The man with the golden mask stood the threshold of a fathomless abyss. His pitch gilt raiment lithe and flowing, as if submerged. His posture, like his mask, intelligent, cruel, mechanical and predatory. Two women stood beside him, one dark of complexion, guised in black and red, the other pale, bound and struggling against the latter's grasp.
The masked man caressed the captive's leaking face, without tenderness, as a practiced dealer of antiquities seeking an imperfection in a replica, and finding it, tossed her to the yawning chasm. He stood the aperture triumphant as its murk went thick with a cry of primal terror. For several seconds that stretched into eternity she fell, a mass of regret and fear, until her frail, vainly grasping body was swallowed by the hungry void.
A solemn silence descended upon the sacrificial mount and a great form shifted amid the hallow canopy. Something restless, many-limbed and voracious.
The masks were discarded, revealing milky, unseeing eyes. The man kissed the woman and she responded. He tore her shirt and felt the supple weight of her breasts, and sunk teeth to neck, extracting a shudder of delight, then pain and blood, and in the red pool that formed, he invaded her. At the edge of the carnivorous rift, the chimera shimmered, like twin stars in the dark.