The smell of burning sheep fat and smoldering cedar grew thick across the forty-pace deep gap. It rolled over the Anchor Platform like an oily sea-fog. It carried none of the clean, biting bitterness of fire coal or forge coke. It reeked of ritual oils, dried myrrh, and old linen bandages steeped in stale well water.
Across the narrow stone bridge that connected the central pillar to the southern cave wall, fifty figures in tattered white sheepskin robes moved with rhythmic, swaying care. They carried no heavy steel kite shields and wore no said clearlyiron breastplates. Their faces were obscured behind masks forged from jagged shards of broken mirrors, held together by strips of blackened lead wire and hardened pine pitch. Through the fractured glass of their visors, their eyes caught the green eerie glow of the cave in dozens of distorted, kaleidoscopic reflections, splintering every gaze into a dozen wild facets.
In the center of their line stood Arch-Heretic Kaelen.
The cult leader was tall, gaunt, his bare forearms crisscrossed with self-inflicted ritual incisions where dark soot and dark oak-ink had been rubbed into the open wounds. It formed nested rings of weeping runes that pulsed with pale violet heat. Around his neck hung an iron chain bearing forty small bronze bells that chimed with a dull, leaden clatter at every step. In his right hand, he held a curved black glass flensing knife whose razor edge shone with grease-film. In his left, he swung a heavy bronze censer…
