I have a story that was published in the March Flame Tree newsletter.
In the silence of the Sacrificial Atrium, where the only sounds are the drip of faith and the flutter of crimson wings, my ceremony goes quietly, terribly, wrong.
The air is cool, smelling of stone and incense and the faint, metallic tang of blood. I kneel on the polished obsidian disc, the chill seeping through the thin linen of my robe. Before me, looming beyond the arched window, is the god. Unlike the gods of nearby heathen villages, this god is not a statue but a vast, fibrous cocoon the colour of a storm cloud, hanging above the silent abyss of the sacred chasm. It has been there for twelve generations. It is why my city clings to the canyon’s rim.
High Priest Durai’s voice is a dry riverbed of sound, reciting the Litany of Approach. My own blood is a quick, hot rhythm in my ears, drowning out his words. I have been chosen. It is the highest honour. My blood will be the ink of a prayer, my life the postage for a message they have been sending for centuries. Better to die now, connecting to the god, than starve in the gutters, poor and alone.
The silver knife is cold, then briefly fire, as Durai draws the ritual cut along my left forearm. Deep and precise. A line of perfect, welling red that flows towards the cocoon. The prayer begins.
From the shadowed niche above the window, it comes. The blood moth. Its wings are the colour of wine dregs in the sacred cup, a shocking, living crimson against the grey stone and the greater grey of the god. It is two-hands-spread wide, its body velvet-black. It descends on wings that make no sound, a piece of the night given purpose.
