RENEGADES OF EXCESS DOMINAR

He does not kneel. He was never made for it. Power tastes different at the top of the Excess Cult, and the Dominar has spent a lifetime developing the palate. There is a particular kind of man the cult produces when it stops pretending to hide. Not a brute. Not a beast half-eaten by mutation. Something worse, because something composed. The Dominar wears his rank the way other men wear scars, and he wears black leather tighter still, lacquered and immaculate, drawn over the body like a second discipline. Do not ask where the hide came from. He enjoys that you wondered. He is high in the human hierarchy of the cult, one of the few who climbed rather than fell, and he climbed by understanding the single truth the others only flirted with: pleasure is not surrender. Pleasure is the leash held from the correct end. Where lesser devotees melt into sensation and lose themselves, the Dominar takes. He dominates. He has never once in his long, indulgent life offered his throat to anyone, an