The shuddering iron shuttle seized in mid-stroke with a shriek of tortured bronze that echoed through the underground vaults.
Three feet from where Ren Prime stood, Arch-Restorer Malichor lay tangled in the snapped gold-silver metal bobbins, his brass air-powered limbs hissing and spurting dying grey steam. The mechanic’s dark goggles stared up at the vaulted ceiling in fractured disbelief, his vocal resonator emitting nothing more than a dry, clicking wheeze.
Beneath Ren Prime’s scuffed cobbler’s boots, the master calfskin thick parchment was convulsing.
The silver tip of his Carved Mammoth Bone Awl was driven three inches deep into the central glyph of the Quarantine Geas of Year 460. The crimson ink of the weeping red coral fought back with vicious, living fury. Tendrils of glowing red mold hissed against the silver metal ring. It spat hot, foul-smelling droplets of acidic venom that ate small, smoking holes into Ren’s leather apron. Every nerve in Ren’s right arm screamed with searing fire as thirty thousand causal threads tried to force their way up the bone needle and into his heart.
The silver tip of the mammoth bone awl groaned under the huge spirit friction. Every square tiny fraction of an inch of the calfskin thick parchment beneath Ren Prime’s boots was soaked with the rancid, carbolic reek of the Crimson Scourge. Through his cracked lenses, Ren could see the single cursive strokes of the forged quarantine rider. Twisted, leech-like letters penned in dried human bile and red coral spore-dust. The text was…
