Sacrifice Underground

Chained to a wall, Carla Trevisan was lamenting herself. She went from a secretary to a prisoner in a single day.

She walked by the wrong street and a man tased her, put her in a ritual and a woman appeared and imprisoned her deep in a cave.

Since then she had no idea how much time had passed. The only thing she knew was that the woman who trapped her came and gave her food and water two times a day, however, she didn't come today and the thirst was beginning to be unbearable.

The air was humid and the floor wet. There was no light and sleeping was almost impossible because of the position in which she was chained: Standing up with handcuffs connected to a wall via a twenty centimeters chain.

Heavy breathing followed by the sound of something being dragged brought Carla from her thoughts to the real world.

"Do you know which are the mysteries of magic?"

The woman asked. Carla couldn't see her but she felt her breath on her face and the smell of blood was flooding the space.

"Please, let me go, I haven't done anything to you! I'm not going to tell anyone about you!"

The ambient changed. The aura of her captor went from relatively friendly to irritated. The sound of a slap reverberated around the cave. A trickle of blood began to run down from her cheek.

"True immortality! True resurrection! The way to the land beyond! The creation of a soul from nothing! How to expand the mana pool of a manasi! The cure to vampirism! The Philosopher Stone! All of them and hundreds more, have been being investigated for millenium with no success!"

The woman got closer, Carla shrieked when her tongue licked the blood from her face.

"Except for one."

"W-why are you telling me this?"

"I would like you to know why you are going to die."

For an instant, Carla was able to define the form of her captor. The woman was full of cuts and some parts of her body were mutilated. She felt the screams forming themselves on the back of her mouth, she wanted to beg for mercy, do anything, but she didn't. She froze, overtaken by fear.

"Mana is stored in the body in a similar way in which the nervous system runs across the muscles. The principal difference between the so called mana pool or, to keep constancy with the rest of terms, the mana system, is that between the fifteen to twenty years, it stops growing. No amount of exercise, protein, drug, spell or mutation can make it grow. Or so it was thought."

The woman slid her fingers down Carla's face and chest until she reached Carla's hearth.

"My name is Hasanaruli. I was born in a little tribe of no more than a thousand members near the Atlantic Coast close to the Yoruba. It was called the Anz'hu'ri tribe, with all the members being manasies. Every fifty years or so they migrated from one part of Africa to the other searching the elusive Abada I had the smaller mana pool of them all. It made me envious. So one night I killed one who I found particularly annoying; it was a little boy, probably eight years old or something near that range who was incredible talented, imagine it, he was half my age and already had the biggest mana pool in the whole tribe. How could he be so shameless, don't you think?"

Carla slowly analyzed the story on her head, terrorized. She felt like she couldn't breath.

"You killed a child, because he was better than you?"

Hasanaruli pinched Carla in the shoulder until she bled and cried.

"Yes I did, and it gave me a trouble, because I did it hitting him with a rock behind his head without using any magic, but I was one of the only in the tribe with earth as my elemental affinity."

Carla didn't understood what she meant, but didn't want to ask. She was scared Hasanaruli would hurt her if she spoke.

"I had to made the evidence disappear in a way no one would try to investigate it, so I ate his corpse."

Clara thought she heard wrong and blinked confused.

"Huh?"

"Obviously I didn't cooked it, or ate all of it. I just wanted to made it look like an animal attacked and devoured him. And it worked! But more important than that I felt stronger for a while. At first I thought it was some type of mentality change or a Placebo effect and after a day of magic practice I was back to normal, but my curiosity got the best of me and I murdered and ate again. I did it over six times before I understood it all."

Hasanaruli quickly bit Carla where she pinched before, taking skin, blood and muscle alike before swallowing without chewing. Carla screamed loudly and tried to kick her just to slip and remain hanging from the chain, hurting her wrists and dislocating her arms.

"You can't break the chain, I did it along with the handcuffs using the stone of this cave."

Carla didn't gave any reponse, but her moans of pain.

"I suppose you are too tired to even form a sentence. Well, continuing my story, what I discovered was that by eating a manasi you can temporarily increase your own mana pool adding a fraction of the one you ate until you spend the surplus. In other words. If I have a mana pool of a hundred and I ate another manasi with the same mana pool, I will have a mana pool of a hundred twenty, but once I spend those extra twenty I will come back to the original one hundred. However, it also has the effect of healing one's body."

