[b]Sarnath, Kingdom of Poertia[/b]

The horror of the entire thing had faded to a dull ache in his heart, drowned by sleeplessness and pain. He could hear the crackling flicker of torches, the sobs of those he was chained with, the throaty undertones of hundreds of evil chanters, and drums. Drums, drums, drums. They sounded like elephants stamping on his ear drums. Long, deep notes coming from drums as large as men, so that every sound they made struck at something deep and fearful in the root of him. It should have terrified him, but he was too far gone to be terrified now.

He regretted what he had done to get here. Two weeks had passed since news of the Poertian raid on a nearby village reached him and his neighbors, and he had been one of the fools coaxed into joining a militia to hunt them down. It was known that the Poertians would sacrifice their captives to the monsters that ruled their land, and the thought had chilled them. It was not for their own sakes they had set out to hunt their enemy, but for the sakes of the helpless women and children that would become feed for the beasts.

Perhaps it was noble that he sacrificed so much for his countrymen, but being shuffled along to his death made it so he hardly cared about what was noble. He wouldn't see his wife again, or live to see his sister be married and his parents grow old. The life he had been meant for was snuffed out. Now he was meat.

Behind him was an old man, who he had heard nothing from since they set out. In some ways, he was jealous of that old man, allowed to live out his life before suffering this sort of fate. In front of him was a girl. His sister's age, maybe fourteen or fifteen. For most of the journey, he could see nothing more of her than a disheveled mess of loose brown hair and the unwashed olive skin of her thin arms. For a time, he had hated her. She had sobbed through most of the journey. She may have been one of those he was captured trying to save, and that made him hate her more. What did she know of life, a thing she hadn't tasted yet? What was her life to his? When these thoughts flared into rage, he sometimes thought about killing her. He could bash her head in with a rock and end her miserable life right there on the cold mountain stones. When his mind went to that place, he felt guilty. He felt like he was becoming one of [i]them[/i].

Who was worse, the Guls in their monster's den, or the entire kingdom that chose to serve their will? He knew who he detested the most. He had never met the Guls before, but their servants...

The leader of the men that had roped them together was a rider dressed head to toe in armor. He wore a rounded steel helmet on his head with diamond-shape holes cut for the eyes. A curtain of chain mail hung from its fringes, covering the lower half of his face and coming to a rest on his shoulders. A coat of steel fishscale covered most of his body. Even his horse was armored, defended to the hooves by its own coat of mail. He was a wealthy Cataphracti, the captive knew. The rider could pay for his own armor and horse, and he rode into battle so fully armed and armored that few could stand against him. There was a lance holstered to his saddle, a sword sheathed on one side of his belt and a dagger on the other, and he had a short bow strapped across his back. Under the bow on his back was a round shield, a spiral of red blood drops painted across the polished steel.

The Gul's lapdog had his own servants, soldiers armed and armored well enough on their own. Some carried axes, and others swords. He knew on man carried a mace with a head designed to look like the head of a cobra. Some of them had cone helms, others simple skull caps, while others wore helmets that came to a bulbous peak, slumping forward like flaccid flesh. They held round shields, or shields in the shape of teardrops, and on them were painted colorful devices. Most were red balls, or drops, or spirals to symbolize blood. Some had more intricate images. One man had painted a kestrel on his shield, while another man's showed a pale woman with a swirling red strip of cloth concealing her nudity.

There had been some things that surprised the captive about his treatment on the road. They had not been beaten, or struck, or even underfed. When they had camped at night, the soldiers had left the women alone. It was only the rigors of the march itself, and the endpoint they knew they would arrive at, that gave them grief. The captive's shoes had fallen apart early on, and his bare feet were torn bloody by the rocky ground of Poertia's terrain. He was hardly alone in this. They had left a trail of blood-stained soil behind them to mark the way. There was no stopping to shit or piss either. They had been forced to do that in their trousers, and whole line smelled exactly like an overripe privy in the summer. The frightened girl in front of him had suffered her bowels turning to water, and thick crusty lines of liquid shit painted her dust-coated legs. That had made him hate her that much more at first, but it had became so much the norm that he soon stopped caring.

It was when they entered Sarnath that they became part of its ritual. That is when the chanting and the drums began, to play the funeral dirge for hundreds of sacrifices. They were shuffled through the camp, surrounded be a horrifying crowd that seemed to leer at them from the gloom. There were warriors dressed like the Cataphracti rider and his men, and there were some suited with poorer arms that reminded him of the people of his homeland. They wore leather, and copper, and had simpler weapons. Though they might have looked like his people, they were not. This ritual did not seem to offend them, and they watched the procession with the same solemn religiosity that seemed to fill the hearts of the Cataphracti and his men. That dark, evil religiosity that came from worshiping the Guls.

