God's Abandoned Shadows

In the fictional European city of Veridion, former criminal profiler Ellis Graves is drawn back into the darkness he fled when a series of ritualistic murders unfolds during the annual Phantasma Carnival. Each crime scene reflects a terrifying truth: the killers are not individuals, but a collective consciousness awakening within the reveling crowds. As Graves peels back the layers of mass delusion, he realizes every profile he constructs is an attempt to trace the outlines of something divine that has fallen into shadow—a god-shaped absence inside the human soul that, once filled by the carnival's ecstatic rhythm, transforms ordinary citizens into vessels of collective evil.