Offering The Lamb

A flame, flickering within the wool cloak of shadow. It dances with the allure of a siren's lullaby, and to Reuben it would beautiful, if not for the agonizing throb of his raw wrists, stiffly bound. His knees too, soon met with an aching burn as they skid bare across the rough gravel of ground, a firm weight pushing down on his shoulders, submitting him to grovel before the pale blackness that encompassed his stripped body.
A cruel wrench jerked Reuben's head aback, his grinding teeth letting out a short lived yelp, as a coarse hand adjusted his iron collar, restraining it around his Adam's apple, making breath arduous. His capturers spoke not a word, and handling him from the rear they remained unseen by his dreary eyes, only the feel of sandpaper skin to let him know they were keeping close hold on him.
As the flame continues to entrance Reuben with its pixie whirl, he focuses all his concentration on the faintest shimmer of the lapping tongues, distracting him from the groaning pain in his joints and the tension of sentinel eyes dissecting each inch of his body. He can feel each vein fit to burst with an overflow of blood, his body fearful enough to kill itself off. By this point, the point of no return, he had already embraced the cold comfort of the abyss waiting for him with outstretched arms. There was no coming out alive of whatever satanic fate awaited his mortal flesh, the collar choked around his throat, and the lack of his being clothed made that evident enough. Unlike his body, it wasn't a fear his mind was in, no terror of the coming procedures unknown, just a preparartion. It was preparation for death, and as the ritual trumpet of thundering horns bellowed over the breeze of air, he assumed it wouldn't be too long a wait.
The mysticism of the fire then erupted into a brazier of hellfire, piercing the dark veil with glimmering illumination. From the margins of night emerged a circle of faceless spectors, masked in twilight-spun hoods. The second trumpet sounded in blaring pulses of thunder. At which seizing hands grasped at the anxiously panting face of Reuben, pulling and prying him one side to the other. He did not resist the clamour of fingers across his dripping skin, and soon he found his breath stifled by a cover pressed to the bridge of his nose. His vision went black for an instant before he found the eyeholes of what visage they forced upon him, and with the final snapping of the restrains behind his shaved head, he had become the mascot of his holder's fascination.
The third horn, slicing through the flames like a heavenly bugle, resonating within the wooden mask to leave a hypnotic beat of bloodflow in his ears. With the deafening signal, the phantasmic ring drew nearer to the bonfire of flame, which seemed to flare up in uprising torrent at their presence. Then with a praticed synchronization the cloaks as one were hurled over bare shoulders. The worshipers' disrobing to present a wall of flesh, suits of skin, though with a defining feature. Their heads, they were of beasts, masks of ebony wolves camoflagued their countenance.
The fourth horn, bringing with it a grim rhythm, stomping of bone soles to the gruff earth. As the thunder dissipated an explosion of frenzied riot broke out, lithe bodies waving and wringing like fiends in the shadows of fire, wavering to and fro in a shared dance, as if to summon some spirit of the wild. Reuben could gaze in astounded watchfulness of the pack twirling about with unseen forces, then surging forward toward the brazier with a uniform cry, clinging low to the ground, before lunging aback once more while straightening their flexed spines.
To the woeful trumpet once more, the practitioners threw back their necks, baying savagely the howl of a moonstruck wolf. The once still of night was bombarded to the brim with frantic and long lasting wails; until then the mock wolves fell to their heels, chests meeting low to the earth as they bowed upon four feet now.
Then from the bleak drew near a force, soot cowl drawn up about in concealment of his form, a concealment shortly lived. The robes was thrown aback exposing a well defined chest, the muscles of the Herculean prophet drawn tight to the marrow. This one's face bore no such mask as his thralls, yet still the shadow cradled him, like a mother to her son.
As the god approached the lamb guised Rueben, he took paused before the great smoldering pit. He summoned every fiberous vein to tighten around his skeleton, skull craning on rigid vertebrae, jaw gnashing against the crackling embers.
Reuben's constrained vision blurred in a haze of a charred miasma; and in two blinks he gazed ahead to no man, but a firm legged hound. He was appalled at this illusion, this trickery, the beast looked to him with a hard stare, but wasn't it just a very different beast not a second ago, did it matter.
The kettle furred dog trotted forward with that kind of eager longing that a domicile pet of the same type may show, though only there was graceful savagery to itsmovement that implied untamed fervor. With one bound the hound pounced up to its offering, great paws coming down on Reuben's downcast shoulders, jolting his nerves with the weight of the very axis of heaven and hell. The colossal titan spread its maw then before the humbly servile man beneath its raised form.
The dog held a blazing tongue, drooling ambers of fire down upon Reuben's tremoring flesh, tbe flecks searing him with an assuaging pain. The claws of the barbarous beast tapped wanting to the very bones of the submitted prey, deathly coals of eyes glaring to meet with the masked ones of Reuben; an acknowledging deal struck between the two. To keep with their blood soaked bargain, Reuben leaned in his forehead to rest upon the heaving chest of that massive canine, and pulling the man into a final assuring embrace, the hound sank its jaws all to lustfully into the bared neck of that man before him. A rush of cruor staining the beast's lapping tongue as Reuben, without hesitance, relinquished his final breath into the panting of the creature upon him.