Lying beneath the writhing snakes, the hierophant had dreamed.
Twin stags stand with heads lowered and antlers crossed. One spear pierces them both, and from the wound pours the blood of four women. One stag falls and the other remains, stronger and more glorious than before.
A gift from Asclepius—a dream to heal his tortured soul.
When he’d awoken, with the snakes’ whispers still echoing in his brain, the girl still hung from the ceiling, long dead at the hands of his mystai—but he felt her life force trickling through his own veins. She’d been weak, sickly, but not without power. Sammi Mehra possessed a tenacity unmatched by the other children in her ward. She wanted desperately to live. The hierophant doubted her tests had shown it yet, but she’d finally started winning her long battle with the disease. In a few months, she would’ve been well.
Suddenly, he remembered another dream from that night—flying through the air at a gymnastics event, spinning once, twice, then landing lightly on the mat to a thunder of applause. Such a simple dream, a girl’s dream, loosened from her mind as she slipped into unconsciousness. He would not feel pity. Her life had served a far higher purpose than anything her mortal mind could imagine. What was the too-short future of a single girl compared to the eternal glory of an immortal?
Now, deep underground, he held a green glass flask to the firelight and watched Sammi’s blood swirl with Helen’s. From Sammi, he gained determination and courage. From Helen, brilliant intelligence and unquestioning faith—a rare combination. Tonight, another woman, young and pure, would add her life’s essence to his. Her blood would hold special magic: kharisma. Modern mortals defined charisma as mere personal magnetism. But the ancients derived the word from karis, “grace,” meaning a talent divinely conferred. A hint of the godly ran through the veins of those with such talents, giving their blood extraordinary power.
The thought sent a shiver of impatience down the hierophant’s spine. He could almost taste the blood of tonight’s sacrifice upon his lips. But the steps of the ritual must be obeyed in order—the Pompe must begin here, in a long-forgotten chamber where the dead lay nearby, guarding the secrets of mortality.
The first offerings waited in cages nearby. Their brains could not comprehend their place in the ancient ritual—but they could feel fear. The hierophant breathed in the odor of their anxiety, reveling in the power it gave him.
“Remove the sacrifices,” he said to his gathered mystai. While the cage doors clanged open, he turned to his most trusted acolyte and placed the glass flask in his hands. “One cannot achieve everlasting life without knowledge of death,” he explained, his voice resonating with the tone of command. “The blood we have harvested carries within it the power of the living and the dreams of the dead. Tonight we add more. Tonight we grow closer to the end. And to the beginning.”
In a few hours, he would finally show himself to the city. Fear would course down its filthy streets and through its crowded tenements. Terror would hurtle along the fetid underground tunnels and up the counterfeit majesty of skyscrapers, invading every corner of the city. One by one, the mortals would realize the extent of their vulnerability. And as they did, he would grow ever more invulnerable.
He stoked the fire before him and made a silent promise. Before rosy-fingered Dawn lightens the sky, I will turn this soulless city into a god-fearing realm.