Page 153 of Red Ruin

He must be wearing a mask.

Wherever we are, it feels like aloooongtime ago.

The reel plays in stop-motion, half-remembered.

Remy is carrying a large jar.

He walks to a shelf, where we pour its unidentifiable contents into a larger urn. A thick, nauseatingsloshcuts through time and space.

A blurred voice barks.

The words are lost, but Remy and the memory both speed up.

An oppressive sense of pressure carries through the gloom.

Hurry, hurry.

Remy dumps more jars, and I catch other blurry figures doing the same. When the urn is full of the chunky, tarry thing I’m glad I can’t smell, he lifts on a heavy lid.

After it’s twisted into place, an array flashes. Magic slithers over the vessel, then settles tightly into place in an ancient version of shrink wrap.

I can’t read the pattern of the array, but its sharp, aggressive lines pretty much scream DANGER, POISON.

Remy blurs through shadows.

The memory is fuzzy even without the darkness of his power, but I catch the blur of a warehouse setting where countless urns are shelved.

A lotof urns.

Contaminated bio-materials?

If they couldn’t be destroyed, they’d have to be sealed away.

The memory continues to blur until Remy pops out of the shadows in a different location.

Suddenly, his vision is much clearer.

Kind of wish it wasn’t.

Somewhere underground, soldiers swarm at the block-framed mouth of a tunnel. They wear old-timey Imperial uniforms, with gold-and-white tunics. Their heavy plate armor hasn’t been seen outside a museum since the rise of the transcendents, when more physically resilient Sentinels replaced pure humans on the battlefield.

Each squad surrounds a figure in glowing chains.

Some are human. Some are monsters.

Some are both, stuck halfway between forms.

Others might be neither. They’re so badly decomposed, I can’t tell who or what they were before.

I spot liches, zombies, and monster thralls. They’re all wrapped in the same enchanted chains that make their decaying skin smoke.

As we pass, the soldiers who aren’t struggling with the chains offer Remy deep salutes.

Remy walks to a man in a crimson cape.

We can only see his tall back. His head is covered with a helmet or some kind of mask.

Remy dips his head and salutes. “The workers have been buried and the sacrifices have been placed. We can seal the prisoners.”

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