“Help me move the table. Please,” Ianna said, already coming to the head and gripping the plywood with fingers hooked to talons.

Nodding, Kael went to the foot of the platform and, on the count of three, easily lifted it up and to the side, revealing the gleaming black of the cauldron beneath.

Instantly, the scents of death, despair, pain and hunger assailed her, causing her to take an involuntary half-step backward while still holding the table.

Ianna yelped as splinters drove themselves into her palms, and she dropped her end of the platform, hissing in pain.

Raphael simply screamed.

Mindlessly, Kael simply tossed the plywood off to the side, and stepped forward again, stared into the cauldron, eyes wincing and watering as the icy chill seared through her skull. Those same eyes widened when she realized that the icy mass of …whatever it was in the kettle… was now coming to a full, violent boil without any type of heat source whatsoever.

She wanted to look up, wanted to demand the priestess’ explanation for this trick, but found her gaze unbreakably captured by the boiling, putrescent miasma beneath. She tried to set her formidable well against it, but the pull of the darkness was just too powerful, and as she felt it wash over her, her will crumbled to dust, and with it, her desire to fight.

The second she relaxed, it moved through her, filling every vessel, every cell, until she was part of the darkness, and it was part of her. Voices whispered to her, their sibilant tones teasing just below the level of her hearing. Raphael’s keening, terror-filled screams were just so much static as she attempted to chase down the elusive voices, if only to hear the messages they seemed to be imparting to her very soul.

With the darkness came a hunger. A hunger more powerful than any she had ever known. A hunger for fear, for rage, for death in all its bloody glory. She raised glittering, colorless eyes to Ianna, her brain not even registering surprise that she was now able to move.

The smile which pulled her lips back from her teeth was a deaths head mask as chilling as the boiling cauldron below.

Ianna met Kael’s gaze without flinching. Her lips moved to the rhythm of the chant she was softly singing. Her body swayed with sinuous, sensual grace, like a snake dancing to the pipes of his charmer.

In her hands was another knife, much larger than the first. Its hilt was made from a partial shaft of a human femur. The blade, blue-fired steel as dark as midnight, was bound to the hilt by human tendon, yellow and brittle with age.

Kael looked on, tongue darting out to moisten dry lips, her eyes following every movement of the priestess as she swayed and chanted.

Ianna stepped forward and handed the knife to Kael, pressing it into her hands and curling her fingers tightly around the handle. “You know what to do,” she whispered before resuming her melodious chanting once again.

The moment the dagger touched her hands, Kael knew exactly what to do. Long fingers caressed the haft as one would caress a lover; slowly, gently, lovingly.

The voices became more insistent, and though she still couldn’t hear the words, the message was loud and clear.

Kill.

Kill.

Kill.

Hefting the knife, she turned and approached her flailing victim. She easily sidestepped his desperate, sobbing attempts to keep her away. Reaching up, she latched an inhumanly strong hand just below his knee, clamping down hard to steady his helpless movements.

“No!” Raphael sobbed, his voice whispery and raw. “God, please, no.”

“Your god can’t help you now, my friend,” Kael replied in a surprisingly conversational tone.

He lifted his head as much as he was able. “Please,” he begged, tears rolling down his face, “please, don’t do this. I beg you, please.”

She actually appeared to consider his pleas for a moment, before a sneer distorted her face and she plunged the knife deep into his gut, just above his pubic bone.

The blade was razor sharp and slid in easily past skin, fat and glistening viscera. With a soft grunt of effort, she brought the blade slowly down, cutting a surgeon-straight line through his gut until the knife was stopped by his sternum. Hot blood glutted from the wound, bathing Kael in its essence, coating her hands and arms and spraying against her face and chest.

Raphael had long since stopped screaming, and hung limp and unconscious, his blood falling into the caldron below his head in a river of red.

Ianna’s chanting became louder, her dancing wilder. Her face and eyes glowed with dark power.

As if viewing herself from a distance, Kael saw her hand come up and plunge itself into the opening she’d made. Her long fingers slipped easily past the man’s ribcage, questing for his still beating heart. Once she found it, she wrapped her fingers around it and, steadying herself, she pulled.

It came free far easier than she imagined it would, and with a look just short of rapturous, she pulled it from Raphael’s body and held it high in the air, where it quivered, glistening in the wavering light of the candles.

Blood poured down her arms to coat her breasts like some grisly coat of armor, and she moaned in ecstasy as her neck lolled back and her eyes rolled up in her head, showing only the glittering whites. Her body writhed and jerked in time to Ianna’s chanting, as if she were a puppet given life by a master’s hand.

Obeying a silent command, she finally lowered her arms and dropped the heart into the boiling cauldron.

Everything stilled.

Even the sound of Raphael’s still draining blood made no sound.

Then, very like an erupting volcano, the cauldron came to life once again, spewing out brilliant beams of light every color of the rainbow.

Enraptured, Kael stayed rooted to the spot, staring downward as the light shafts pierced her torso and head, lancing through her body and continuing onward through the ceiling of the building and to the infinity beyond.

She felt a dark, malevolent power enter with the light, filling her as if she were nothing but an empty vessel created expressly for that purpose. The power of it was overwhelming, causing her to stumble a bit as her knees weakened. Her strength returned rapidly, however, as she felt a huge surge of vitality flow through her with the force of a tidal wave.

Her vision, already perfect, became even sharper. Scents previously undetectable now assailed her senses. Likewise, her hearing became almost uncomfortably acute, to the point where she could easily hear the sound of Ianna’s heart beating furiously in her chest.

This is how it feels to be a god, she thought, reveling in the dark power which consumed her. Nothing could hurt her. No one could stand against her. She was invincible.

Ianna waited in the proverbial wings, the same dark energy roiling through her own body; though in her case it was something she was well used to, and as such was not quite as intoxicating.

“Come to me,” she rasped, arms held out in a gesture of tender welcome, though the look in her eyes was the very antithesis of tender. “Join with me in the darkness. Let me welcome you home.”

Kael looked up slowly, seeing the naked priestess as if for the first time. A smile, slow, dark and incalculably evil, spread over her face.

With the fluid, muscular grace of a stalking lioness, Kael closed the distance between them. One blood covered hand reached up into the thick fall of Ianna’s hair and pulled back, hard, exposing the priestess’ elegant neck to her hungered eyes.

“Welcome this,” she purred, lowering her head and biting through tender skin to suckle the heated blood within.

Ianna struggled just enough to spark the American’s dark rage, then submitted willingly to her merciless attentions, her body an open, wet and willing vessel.

The furious coupling lasted until the first light of dawn turned the eastern sky to rose, and only ended as each woman finally gave into the exhaustion of their bodies and collapsed, still entangled, onto the cold dirt floor.

It was an experience neither one would forget.

*******

There ya go! I hope to have the next piece up in the next week or so. Swordnquil@aol.com

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