Red Sonja tours the Border Kingdoms alone, and comes upon a man tortured and hung up to die. She aids him, and he tells the tale of how a High Priest came with promises of how the area would prosper under his God, but all that came of it was darkness and despair.
Sonja visits the nearby village and sees it firsthand, and is approached by a young girl who begs Sonja's help. She tells of how her mother is prisoner of the High Priest Drelrem in a nearby castle, and must be rescued. It, of course, is a trap, and Red Sonja finds to her horror that the man she aided at the start was the Priest himself that she inadvertently freed. Her fate is to undergo a ritural and become a receptacle for the Dark God, but Sonja has other ideas.