Sliding her fingers through Carla's hair she started to feel at ease. It was the first time she told this story, and to someone she was going to eat too; she smiled to herself, a farmer usually don't tell to his chicken how he got the idea of making a meal out of it.

"Thing is, mana pool is calculated in mana units. The average manasi has fifteen thousand and I have four thousand. However yesterday I had twenty-one thousand but after that fiasco of a fight with the aquamancer and escaping from the aeromacer I'm back to my original quantity. Do you know how much mana do you have?"

Tears of pain run down from Carla's eyes.

"How much?"

"Sixty seven thousand. I measured it the day I brought you here. Had you know that magic was real you could be a prodigy, instead you are here, in the dark. No one is going to find your corpse and no one is going to cry your death. Your name will be lost to the ages. Forgotten. But I will live for ever."

Carla had gave up. She had no form of salvation and she knew it. From the bottom of her hearth the only thing she felt now was indignation. All her life, all those years of work will now amount of nothing because some maniacs decided it. She was going to die here and she couldn't defend herself. But if there was someway to get vengeance on this woman. She would get it.

"After eating the seventh one I was caught by my tribe and had to flee. I hid on an european ship and traveled to all continents, searching for the best way to eat someone and gain their mana. And I found it in New Spain. Before Spain colonized the place, there were the Aztecs. They believed they had to sacrifice people so the sun could live and they did it by ripping out the hearth of their sacrifices so fast it was still beating outside of the body."

Once again, Hasanaruli touched the skin over Carla's hearth.

"I don't know if the great amount of sacrifices they did is why the sun is still alive today, but when I tried to do it and ate the hearth, I discovered that I can extract up to thirty three per cent of their mana pool, while eating the rest of the body afterwards doesn't add anything to it, so I theorize that by ripping out the hearth, the mana system of the body collapses and most of the mana ends up on the hearth. I haven't investigated it yet, maybe I'm wrong, but your life will be the fuel that powers me to discover it."

"Jiwe linakuwa jambi langu, blade yake haitaniangusha kamwe."

From the stone in the ground, a dagger formed, both the blade and the handle made with the same material. It was twenty-one centimeters long and sharper than obsidian.

Without warning, Hasanaruli cut vertically through Carla's chest and with her free hand she grabbed her hearth and ripped it out.

Carla gave a last scream drowned with blood running from her mouth.

She tried mumbling something that resulted unintelligible, Hasanaruli took it as a last insult towards her. She laughed as she saw her loosing strenght. Her hearth was still beating in her hand.

"This is the healthiest hearth I have ever seen, you would have easily reached ninety years of age."

She bit the hearth, blood shot everywhere, covering her face, as if protesting the sin of cannibalism, Hasanaruli didn't care and continued eating. In less than a minute, she had ate it all.

The cuts on her body started to heal and the mutilated limbs to regrow. She looked down on Carla.

"So much wasted potential. Imagine the things I could do if i had your mana pool. Enjoy your last minute on earth."

Hasanaruli left walking. Carla felt time pass quickly. She tried to break the chain once more, but she simply was too weak to do it. Blood wasn't reaching her brain. It would be a matter of seconds before the end.

"Please... someone... please... just give me one more day..."

How much time had passed, she didn't know. Unless she was doing magic it couldn't be more than a minute, but it did felt like an eternity, with every breath being weaker than the one who came after.

She tried to keep speaking but found herself to be unable to do it, she close her eyes and slowly inhalated to exhale for the last time.

She then heard steps getting close, did Hasanaruli came back? She didn't care, her vengeance was denied by the laws of nature, as the dead would remain dead for eternity.

"How could someone be so cruel? Aren't we all manasi? I don't need people like her in my world. Say woman, would you like me to get vengeance for you?"

It was impossible for her to anwser. It was impossible she even understood what was being said to her in the state she was. But she did. She gathered whatever was left of strength in her body and with her last breath she answered.

"Yes..."

Then her mouth close for the last time. Her brain stopped thinking and her soul left her body.

The man then walked towards her body and with a single pull he destroyed the chain, liberating her corpse.

"You will be the vanguard of my army, the captain of my Varázsezred. When I'm done I shall grant to you the awaited eternal rest, so in exchange I ask of you but one thing: To forgive me for violating the santity of your death."

Grabbing the corpse with extreme delicacy he cleaned the blood out of her lips. Like a knight carrying a princess, he walked away. To the light outside the cave.

"I declare you Almos, he from the dream, and myself will be Turul, the eagle that will lead us to the new world."