Free Nightmarish Sacrifice (Cardew) by Simona Panova

ritualistic rock, and stretched my hand as if to fondle lightly their rough shabby surface, but was gently stopped by the sinister feeling that a lightning would come out of nowhere and strike me dead if I involuntarily desecrated their rest with my not divine touch. “Do you know anything about them for sure?”
                  “No, but I like hypothesizing,” Cardew smiled and relaxed on the ground, negligently leaning his back against the largest piece of unknown granite-like stone as if he was feeling perfectly at home beside what had possibly been a pagan altar lavishly bathed in sacrificed blood just several centuries ago. “It does give a mysterious thrill if you imagine it lively enough –”
                  “Ah –” I shuddered lightly and hesitated whether to sit down at all; the recollection of the nightmare had returned to me with the full power of its oppressive mood, and I couldn’t chase the image of the horrified sacrificed girl and the circle of eleven out of my tortured mind.
                  “What’s wrong?” Cardew’s penetrating eyes fixed onto me with alarm, and that awoke the instinctive fright of him inside me again.
                  Danger, danger!
                  “Nothing,” I regained complete control over my actions and sat down a bit aside from him, pretending that I was too occupied with exploring the shapes of the stones and that this had been the reason for my distraction. “I was just wondering what kind of rites it had been used for.”
                  “Various,” he answered with a shrug and took a small dark-red satin pouch out of his pocket while his knife-gray eyes were searchingly exploring the calm depths of mine. “Do you want us to try a simple one?”
                  “Oh, casting runes!” I smiled more widely, having guessed what he was about to suggest; I was familiar with this kind of fortune telling, and was therefore feeling more in control of the situation. “A nice method of divination, indeed.”
                  “Indeed,” Cardew nodded, too, glad that I was enlightened in the question, and handed the pouch to me; its cloth was smooth and warm under my fingers as I lightly passed my hand over it before unbinding the strings holding it closed, and it eagerly opened on my knees with a silent melodious clink.
                  The set of stones was much like what I had seen and possessed myself, but, instead of some more common mundane material, Cardew’s were crafted out of shiny polished obsidian, and each had the striking unexpected shape of a perfect hexagon, exactly equal to the others, a single rune engraved deeply into each of them with another whole piece of refined intense blood-red gem.
                  ”Ruby,” Cardew prompted with a wink. “In obsidian, that makes the combination dramatic.”
                  “For sure,” I uttered, staring at the breathtakingly beautiful precious stones. “But don’t they get scratched if they hit one another all the time?”
                  “They do,” he shrugged indifferently and reached to pick one to have a closer look. “Material things are not forever.”
                  I raised my head and gazed deeply into his face to purposefully attract his stare on me, but he didn’t look up, as he was observing his fingers play with the hexagon he had chosen – or rather, which had chosen him. The dim grayish light the skies were radiating was turning the crimson of his hair into ashy-dark, and his skin looked unnaturally white, as though he had never been kissed by the rays of the sun…
                  Kissed? Why were my thoughts always turning in this temptingly addictive direction when I was so seductively close to him, even when they were referring to it purely metaphorically?
                  “Then what is