The ritual that Lord Taranas kept talking about took place outside of the mansion in its backyard. I stood in the backyard of the mansion, still without Domination, staring up at a tall granite pillar which rose out of the center of the backyard like a sentinel standing watch on a city wall. The granite pillar was covered in a vast amount of ancient carvings and images that made no sense to me, though I noticed that one or two of them resembled bats while another one looked like a wand, but that didn’t help me understand what any of them meant.
All around me, vampires worked hard to put the finishing touches of the ritual in place. Lord Taranas had explained to me that the ritual required seven concentric circles of stone set up around the pillar in the center, the stones connected via li
