It would appear that their goal was simple; they were to use their bodies as containers of mana to fuel a Ritual Circle that wasn't one that I could recognize or understand in a brief moment, though it was clear what it did as a billow of black mana erupted from the center of it.
These cultists here - either willingly or not, I wasn't entirely sure - used themselves as the battery for a spell to tear open a gateway from one location to another; a gateway that connected somewhere else to here.
Not a Gate; it wasn't connected to the Labyrinthian, but instead to somewhere else inside the Empire - or perhaps outside the Empire - and allow another group of true cultists to spill out in droves.
Draped in mantles of dark sapphire blue, the collective of various races poured out of the gateway and raised a myriad of weapons towards us, black metal dripping with liquids pointed our way as they charged, trying to catch us unaware.
