either. If it wasn’t already weird enough, this girl looked like she’d walked straight out of some 80’s drug-trip horror movie that got banned for corrupting teenagers.
Mina Choi wasn’t supposed to be there.
But she was.
She stopped the moment she reached Abby like everything else in the world had been background noise, and this was the destination she’d been walking toward the whole damn time.
The crest scorched Abby’s palm, then erupted into a full glow, burning hot enough to feel alive.
And in that instant, all four of them felt it something gripping them, seizing them, pulling tight around their nerves like invisible claws.
Reality didn’t ask permission.
But shit was about to get real.
VII. The Pull
Abby looked up for only a second
and that was all it took.
Reina moved closer without thinking, grabbing Abby’s hand on pure instinct.
Arisa, fifty feet away, saw Mina and felt something hit her gut.
Not fear.
Not danger.
Something different.
Something weightless.
Something her training had no name for.
The air tightened.
Then inverted.
Then twisted
and finally collapsed, as if the universe had taken a sudden power nap.
No chant.
No warning.
No glowing runes or sky-splitting lightning.
Just a sudden, bone-deep switch.
One heartbeat, they were on a cold lawn surrounded by cops and the corpses of a cult.
The next heartbeat, they were somewhere else entirely…
VIII. The GuardRealm
Silence… only silence.
No sirens. No shouting. No ocean, no wind… just complete and utter nothingness.
The ground beneath them was smooth and black, like polished obsidian yet somehow ancient at the same time. Above them stretched an endless sky that wasn’t quite night, threaded with faint crimson and violet veins, with clouds spiraling toward a funnel-shaped abyss of perfect black at the center.
They stood on a vast causeway leading toward a colossal palace — gothic and cathedral-like, dark spires reaching up like teeth, lit from within by a soft, sickly radiance that felt warm but wicked, good but utterly unknown.
Abby’s first feeling wasn’t awe.
It was nausea and the creeping thought that she’d done something wrong.
Reina felt insecure, paranoid, and offset in every sense, her entire presence visibly and mentally frayed.
Mina giggled under her breath, strangely relaxed, like she’d either been here before or at least recognized where they were.
Arisa seemed calm, though for someone who hated being two steps behind anything, she looked too okay. She reached for a weapon then froze as she realized she didn’t have one.
“Shit.”
The air itself hummed not like electricity, but like a choir singing at a frequency their human ears couldn’t fully hear. It was haunting, peaceful, disturbing… and absolute perfection.
Welcome to the GuardRealm.
Welcome to the place between places and time.
IX. Encore, Herald of the SkullGuards
A figure finally emerged out of the shadows after several minutes of the four wondering where they had ended up.
Tall, robed, faceless in the way old statues are faceless features blurred by time but still intensely present. Skin the color of marble left too long in the dark. Eyes like two pinpricks of distant galaxies, old and indifferent.
This was Encore.
Not god.
Not king.
Not savior.
Something older than all three some call him the bureaucrat of destiny, the caseworker of fate… even the archivist of broken realities.
“Name’s please” he simply stated.
“Well, I’m Abby, this is Reina, and I’m pretty sure the army-looking lady is named Arisa… but I don’t know what the pink-haired girl’s called??” Abby said, both introducing and side-eyeing Mina.
“I’m Mina,” she answered immediately. “Human class of the 2nd Generation, Reality Sector 9T… Earth." But I actually ended up in a random forest. I was pretty high off some shrooms I found earlier in the night, but aside from that I’m a Traveler.”
Her confidence cracked halfway through the last words landing small, intimidated.
“Abby, Reina, Arisa… and Mina,” Encore repeated. “Let me see here.”
He reached into his robe and pulled out a book impossibly old, impossibly thick, and absolutely out of place flipping through its pages with deliberate slowness. Seconds felt like minutes. Minutes felt like hours.
Then:
“Ah. Here we go.” His voice didn’t brighten; it simply located.
“I found something connecting you here. And it seems… a crest was used to get here, hm? Interesting.”
He spoke not with thunder, but with calm, almost gentle inevitability.
Every word landed like a stamp on paperwork that had been waiting years to be processed.
Encore confirmed to the girls that everything up until now had happened for a reason.
The crest brought them here the moment all four paths finally intersected every choice, every wound, every coincidence in their lives funneled toward this meeting, this moment, this realm.
He wasn’t explaining it so much as making them realize it.
They learned not through a lecture, but through a sudden, silent flood of understanding exactly what he was:
-
Herald of the Legion of SkullGuards.
-
Liaison to something called the Skull King.
-
Keeper of Assignments for those drafted into cross-reality service.
He did not thank them for surviving.
He did not comfort them for what they’d endured.
He simply acknowledged them, as if they had finally arrived exactly where they were always meant to be.
The girls felt it together a shared pressure in their bones, a shift in their breath like the world was inhaling right before a massive reveal.
X. The Offer Without Alternatives
Encore made it clear:
They had been marked long before the four of them ever crossed paths. Their gathering wasn’t coincidence it was the activation of something older, something called the Skull Order. They weren’t chosen to join it; they had been born to inherit it.
Destined to become SkullGuard.
Bound to serve the Skull King.
The Skull Crest wasn’t an heirloom at all.
It was a key passed down through generations of SkullGuard, waiting for the moment the next mantle-bearer stood close enough to fate for it to ignite.
