Reflections of Mist

Mummified

"Ho-oly son of..." Travis gaped as be stared at the scene before him.

"Uh huh." Julianna nodded, looking shocked herself.

"I mean... What is that?"

Travis pointed to the large floor-to-ceiling object in the middle of the room.
It was a large cylindrical tank, filled with a cloudy, blue-tinted, viscous liquid. Suspended within this liquid was... Something.

It took a second, and a bit of squinting, for Travis to quite make it out.

Once he did, it made him shudder in revulsion.

It was the twisted torso of a mummified man, floating in an almost ghost-like fashion in the hazy liquid.
It's arms floated limply from his body, it's head lolled back slightly on its neck.

The body was not the traditional, clean and tidy, Egyptian style bandage wrapped mummy that everybody immediately thinks of when they say the word.

No. It was a grotesque thing, captured forever in what looked like a scream of agony.
The body was hideously distorted, aged and twisted, the skin swallowed and greyed and leathery, disgusting wounds, tears and damaged patches of skin and flesh decorating its body in a terrible patchwork.

The base of its torso, where the lower half of the body should have been, was a jagged tear of twisted, mangled flesh, where the body had obviously been hacked in half at some point in the distant past.

Travis swallowed nervously. "Ten bucks says I can guess what killed it. Him. Its a man, right?"

Julianna gave him a look. "I don't think that's the important thing here."

"Then what is?"

"Well, for a start, it's a Draugr."

"Holy mother of crap, it is! That explains all the..." He gestured to his own face and torso.
It had been hard to recognise at first through the crude mummification, but now he'd got the thought in his mind, he could see it. The familiar decayed look to the flesh, marked by the spread of dark veins.

"A mummified Draugr, thousands of years old." Julianna mused. "Can't say she's not devoted to her projects. Oh, look, there's a file!"

She pulled the binder off of a nearby table, and began to flick through the carefully pencilled notes.

Sorry it's super late and I didn't post yesterday! Stuff's been hectic!