{"You can't wash away blood with more blood."}
He rose, slowly, deliberately like a monarch waking from a long, patient slumber. Ash Marcel stood at the centre of the core chamber; his body drenched from head to toe in fresh, slick blood. It dripped from his fingertips, coiled like serpents around his arms, and pooled beneath his bare feet like a living sacrifice. I did not know where the blood came from.
But the mountain did, and the stone drank it, and around him, the very core pulsed with a terrible rhythm, each beat echoing like a war drum through the marrow of my bones. My throat tightened as I had seen horrors before. I had hunted monsters beneath moons both black and red. But this… this was not a monster. This was a hunger given form. This was death with a crown and a name.
