Blood for the Blood God

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The stink of blood and death was thick upon the plain. A crimson light tainted the sky, turning the midday sun into a smouldering ember behind the unnatural haze. Overhead, the croaking of vultures drifted down, like the impatient muttering of daemons. Again and again the carrion birds circled, never descending, never departing. The reek of death had drawn them from their gruesome rookeries, to linger until they had filled their scrawny frames with their hideous repast.

A man stood upon a small hill, little more than a jagged pile of rocks cast down by the craggy mountains beyond the plain. Like the vultures, he waited, waited for the sounds to fade: the warriors’ din of crashing steel and the screams of dying men. Unlike the vultures, he did not listen to the clamour with a mind greedy with hunger. He was no scavenger, no slinking jackal preying upon the leavings of true predators. The man stood with a pride alien to scavengers and ghouls. His frame was straight and tall, his limbs corded with iron-knots of muscle, his chest swollen with strength. Armour of lacquered bone and boiled leather was fastened around his powerful body, blackened with soot to match the braided scalp-locks that dripped from beneath his gold-masked helm.

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