Back home, Roselle went straight to his bedroom without even changing, locked the door, and slumped into the chair at his desk as though he had just witnessed a nuclear explosion.
Once the memories he had been unable to recall returned, they kept growing clearer. By now, they almost felt like something he had experienced himself.
He remembered that after the original Roselle Gustav went out, he lost consciousness upon seeing an abstract oil painting handed to him by someone unknown. When he woke again, he was in a damp, chilly underground cavern without a trace of light. Natural stone pillars reached the ceiling around him, along with several victims whose hands and feet were bound and mouths gagged just like his, and a group of fanatical cultists in hooded robes that concealed their builds and faces.
This was almost identical to the underground cavern Tres Tamara entered in the scene Arrodes's Mirror showed us during the murder investigation in the Harbor District. No wonder it felt inexplicably familiar then... Roselle slowly straightened from his slumped position and looked at the parts and discarded drafts scattered across his desk, muttering silently.
In his memories, seven other people had been abducted with him. The cultists seemed to have no particular preferences when choosing sacrifices, using whoever they caught. The seven included men and women whose clothes clearly marked them as belonging to different social classes. With their mouths gagged and their limbs immobilized, they could not communicate at all. They could only stare with terrified eyes, growing ever more desperate as their gazes met.
Soon, the eight of them were dragged one by one onto the low altar at the center of the cavern and tossed beside a hollow depression like livestock awaiting slaughter. Torchlight flickered around them, candles were lit