The tolling of the great bells resonated through the stone beneath my feet. Each chime was a hammer blow against the fabric of reality, a countdown to my own violent creation. The Centennial Blood-Rite had begun. Above me, in the grand halls of the citadel, Julian would be raising a chalice, his voice a silken ribbon of lies, celebrating an eternity he believed was his to command.
He was wrong. Eternity was a debt, and I was here to collect.
The f*******n altar was not a place of worship, but a place of consequence. Carved from a single, massive geode of blood-quartz, it sat in the heart of the catacombs, a nexus of raw, telluric energies the Coven had long ago deemed too volatile to control. It drank ambient magic, and it remembered every oath sealed in blood upon its surface. It was he