The cult? Horrific, yes but ultimately incidental.
Just one tumor in a multiverse riddled with malignant growths.
Their lives, small pieces in a much bigger design, had just snapped into place.
And as frightened as they were, each girl tried to stand strong, steady, and somehow optimistic amid the impossible.
Encore told them plainly:
This was the moment where choice, decision, and destiny braided together.
This was where their real path began.
On one path:
They could be returned to their world their memories blurred, their bond to the Crest severed forever.
They’d wake up in hospital beds or their own homes, living out ordinary lives again: damaged, directionless, and haunted by voids they could never quite explain.
This would be the path of rejecting fate.
On the other path:
They could accept what the Crest had awakened and take up their place as SkullGuards — bound to a new reality, assigned to patrol the fractures between worlds where cults, monsters, ghosts, gods, and things-without-names bled through.
A SkullGuard’s duty was simple in description, brutal in practice:
prevent, stop, and banish evil from its designated time and place.
Their public identities would become those of a globally famous music group, just like all Guards before them.
One guard-unit among many, but meant to serve as anchors of hope and order in a world dripping with sin.
There was no sales pitch.
Encore didn’t negotiate, didn’t persuade, didn’t even blink.
He spoke the way someone reads a document already stamped and filed
as if their futures had been decided ages ago, and he was merely informing them of the outcome.
XI. Four Hearts on the Edge of Everything
Abby thought over everything she’d endured so far, her mind looping back to the same impossible question: Did her grandmother know?
The crest in her hand now revealed as something ancient, something tied to this Guard reality suddenly reframed her entire life. She could have become a sacrifice, another missing girl swallowed by the Cross… but she wasn’t. Somehow she ended up here, standing on the edge of something bigger instead of buried in that basement.
The crest glowed softly and hummed in her palm, almost like it was nudging her forward.
Like it agreed: this was the right path.
Reina thought about Abby.
About how shockingly fast she’d become the closest thing to a real friend in years.
About how she’d finally found someone who didn’t feel like a stranger wearing a mask.
For the first time in forever, she didn’t feel alone… and she wasn’t about to lose that.
Knowing that, she understood her decision immediately:
she’d take the offer.
If Abby was going, she was going.
Mina didn’t even need to think.
She threw her hands up and yelled a loud, unapologetic:
“Hell yeah!”
She was practically vibrating with excitement.
In her own dimension, SkullGuards were legends mythic protectors, half-superhero, half-urban legend and the idea of becoming one hit every chaotic nerve in her body in the best way possible.
She was in before they even arrived.
Maybe even before she met them.
Arisa was the only one who truly hesitated.
She had a life. A purpose. A mission she’d fought for, bled for, built from the ground up. She had brothers-in-arms who trusted her, a father who loved her, a position she’d earned through sweat and discipline.
But beneath all that, there had always been a quiet, gnawing thought:
What if there’s something more?
And now here it was.
This impossible realm.
These three girls she barely knew but somehow felt tied to.
The SkullGuard a path so wildly beyond her world that it made everything she’d known look small.
Walking away from what she had meant stepping into the unknown, possibly never seeing her family or her squad again. That fear hit hard. Harder than she expected.
But walking away from this…
That meant never knowing.
Never understanding why she was brought here.
Never remembering any of it.
A hole in her life where meaning should’ve been.
She knew that kind of emptiness could haunt a person worse than any nightmare.
With a sudden, sharp clarity she saw the truth:
Down there, she’d always be cleaning up after nightmares someone else unleashed.
Up here, she might actually stand at the place where nightmares begin and stop them before they ever touched innocent lives.
To stay would be selfish.
To go would be selfish in a different way.
In the end, Arisa stepped forward because the idea of becoming ordinary again terrified her far more than this cathedral of wrong holiness.
She wanted the bigger fight.
She wanted the truth.
And she wasn’t going back.
XII. Ritual Black
The stage was set. The girls were ready, and Encore was prepared to lead them to the next step.
Encore watched them with an almost fond detachment, like a librarian observing four books finally placed on the correct shelf.
He raised one long, jointed hand.
The palace doors behind him groaned open, revealing blinding white and unfathomable darkness at the same time a contradiction that somehow made perfect sense.
No trumpets.
No choir.
No final human farewell.
Just four hopeful girls and their new destiny waiting for them.
They took a single leap of faith and stepped toward the doors a warm glow washing over them, a swirl of emotions and pure intention pulling them forward.
From this moment on, they would not merely witness horror
they would hunt it, bind it, and crush it at every corner of existence.
By day they would live as artists.
By night they would become bringers of justice and the divine.
They were no longer just Abby, Reina, Arisa, and Mina.
They were, at long last:
RITUAL BLACK
The 4th Generation — Reality Sector 7A (Earth)
SkullGuards of the Legion
XIII. End of Episode
A cult promised them salvation and tried to turn them into corpses.
Fate offered them an upgrade:
trade in their graves for a throne at the edge of oblivion.
They took it.
Not because they were heroes.
Not because they were ready.
But because there was no honest way back to who they were before they saw what the world really was.
The first adventure doesn’t end with closure.
It ends with four silhouettes vanishing into impossible light, under the gaze of a Herald who has seen countless generations come and go.
Up here, a new story begins.
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