There were more than soldiers in the camp. He saw old men, and men who did not look like warriors. And there were even women, and children in their numbers. They filled a sea of tents and bedrolls that stretched across a barren, rocky countryside below the city of Sarnath. 

He knew when they entered the city. That was when they passed beneath the crumbling stone remains of an old outer wall, who's broken towers held raging bonfires tended by more soldiers. Once inside, he saw the true city of Sarnath.

This was an ugly place of buildings made from piled stone or mud brick. Though so many worshiped these Gul kings, few wanted to live by them, and the simplicity of the town spoke of that. Still, it was something of a shock to see it so much in ruins. This was supposed to be their seat of power, he knew. Sure, it was common to see places like this in the mountains. Living so high above the fertile valleys that sat at the heart of the mountain realms meant a hard life. The only purpose to living here at all was that it was defensible. An army laying siege to a mountain stronghold would be taxed to maintain long supply lines while the people inside lived off their stores. Furthermore, Sarnath was an ancient stronghold of the Visha-jinn who ruled this land before the Gul's. It took somebody like Shapur to conquer it, and there were few people like that around anymore. But life was still hard. Crops did not grow well in the rough soil, limiting growth to small gardens fed by animal dung. The weather could be rough as well. The ground froze earlier and warmed up later in the high places of the world, and icy precipices could make even the simple act of gathering dung for a fire into a perilous task. And then there was that wind, whistling across the hills with not but a few patches of old junipers to stop it.

He had known since arriving that he was going to die here, but inside the walls he could think of nothing else. He was going to die. He was going to die. That was all that was left. He looked up at the fortress of Sarnath looming in front of him and sickening desperation filled his soul.

The ancient Visha-jinn fortress was carved into a massive jut of rock that served as the peak of the mountain that they had spent most of the last few days climbing. The way up the Old Road had been harsh. It had been a steep path, and every step had reminded them that they would not be coming back down. The worst part was when they passed a couple of old warriors making an onion soup over a campfire. The smell had brought back every memory of life that he had started to forget. He had cried then. Until now, that had been the only time that he had cried.

He felt tears well in his eyes again as he looked up at the fortress. Its tallest tower was nearly three hundred feet tall, carved into the living rock so that it ended where the mountain peaked. These were thick, rounded towers with smooth stone surfaces showing no sign of mason's work. In some places, the castle was little more than an impression sunken into the rock, while other places saw towers surrounded on three sides by open air. Thousands of small bas-relief depictions of the Visha who had lived here before. These carvings covered the towers and flattened walls of the castle, but the howling mountain wind had eaten away their details so that most were nothing more than round, featureless human shapes. The stood guard like old ghosts lost to time. There were places where the rock was still rough and unshaped except for arrow slits or small windows.  Faint torch-light leaked out from these places so that they seemed to glow a fiery red, and the sight of the entire thing filled him with an immediate sense of dread. It was under these towers that he would die.

The drums grew louder as they approached the entrance to the great castle. They curved around a square well in the center of tower. The iron statue of a demonic looking baby stood cold and twisted in an indention in the stone. When they came to the dreaded steps of the Gul's castle, the captive gazed at a pair of statues even more grotesque then the monster-infant. These were vultures, wings outspread, with human faces on their breasts. They guarded the flanks of the steps, while a central gutter cut the stairs into two sections. The captive looked on in horror as he realized that the gutter was still flowing with blood so dark it was nearly black.

Mountain horns sounded just then, deep and low. He heard the girl in front of him yelp, and she began to sob. 

Amongst the prisoners, the doomed wailed and screamed and begged. Their sounds were nearly drowned out by the drums, the horns, and the constant drone of the throaty song that the people of Sarnath sung. The captive watched as their Cataphracti captor dismounted and climbed to the top of the steps to join the Gul's.

In groups of three, they were unchained and brought up to the top of the stairs. From where the rest of them waited, the sacrifices were a distant blur. He could see the bright white armor of a Gul lord, and the glint of cold steel as he slaughtered each person one at a time. A river of blood flooded down the gutter. 

When it was his turn, he was brought up the stairs with the young girl who had been chained in front of him and an older woman who had been in front of her. The climb was slow, and he felt his heart pounding with each step. He tried to think of a way to escape, but there was no way that he could see. The Gul's had their own guards bring them up the steps, men with golden armor and helms with emotionless faces for visors and golden vultures perched on top of them. If he tried to run, his death would be much worse. 

