CHAPTER TWO HUNDRED – THE FINAL SHOWDOWN

Another scream lanced through the night - ragged, choked with agony. Karina felt bile rising in her throat at the soulless glee that colored the speaker's next words. "Hear those exquisite lamentations? They are the howls of the damned beast made flesh, heralding their rightful destruction at our blades!" A resounding cheer rose to greet that declaration, quickly swelling to a feverish crescendo of ecstatic shrieks and howls. The massed voices seemed to crash together in profane rapture, attaining a force and weightiness of their own - a living, breathing, profane thing given roiling form in the veils of acrid smoke swirling off the hissing braziers. And at the eye of that storm strode a single figure, clad in sanctified crimson vestments so profound they burned the retinas. Edmund Beaufort - the High Sanctarian of the Order, its most revered figurehead. His gaunt features were twisted in a rapturous leer, cherubic face utterly transfixed by the transcendent agonies being enacted b