[littlemanpoet]

He was in an evil dream, and wondered if he would ever wake up. It had started pleasantly enough, among quaint hobbits and northmen, then a foray into the hills in search of signs of missing men for a report back to King Eomer. But it had led to capture, witnessed by a wanderer that his captors had never seen. So he had hoped, when he still had hope. They had tried to break his spirit by showing him their machines of torture in the ruins, but they had not been able to. Then had come days and days of being herded along with scores of other men, out into fields to work a slave holder's lands, then long nights with at first a growling stomach. The growling had been replaced by a stretched and empty feeling, then numbness, the last stage before starvation. He had been fed as little as possible to keep ghost and flesh together. He grew desperate and saw a chance to escape while his limbs could still carry him, and took it; but one of them had seen and caught him before he was over the first hill. He remembered their words then: this one has a strong will, the kind the Master likes to drink; send him north. They had tied him down in a wagon and he had spent two bumped and jostled days before reaching the fortress, where there was no chance of escape. Surely the wanderer had forgotten about him, or done nothing in the first place. The Master's henchmen had fed and watered him well, for they had needed him fatted for the Master; so it was with all the prisoners who came to the fortress. He had watched those who had arrived before him, taken one at a time, their screams, ravaged with horror and loss, raising the hair on the nape of his neck. Something worse than death awaited him. Finally, the last prisoner before him was taken, and despair had set in. Now it was his turn, on a wild and stormy night, the kind the Master liked best.

They had brought him into the temple and lain him on the altar, and left him alone, naked but for a loin cloth. The entirety was wrought in black marble, shining luridly in the lightning flashes that could be seen through the hands' width thick glass of the tall windows just below the domed ceiling. The altar, round as the rim of a goblet, was in the center of the temple. At the circumference of the altar was a gutter, and there was an aperture of some kind near his right hand. He had heard the talk from the guards. They spared no detail of the horror, so he knew what was coming. The Master would cut the arteries of both wrists and ankles, and would keep the wounds open with water as needed, until he was bled dry. His blood would flow into the gutters and the Master would open the aperture; his blood would flow into a vat down below. But the Master would have a goblet handy, and the last thing Eodwine would remember, in his bodily life, would be the agony of his chest cut open, his heart removed, its contents poured into the goblet, and drunk by the Master.

But that was only the beginning.

The Master wielded power over the dead, the ghosts of his victims; and he had control over evil spirits that were all the guard he required in his temple. He himself was safe from them as long as he had drunk blood within the last twenty-four hours. It was his power now, for both his necromancy and his continued life. And Eodwine would become his slave, tied by the continuation of his blood in the vat, to the Master's will. So it was told to him by the guards, who said that they had it so from the Master himself. He believed them, for he imagined that the Master's weapons were not least, fear and terror in the hearts of his victims.

Eodwine acknowledged to himself, that he feared greatly. His heart beat as if he was sprinting. Lightning flashed. Rain poured. Thunder rolled. A shadowy figure entered the chamber through a portal Eodwine had not seen before. The Master.