Near the top of the steps, the blood did not stay confined to the gutter. Here, rivulets of trickled down the steps themselves, joining into larger streams at the top until eventually everything was covered in red. He saw them dragging a headless body to a stone outbuilding on the side of the great mountain castle. To be butchered like a pig, he knew. They would quarter the meat and prepare it to eat. He wondered if the Gul's themselves performed that grisly task, or if they had human servants for that as well. It was no matter. In a few minutes, he would suffer the same fate. He felt his knees go soft, and he began to fall, but a guardsman grabbed him by his arm and propped him up.

It was at that moment when he first saw a Gul. There was only one, he noticed, where the rest of them were lurking was hard to tell. This one was young, its hair still dark, though it had already went from black to a dark shade of grey. It had a short-cropped beard that lined its face, its cheeks and upper lip shaved clean. He could see the beginning of a dull-red coloring to its eyes, like a red glow beneath the dark cracks of cooling lava. And it was pale. So pale that its cheeks looked almost blue in the darkness, like a fresh corpse standing.

The Gul wore a white breastplate over a light coat of polished steel chain mail. A vulture featured proudly on the plate, wings outstretched so that the tips reached the openings for the Gul's arms. The armor was spattered with blood, as was the creatures pale-white face. A thick indigo cloak hung from his shoulders and dragged to the ground. 

He saw the Cataphracti as well, who was now holding his helmet under his arm. He had the tan skin and wiry black hair that revealed him to be of the people who had lived in these lands since the days before Shapur. He had a beard that was neatly cut and oiled, and his eyes were a deep grey. 

They took the old lady first. She did not cry, or beg, or moan, but he could see that her breathing had become shaky. He felt a strange sort of pride for her then, and he wanted so much to make sure that his death was a dignified one that his head rung with the thought. When the Gul grabbed her by the hair, she closed her eyes and began to mouth a prayer. He forced her to her knees and held a long, thin sickle in the air above his head. Blood dripped from its surface, and he could see that there were glyphs carved into the blade.

He did not watch as the Gul killed the old woman. He only knew it happened when he heard the sound of a blade cutting through flesh, and he knew it was done when the young girl in front of him broke down into hysterics. He did not want to watch that. Instead, he stared coldly at the Cataphracti.

The Gul was a monster acting out its curse, but the Cataphracti was different. He had captured them, and brought them here to be fed to the demons. He was a man, a man who's people were not very far removed from the captives, but he served the monsters anyway. And he didn't seem to feel even partly guilty about what he was doing.

The young girl had fallen on her knees in a fit. She was trying to plea for her life, but her voice broke down into a shrill, screaming stutter. The captive felt his heart wrench for her, and he hated himself for all the times he had dreamed of killing her. She was at an age when girls dreamt of their futures as fairy tales, where they would get married and have perfect little children in some perfect little hovel in the countryside. She did not deserve any of this. He could say, at least, that he had went to battle and earned his captivity by failing in the field. She was, in all the ways he could tell, innocent. A child.

For a moment, he saw a glimmer of hope for them all when the Gul lifted her gently by the hand instead of yanking her from the ground by her hair. He held his sickle above his head in a clinched fist, fresh blood from the old woman before still covering the blade. And then he dropped it.

"Mercy stays my hand!" The Gul shouted in a deep, booming voice. He spoke loud enough that the captive had no doubt the people below could here them. Everything went silent, save for the confused weeping of the frightened young girl. "I do not pronounce death where death is not supposed to go. I have seen this ones fate and I know that she will live."

That glimmer of hope shattered when he realized what was happening. They always saved one out of every group of sacrifices. He had always known that. He had spent many days after his captivity praying that he would be the one who was saved, but he had lost that one last hope when he heard the soldiers talking about it during the march. "They always take one, aye." one had told another. "And it is always a pretty one."

A guard led the uncertain young girl into the castle. She would get to live. But he watched the Gul pick up his sickle, and he knew his time had come

He felt his heart slow as he was led up to the trough that served as a sacrificial alter. The Gul grabbed him by the head and forced him down. His body went numb. The metallic smell of fresh blood filled his nostrils, and he looked down at the bottom of the trough to see coagulating heaps of blood pooling in the porous volcanic stone of the alter. There was something cold about this alter, a chill that he could feel on his face. This was the last thing he would see. The thought of death had made him nauseous. He considered vomiting, out of spite.

He felt the force of the sickle come down, but there was no pain. He saw his blood pouring into the trough below. That seemed strange. That was his? 

A quick wave of malaise shot through his body, as if he had all become sick at once. His limbs went cold, and he became rapidly tired. The vision of his own blood faded, and in its place came nothingness.