Blood

THE STORY SO FAR
In an age and a region renowned for cruelty and violence, Caleb was
legendary. Born in western Texas in 1847, he had sealed a reputation as
a merciless gunfighter by the age of 17. But it was seven years later when
he met Ophelia Price that his hunger for bloodshed took on a menacing new
timbre.

She was already well beyond the bounds of sanity when he found her cowering
in the charred ruins of the burned out homestead where her husband and child
had perished only days before. It was neither her tattered beauty nor her
plight that compelled Caleb to take her in, however-it was the words he
picked out of her virtually incoherent mumblings.

He learned that her husband had attempted to rescind his membership of the
dreaded Cult of Tchernobog and in return cultists had set fire to the house
in the night. Ophelia was filled with rage-not at the cult but at her
husband, whose cowardice she blamed for the death of her young son.

Ophelia was Caleb's doorway to the Cult and its dark purpose. He could not
have known that in time he would come to love her, nor that their service to
the Cult would find the two of them beloved among the Chosen, elite servants
of the dreaming god Tchernobog, the One That Binds, Devourer of Souls.

In the Hall of the Epiphany, a temple that spans the chasm between the
worlds, the four remaining Chosen stand at the forefront of a procession of
worshippers. Tchernobog's presence is felt more than seen-the great, frigid
weight of a hunger that spans millennia. He speaks in a cacophony of voices
stolen from the dead, summoning the Chosen to the center of the sacrificial
ring. They stand before the Dark God, united by a sudden, inexplicable sense
of doom.

A wordless cry rises up from the seething shadows, one voice swallowed up by
many until the hall resounds with them. The members of the procession behind
the Chosen melt away in a gust of ethereal wind, extinguished like so many
candle flames. There aren't even ashes to indicate they ever existed.

The Chosen look to one another in confusion and dread. They can already feel
the ties that bind them to Tchernobog fraying. Why? How have we failed you?

But there is no answer other than the shattering scream that threatens to
tear the universe to shreds. Darkness swells around them, swallows them.
Their cold, abandoned souls fall through the abyss.

And they burn.

Caleb awakens in cold and damp in a body he no longer knows. It has long
lain as a corpse that refused to rot, protected from putrefaction by some
unearthly link to its master. The pain of protesting muscle and flesh
invigorates and awakens him. He welcomes it. It distills his hate into the
maelstrom raging in the center of his mind.

An agonizing cry breaks out of him, shattering the stone lid of the tomb in
which he lies, knocking loose sediment, cobwebs, and the small, unnoticed
creatures that have shared his grave with him. A single word rings out
through the darkness, echoing Tchernobog's lingering howl: "Why?"