Chapter Three: The Final Sacrament

They carried her to the inner sanctum at moonrise.

The chamber was smaller than the great hall, circular, walled in black marble veined with gold. A single low altar of polished obsidian dominated the center, surrounded by thick cushions and flickering braziers that filled the air with smoke sweet and heady. Forty members of the Circle waited in perfect silence, naked now, robes discarded in neat piles at the edges of the room. Men and women, bodies ...