Neil strolled slowly along the sun-warmed wooden planks of the old pier, the rhythmic creaking beneath his boots harmonising with the distant crash of waves against the shore. The late afternoon sun dipped low over the horizon, casting golden rays across the endless blue of the Pacific and bathing the coastal town in a warm, amber glow. Mexico’s natural beauty had always held him in quiet awe — the vivid colours of the bougainvillaea draping over stucco walls, the salt-tinged breeze that tousled his hair, and the soothing murmur of the sea that never ceased.

Yet beneath that postcard-perfect serenity lay a past he could never quite forget.

If you could somehow look past the stories — the rumours that had circulated for centuries about the infants offered to long-forgotten gods, the blood rituals whispered about in half-serious tones by locals around fires late at night — it might all seem idyllic. But Neil couldn't ignore them. He'd seen too much. Known too much. The ghosts of those lost children seemed to linger, unseen but ever-present, hanging in the humid air like a memory too stubborn to die. It didn’t stop the sun from shining or the ocean from glittering like a sapphire in the light — but it added a weight to the beauty, a shadow in every corner.

And as he walked the pier, that beauty — like a painted mask over a rotting skull — never failed to both mesmerise and disturb him.