Sytarith stood in a sea of blood. The vision had been quite right, she mused. She wanted it gone. The thing behind her skull, that ate away at her mind. She desperately wanted it gone. The strands of fate had guided her well.
They needed more blood.
“More sacrificial blood!” the Archprophetess shrieked, fully entranced by the ritual, and Sariant warriors brought more cadavers of recently slain “wildlife”, hastily gutting it open. The blood flowed freely, down the walls of Old Brass, onto the consecrated inner sanctum floor.
Dark, monotonous but intense whispers sprung from her throat, as she again and again invoked the powers of the Realm of Chaos, as she brought her arcane might to bear, and continued to tear at the rift to Khorne’s domain.
The metallic sounds of desperate fighting behind Sytarith sounded so distant, so inconsequential to her.
It was a risk to intrude this much on a foreign gods domain. She was not a follower of Khorne, and she needed an amalgamation of a ritual pleasing to the blood god and magic to accomplish what she had set out to do.
Sytarith had no doubt the demons would find her unworthy because of that and would have no qualms to attack her and her warband in their insatiable bloodlust.
But that’s… where their unwilling saviours came in.
What she did here, broadening a rift to the killing fields of Khorne so that demons could enter the realm – it was a shining beacon visible to all that possessed even rudimentary magic sense.
And Sytarith knew the Seraphon would not let her open the rift, even if they knew it was a trap.
As he had predicted, they had come. More than a single warband, true – in numbers that would be hard to withstand for long.
The Templars had built a defensive position around her ritual circle, one that was easy to hold – and then those Saurus warriors led by a skink priest had come out of the jungle to challenge them, to stop the ritual.
Sytarith could not see how the battle went, she was removed from it. All she could hear was distant clanking if weapons and diffuse warcries.
She had ordered for the corpses to be dragged to her circle, the throats cut – the blood from recent battle was potent, she needed it.
Her eyes were glazed over, but she could see it – the glowing, pulsating rift to the killing fields, shining in an intense red, she could feel the warmth, the heat, burning her skin, as she pulled at the rift. She could hear the anger, the rage and fury of the demons, could feel their hands trying to claw their way out… just a tiny bit more.
The pain was excruciating. It wet through her head into her body, into her arms and legs, but she never stopped chanting.
And just like that – the rift tore deeper. A horrific cacophonous screaming from dozens of unnatural maws, claws of fleshhounds appeared ripping at reality, and finally bloodletters tore at the rifts edges with their jagged blades.
It broke. Demonic masses poured out of the rift and fell upon the Seraphon with frenzy, hacking, tearing and rending through their ranks.
The Archprophetess saw the rift widen even more, as the demons continued to claw at its edges as they came through.
It was a most glorious sight. Glorious and terrifying.
Archprophetess Sytarith had been successful. A continuous stream of Khornate demons pouring into the Furyoth Dell would surely hamper Seraphon operations deeply. With a bit of collateral damage, of course, but ah well.
“These are my gift to you, esteemed demons of Khorne!” she screamed, as if in a fever, “Many more of the Seraphon are out in the jungle! Enjoy, spill their blood in the name of your God!”
The last of her power spent, the Archprophetess fell. She did not feel being caught by the armoured hands of Templar Oron, or being carried away while the Templar warband slipped away during the slaughter.
For the first time since a long, long time, she fell into a soft, dreamless sleep.
