Episode Title:
The Sacrifice and the Night of the Ritual
Episode Description:
Sariphi is taken in chains to the Kingdom of Beasts as a sacrifice. The King is intrigued when she is rude to his chancellor Anubis but shows no fear. Her name means "sacrifice" and her adoptive parents raised her as a surrogate for their own daughter and she has accepted her fate. The King temporarily treats her as a guest and takes her on an inspection of a border town where flowers grow - one of the few places in the kingdom not covered with poisonous miasma. On the night of the sacrifice in a secluded underground room, Sariphi is confronted by an assassin planning to kill the King but a human suddenly stops him. The man is in fact the King whose mother was human which causes him to suffer immense guilt over his deception. The transformation occurs on each rare "moonlit night of the revelation" when he is supposed to devour the sacrifice. He secretly releases the sacrifices then cuts himself to make it look like their blood has spilled. He symbolically breaks Sariphi's chains and the next day as the beast King, he outrages his court by declaring Sariphi will be his Queen. Sariphi calls the unnamed king "Leonhart", meaning "brave heart", which he accepts.
