It was early morning on the 23rd of Glacian, 395 A.F. Crimson-hemmed
robes crackled sharply against Aznahz's legs as he stalked up the temple
stairwell at a swift pace. He stumbled as the long robes entangled one
cloven foot placed too hastily on a step. Despite himself, the daemon
glanced back surreptitiously to see if his half-siblings Sabatu and
Nebatu had noticed. They stared at him blandly, faces blank as they
trailed behind him a dozen steps down.

Setting his mouth firmly, Azhnahz continued the ascent with renewed
dignity, rubbing at the nubs at his temples. They pained him today. They
always pained him, but this day more than most. Much more: to the point
where it was a conscious, ongoing effort not to scream. He would not
scream.

An unusually strong telepath since his birth, Azhnahz, son of the daemon
Morimbuul and the human Apostate named Ravai, had been feeling unusual
for days. He had been... growing. Though it had been a scant ten years
since his birth, he had developed at the speed of a normal human child
up till recently. Unlike him, his half-siblings had aged much more
quickly, to his frustration.

But he had grown. He had nearly doubled in size from the child he had
been a mere handful of days previous. The strain on his body was obvious
-- he was reed-thin, his flesh stretched over a skeleton that was twice
what it had once covered. Dark purple veins protruded from his skin, as
if worms crawled beneath the taut epidermal layer.

His mind was sharper, too, the thin, slimy film of childhood cast from
it like a dirty soap bubble popping. And the visions, too, were sharper.
Still, they were not quite sharp enough, not as images and impressions
in his mind, slippery shades of things that eluded his understanding.
Azhnahz needed something more... something he could touch, something he
could see clearly, something to help him understand.

The disciples of the Master came -- Mhaldorians, young and old,
high-ranked and low. Father Wulfen, the Messiah of the Damned. Vicar
Ladydeath Aristata, mother to Nebatu. Vicar Herenicus Coldraven.
Syralis, Rameus, Daitya, Kalseru, Skarash, Dethea, Bastet, Nitrile,
Lycaris, Ora, Vadimuses, Toranth, Shrissysn, Maridian, and more answered
Azhnahz's call in the name of the Master.

Once enough had gathered, Azhnahz announced what he required from them:
a sacrifice.

Daitya stepped forward. Concentrating on the powers that had recently
grown in him, Azhnahz stared at Daitya balefully. Daitya began to arch
backwards, her arms splaying out to either side. Gathering his power,
Aznahz flicked his palm out towards Daitya direction with a whip-sharp
motion. A river of blood spurted in a torrent from Daitya's mouth,
drenching the floor, accompanied by a wretched, gargling scream as she
was bent completely backwards at an impossible angle. With a sickening
crack, Daitya's back snapped in two. Her body crumpled to the ground,
lifeless.

Then without thinking Wulfen laid his hands on her body and drew the
soul-essence from it, shaping it into a glowing spear for his own
diabolical purposes, as Necromancers are wont to do.

Azhnahz spat in fury. "You have defiled the corpse!" he screeched. "It
is useless to me now."

"Take another, then," Wulfen replied, realising his mistake. "I will
stand in her place."

After Wulfen's back too had been broken, Vicar Ladydeath decapitated his
head from his body at Azhnahz's request. Crouching over the headless
corpse, Aznahz split open the torso and reached into the chest cavity,
then down. The dead Apostate's body was warm with just-fading life, and
through his stretched-thin skin, the hot blood gushing over his hand as
he dug around in the entrails of the man felt as if it were scalding
him.

Ripping out heart, liver, and intestines, Aznahz placed them upon the
sacrificial altar and began the true work of the haruspex -- divination
through reading and interpreting the secret, occult signs hidden within
the entrails and organs of a sacrificed animal.

It was as he had thought it would be, and more... the life essence
stored within the entrails strengthened him, grounded him, grounded the
visions and the voices that fluttered like tattered curtains at the
edges of his mind. The images that came to him wracked his body, and he
swayed on his impossibly frail legs, the room spinning around him.

"Master..." he grated out loud, shuddering. "Such pain... the sword..."

His body spasmed as if in pain, his hand clutching the heart before him.
Azhnahz cried out suddenly, "Twain!" and his eyes snapped open, a look
of fury blazing across his face. There was something more that was being
kept from him, something the entrails were withholding!

He spun on his heel, the sharp movement causing his blood-drenched robes
to fling crimson splatters across the chamber. Striding back to the
corpse of Wulfen upon the ground, he snatched up the decapitated head at
its side by the hair. With the blood upon his fingers, Aznahz inscribed
a symbol upon the forehead, invoking words in a sibilant daemonic
tongue.

The grey eyes of the decapitated head of Wulfen opened wide, crimson
from lid to lid. And the head began to sing in a strangely beautiful,
yet empty voice:

--
I saw a dark and shining thing
it cut me deeply when;
She wielded, stroked, and made it sing,
it gashed us harshly when
The three they stand in dread array
it pains us awfully then
Our cleansing is begun, I pray:
exalt us vastly then.
--

Once the song was ended, the head crumbled into black ash.

Those who had gathered there questined Aznahz on the meaning of the
portents. Gazing into nothingness as if his thoughts were far away,
Aznahz only murmured cryptically:

"So it begins."

Penned by my hand on the 23rd of Miraman, in the year 396 AF.