The Tender walked, in slow and carefully measured steps, around the perimeter of the shrine. Its long fingers were a grayish green against the moonlight, and it ran them contemplatively along the stone of the circular structure. It stopped once, at a small crack in the stone. Slowly, the Tender bent its fingers in toward the crack, bending one knuckle at a time, first the top knuckle, then the second, then the third, and finally the fourth. When nothing but its closed fist was pressed against the cracked wall, it knocked softly three times.

There was no answer, of course. It was not yet time.

Turning away from the wall, the Tender continued its vigil around the Garden. It was always pained when it walked away from the shrine. Even though it never – virtually never, anyway – left the garden, even a short distance between it and its master was crushing. It existed to tend to the shrine where its master slept, kept from the world until the Master’s gifts could be given. And that time was coming. The Tender did not know when, but it knew the time was coming.

Fortunately, the Tender was afforded a certain degree of diversion. A short distance away from the shrine were the racks. There, in neat little rows, were the frames of the Tender’s favorite devices. Hanging from the frames of the racks were iron chains, painstakingly crafted by other servants of the Master, though there were few of these other servants, and none had the Tender’s place of honor. Affixed to the end of these iron chains were large iron hooks, the points of which were sharpened to nearly a knife’s point.

And hanging from those hooks were, currently, eleven mangled corpses in various degrees of disrepair.

The Tender walked slowly through the lines and admired its handiwork. The corpses were primarily human, although two were elves, whose death smelled sweeter. They were the Tender’s favorites, at least of this crop. There were others the Tender coveted, like the exotic Kor or the elusive Fae, but the Tender, though a true connoisseur, simply did not have the ability to find the others. If it could leave the Garden, it could do its collecting itself. But to be that far away from the Master, locked behind that wide pillar of stone, was unthinkable.

So for now, the Blood Cult would have to do the Tender’s collecting.

For the most part, they did a poor job. Often, their offerings were from their own numbers, which was neither wise nor practical. In addition, the cultists themselves, while passionate about the wine of the veins, rarely contained an adequate vintage. They believed that blood was blood, and had no eye for their own inferiority. As the Tender looked from the flayed remains of its work down to the small canal beneath them, which led back to the stone wall of the shrine, a cruel, misshapen smile came to its face.

They were partially right. Blood was, in fact, blood. And every drop spilled in the Garden brought the Master that much closer to awakening. The Master needed the blood, and the Tender gave it. The flaying was mostly for fun. There were simpler, faster ways of draining the offerings, but they were not nearly as enjoyable, and the Tender had so much time to kill. The offerings, sadly, had less time to die, and there were never enough. Even now, the eleven he had seemed like too few. The racks had room for two dozen, after all.

Soon, though. Soon the Master would rise, and the blood would run down the mountains, through the trees, and into the marshes beyond. And the Tender, free of its long vigil, could collect as many corpses as it wanted to. And there would be plenty to choose from. The whole of the world would run red when the Bloodbringer finally awakened.