It was the cold against my skin that I noticed first. The slab of stone I lay on seemed like a block of ice with the way cold wafted out of it. But I guess that was what death's chill touch was like, and this slab underneath me had seen a lot of death tonight.
Earlier…much, much earlier, before all the screaming and dying started in earnest, I had been among ninety-nine people huddled together in a corner of the great chamber. Our hands and ankles were bound by golden chords that seemed tougher than steel manacles for even the big, strapping men of our group had no strength to tear them off. It's why we could do nothing but watch as the first of us—the first of one hundred people kidnapped over the course of a single day—had been sacrificed on the slab I lay on now while a hundred people in robes stood around it.
