Episode 65: Temple of Blood
Written By Karl White
Wanting to start over can be its own kind of torment. The weight of unforgivable acts can haunt. And carrying a curse, no matter what good still lives inside, becomes the burden. With hunger steering the hand even as the heart strains toward something gentler. And in that struggle lives a longing. Not for deliverance, but for the chance to choose differently, if only once.
Samuel Mundey was struggling with his fresh start. Having shed his past mistakes, heartbreak, and betrayal, he had hit another agonizing obstacle in the Philippines, and the ordeal with Sinag. He was skirting a razors-edge of composure, and holding on for dear life.
Staying on the periphery of the modernly growing world, Sam’s heart remained primitive. Unable to shake the wanton desire to tune the noise out. The struggle between man and beast had become a war of attrition. On one hand, Sam recognized his need for people. Community with the Aborigines filled his cup. But his curse hindered all relationships. It kept him at arms length. And remaining on the move complicated interactions as every place he went, he’d encounter new languages and customs that kept him incapable of resonance.
Crossing mainland China and Burma, the world pressed in around him. His face didn’t belong to any nation. Intolerance followed him wherever he went. In cities, he was met with cold stares and cruel restraint. Lodging became difficult to secure. In remote villages, he was shunned, or chased off. He considered returning to America, to England, to Australia, but one held too much pain, and the others still carried the danger of being recognized, wanted, hunted. It began to feel as though there truly was no place for him anywhere in the world.
If society rejected him, nature did not. The wild was his only panacea. He needed distance. He needed room to roam. The world was still open enough then that he could sprout claws and fangs and hair and vanish into the vastness, running untethered beneath indifferent skies. But as a man, he was failing at reconciliation. Pain remained his closest companion. Nothing quieted the noise. And no matter how hard he resisted, the old siren call of alcohol returned, until eventually…he gave in.
Seeking solace at the bottom of a bottle brought familiar consequences. The control he’d fought to reclaim slipped away again. He terrorized his way through Bengal, heading northeast, leaving behind the kind of damage only a cursed man could make. And in 1793, bandits who had been tracking him as a werewolf, captured him in human form during a long bender.
Held captive - © 2026 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
Knowing of his abilities and his strength as an monster, Sam awoke in a iron cage he couldn’t escape from. By ox-driven wagon he was transported to just outside Kathmandu... delivered to a man named Kishor, who ran the Rakta Mandir, known in English as The Temple of Blood -- a shadowy fighting syndicate where enslaved creatures battled in secret arenas, hidden away from the world.
Centuries before, as Europeans colonized parts of Southern Asia, foreign soldiers sought new and exotic entertainment, and the well-guarded attraction was born. It began as a murderous spectacle, men pitted against predatory beasts in dug-out pits. Tigers and bears would maul and kill criminals who were secretly sold off from overcrowded prisons. Kishor inherited the business and turned it into something more infamous. By the late-1700s, legends of mythical creatures and cryptids spread like smoke through ports and empires.
Sketchbook study of a Yeti - © 2026 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
Deep in the Himalayas lived ancient tribes, the Nyalmo and Lha Karmu. Humans with the ability to transform into bipedal ape-like creatures, serving as spiritual guardians of the mountains. Yetis, as the West would come to call them. Their ancestry could be traced back thousands of years. Shape-shifting protectors, the result of some unknown ancient magic. They were a strange genetic offshoot of the Children of Nature, who could harness only Fire, though less concentrated than a werewolf’s elemental power. The difference was, the Nyalmo and Lha Karmu were born with their gift, unable to pass it along. Still, Kishor paid handsomely for any captive delivered into his cages. There, they were tortured, starved, used against their will to fight for violent sport.
When Sam arrived, Kishor had never seen anything like him. A creature more vicious, more bloodthirsty, with the mind of a man buried beneath hunger. Plied with alcohol and opium, keeping him subdued in human form, and fueling his rage when the wolf emerged. Sam became the Rakta Mandir’s prized attraction. An unstoppable horror at the center of the spectacle.
For years, Sam was forced to tear men apart for entertainment. Kishor’s exploitation of his addiction took its toll. Sam became difficult to manage in the pits, unbalanced, maddened by confinement, unable to run or hunt as nature intended. But the crowds loved him. The Man-Wolf was terror made flesh. And as with all appetites, what began as fascination soon demanded escalation.
Sam as the main attraction of the Rakta Mandir - © 2026 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
The carnival of slaughter gave way to the pageantry of combat. At first, predatory animals were his contenders. But Sam tore through them with ease. And so, Kishor reached for the only thing he believed might challenge the monster -- Yetis.
Bound by their shared curse of transformation, the Yeti’s felt a grim sympathy for Sam even as they were forced to face him. He was a Child of Nature held against his will, doing what he had to do to survive. But they also knew they wouldn’t last with him around.
In 1799, with the help of a Lha Karmu, a Tibetan woman named Bolormaa, who had been imprisoned longer than Sam. The decision was made to fight back. By day, the shapeshifters were kept underground in a mine, shackled and locked behind reinforced cages. In that darkness, a plan was whispered into being. Sam had to get sober. They’d need his elemental power sharp, his mind clear enough to command it. So, he went cold-turkey. Sam would secretly dump his daily rations of booze. And when they were alone, they'd rehearsed the plan again and again, until it became instinct.
One night, during a sold-out show, Sam was meant to fight a Nyalmo named Yeshe. But before Sam transformed, Yeshe and the other Yetis unleashed their Fire, igniting a roaring inferno that swallowed the building and crowd. Sam answered with Water, suppressing flames and forging a path through smoke and chaos so he and his fellow captives could flee.
When the escapees scattered, Bolormaa, gone too long to have any home left, stayed with Sam. Somewhere inside captivity, she had come to like him. To see the man beneath the curse. Together they followed the old Silk Roads westward, all the way to Europe.
Sam & Bolormaa - © 2026 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
Bolormaa did what she could to keep Sam clean, knowing it was dangerous for them to travel together -- two shapeshifters moving through the world. But along the road, far from their origins and with no one else left in their lives, something fragile bloomed between them. A romance. A quiet harmony. Sam with his caveman roots, Bolormaa raised on wilderness and hardship, they rejected civilization and made their home in the dense Bohemian Forest of Austria.
Their love lasted over five decades, until tragedy found them in 1856. Farmers, terrified by slaughtered cattle in the fields, banded together and caught Bolormaa in her Yeti form as she sought a meal.
Shattered by her death, Sam migrated, ending up back in England...where he fell back into his familiar habits. It was excess with no restraint.
In 1858 he was arrested in the sleepy hamlet of East Proctor for butchering two prostitutes. While in custody, Sam changed into a werewolf, escaping and retreating to London. 30 years later, the memory of that night would resurface, linking him to the Jack “The Ripper” killings in Whitechapel. Though Sam had nothing to do with those crimes, the former magistrate of East Proctor, Nicholas Pegg, recalled the supernatural events -- women of the night, killed by a man who turned into a monster and fled.
The Ripper was a monster of another kind - © 2026 Headless Horseman Productions, LLC
Pegg sought out Chief Inspector Michael Hawthorn of Scotland Yard, who had advanced a theory to the press that “The Ripper” was a monster able to disguise himself as a man, due to the inhuman nature of the killings. Together Pegg and Hawthorn tracked Mundey to a London ghetto, where Sam was able to evade capture and make it out of the country.
Having nowhere else to go, Sam headed back to America, uncertain what waited for him on the familiar shore. It’d be another 62 years before he would resurface...this time, for the last time.
TO BE CONTINUED…