Phenom, I am calling you out, son

[Erdawn Il Deus]

The temple was as much a part of the jungle as the wilderness itself. The stone had at one point in distant antiquity been a tremendous testament to the will of man, but had become a farcical example of His power, had returned to the raw elements which had giving it birth, had been taken back by the forest. The stone toppled, worked loose by creeper-vine, mosses, lichens, vegetation with had settled into the gums of its mortar like a floral gingivitis. Insects nested in countless billions, thrived, festered in cracks and pockets. Even the raised effigies at the holy place's sunken entrance had been overgrown, so that the shadows of caricatured human faces poked, shrouded, from curtains of leaves and ferns, crumbling forever behind their new masks. There was little to suggest rational life. Nothing to suggest civilisation.

Its bowels twisted deep into the earth, the lightless roots of the lower jungle canopy offering little to illuminate pillared, crooked corridoors. Ferns bloomed from floor and ceiline and vines hung so thickly they had to be hacked and torn aside.

But in that darkness beat life.

From the dank throat of the structure rose the low, solemn wailing of prayers. To what unspeakable gods, of light or darkness, remains ambiguous. But we shall concern ourselves with only a single denizen. The praying continued, a drone, effacing language from their mouths the way the jungle had effaced civilisation from the temple. The only light came from candles, which had been laid in patterns on the marble floor by the hundreds, perhaps thousands, some raised above the others with a hierarchical precision, following a thematic, circular approach. The air was damp, heavy. It smelled of old soil, sweet-rotten with dying vegetation. The burning of incense. And the meat-stink of blood. The air was so thick with the soup it was like a sauna, like breathing a drug, slowing perception or increasing it. And the drone of the chanting drowned out anything else. They were at one with themselves, here.

The Major was used to the smell. Used to the slowness. His sweat had long ago drained his body of superfluous materials, and his sparse robing sucked wetly to his body. He was immense, his shoulders rolling back from his spine in coiled knobs. He moved little, saw little. Bracelets gleamed quietly in the glow. He knelt before an altar. One of the monks stepped with muted precision, holding a heavy castiron bowl in his thin hands. He seemed scarce able to lift it, but with delicacy and care dipped it over the candles, which hissed and sputtered but did not go away. The smell of blood. Smoke.

His head was shaven, but it had always been so in his former life. His eyebrows were grey, now. His face sunken to his bones. In the light, his flesh gleamed like candle-wax. The chants... soothed him. He had found peace here. He looked upwards to the altar, to the artefact of warfare which hung sanctified above the incense fumes and smoke and blood. It was a mask, shaped in gold to the features of a man's face but twisted into a perpetual frown, almost caricaturised. He lowered his head to the stone floor before it.

"You have the smell of death on you," he said.

[Phenom]

I'll edit in an entrance soon.

[Erdawn Il Deus]

I am going to beat you like a left-handed stepchild.