Chapter 54: The Red Mist
I could see everything. The gaping, torn cavity of the executioner’s chest, the pulped ruin of his internal organs, the obscene glint of splintered bone. The acrid smell of burnt meat, a smell I now knew all too well, stung my nostrils. His leather hood had been half-burned away, and through the two crude eyeholes, his dead eyes—wide with the terror and disbelief of his final moment—stared directly into mine.
“Aaaahhh!” The people crushed beneath the body screamed and scrambled to get out from under the gruesome weight, their hands slipping on his blood-soaked clothes. The sight was a shock to my system, a brutal, visceral horror. One moment, the executioner had been a figure of terrifying power; the next, he was just a piece of smoking meat that had fallen from the sky. Down on the stage, the guards who had survived the blast were picking themselves up, many of them grievously wounded. The knights, protected by their full plate armour, seemed to be in better shape, struggling to their feet amidst the swirling, toxic smoke.
“Don’t go in! Shoot her! Shoot her down!” one of the priests screamed, his voice a ragged shriek. He drew his own strange pistol and began firing wildly into the epicenter of the explosion. The other guards followed suit, raising their weapons and unleashing a volley of fire towards the stage. They weren't firearms as I knew them. They were silent, pneumatic things, hissing as they fired, spitting out what looked like sharpened iron bolts on jets of compressed air, making only a series of quiet thwump, thwump, thwump sounds. But the stage was a raging inferno, a swirling chaos of fire and green-black smoke. They couldn’t possibly see the witch. They were just firing blindly into the flames, their panic overriding all sense.
Just then, a violent, lurching sensation seized my heart, an instinct not my own screaming DANGER. At the same time, I saw it—a strange, shimmering red mist, almost invisible, began to rise from the people in the crowd around me, a faint, bloody haze.
“Jared, run!” I screamed, not knowing why, only that we had to move, now. “What? What is it? Ugh!” Jared was still dazed from the explosion, his head having hit the stone steps when he’d cushioned my fall. He was confused, disoriented, trying to make sense of the chaos. There was no time. The feeling of danger was intensifying, a physical pressure on my senses. I grabbed him and pulled, dragging him sideways with a surge of unnatural strength I didn’t know I possessed, stumbling over other panicked bodies.
It was just enough. We had moved no more than a few feet when the red mist moved. It wasn't drifting; it was hunting. With a sickening, silent rush, it coalesced, violently siphoning itself from the bodies of those trapped within its embrace, pouring from their mouths, their noses, and their eyes. A hundred crimson streams flowing into a single, rushing torrent that shot towards the heart of the fire on the stage.
“Aaaaarrrrgggghhh!” An unearthly chorus of screams erupted from the people caught in the mist’s grasp. The young woman who had been sitting next to me—her scream cut off, her face collapsing in on itself, the skin turning to a dry, papery husk in the space of a single heartbeat. In a matter of seconds, she aged a lifetime and then some. The old and the weak were the first to go, their life force drained from them in an instant, their bodies collapsing into desiccated, mummified remains. When the last of the red mist had been drawn from them, their screams ceased, leaving behind a silence more terrifying than the noise. It was as if the red mist was their blood, their youth, their very life. I trembled, my body wracked with a violent, uncontrollable shivering. If we had stayed in that spot for a second longer, we would have suffered the same fate. To watch a living person be drained dry, to be turned into a hollow husk before my very eyes… it was a horror beyond anything I had ever imagined.
The knights and priests who had been caught at the edge of the mist reacted quickly, diving to the sides. One man, a burly labourer, managed to stumble out of the affected area. He was alive, but he had aged decades in a single instant, his hair now a shocking white, his face a mask of wrinkled terror. “Run! For your lives, run!” someone screamed, and the last vestiges of the crowd's morbid curiosity shattered, replaced by a single, mindless, animal instinct: Flee. The plaza became a panicked, trampling stampede, a mindless beast of terror, all scrambling to escape the amphitheater of death.
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