Page 64 of Blood Red Woes

I see a figure hobbling about three feet in front of me, and I skid to a halt as I reach for them. “Come on!” I shout over the volume of the storm. “We need to get you to the upper city—” If the storm swallowed up all of Laconia… then we’re all fucked, but right now, I’m operating on the assumption somewhere else is safe.

My tattoo-less hand touches the person’s shoulder, and they spin around to face me. An elderly woman, her cheeks gaunt and her eyes sunken in, wrinkles everywhere. “You,” she starts to say, but then her body convulses in front of me, jerking and shaking as she stumbles back.

I watch in horror as she changes before me. Her skin thins and grays, as if the scourge itself is eating away at her. Her eyes dry up seconds before her lids fall. She shrivels into nothing but skin and bones, and then she collapses on the ground in front of me, evidence of what a storm like this does to regular people.

Except me.

Why doesn’t it affect me like that?

I’m about to keep moving, but before I can the woman who succumbed to the storm jerks back to life. My mouth falls open as I take a weary step back, watching as the woman gets to her feet again.

Strange movements. Mechanical. She doesn’t look human anymore as she straightens out. Parts of her flesh are completely eaten away, revealing bone and diseased tissue underneath. Some of her teeth are visible through the storm, most of her right cheek gone. Her eyes glow with an otherworldly hue. She looks like a zombie gone mad.

Shit. The storm doesn’t just kill them. It turns them, twists them into things that shouldn’t exist.

I’m frozen. I can’t move as the woman lumbers toward me, outstretching both of her hands—hands that look more like bone claws than anything else, unnaturally sharp and jagged. Something pulled straight from a nightmare.

This whole place is. It’s all wrong.

I hear moaning behind me, and I turn around just in time to see I’m surrounded by other zombie-fied people. What did the Emperor call them? The afflicted? Those taken and tainted by the woes, morphed into something that goes against nature.

I don’t recognize the hollowed-out, holey faces staring at me. Their clothes are nothing but rags that now hang off bodies too thin and angular. But just because I don’t recognize them doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. It does. As I stare at the crowd of ten or so afflicted before me, I think of all the hardships they had to endure to get here, all the pain, all the loss…

And for what? What did it accomplish? They stayed alive only to die like this, en masse, in a fucking storm?

“Uh, Rey, I would do something if I were you,” Rune chimes in.

“I can’t,” I whisper as they take a collective step toward me. “They’re people—”

“They are not people anymore. The storm changed them. You can see that, can’t you?” He sounds desperate, like he’s genuinely worried about me or something. I don’t see how. I drive him crazy. The dude obviously hates me.

But he makes sense. These aren’t people anymore. Still, as I stand in the middle of a raging shadowstorm, I can’t shake the feeling that everything I’ve done, everything I will do… it means nothing. It’s all pointless.

How can you fight against something like this? Something that doesn’t have a tangible presence, something that can come and decimate you in a matter of seconds?

“Rey!” Rune’s voice cuts into my thoughts the same moment the old woman behind me reaches me. Before either of us can react, before Rune can throw up a shield to protect me, the old woman’s claws rake down my arm, cutting into my skin deep enough to draw blood. Pain blossoms within me, shooting up and down my arm, flooding the rest of my body and driving me to action.It’s the same arm that Gladus’s sword cut into, and I’m pretty sure the wound re-opened as a result.

I shoot a bolt of yellow, sizzling magic toward the old woman as I flip around. The magic impales her and sends her flying back. She turns to ash before the magic bolt disappears.

With my arm hurting and probably bleeding, I bare my teeth as I glance at the crowd of afflicted who gathered around me. “You want some of this?” I ask, ready to be done with all this shit. Done with Laconia, done with the woes, done with Rune; done with everything.

White magic grows from my right palm, coiling and elongating like a snake. My tattoo glows brighter when the magic fully forms into a whip; something I’ve never used, but that doesn’t stop me from hitting each of my marks when I raise my arm and jerk the magical whip back. I swing the whip aroundme, catching the afflicted in their midsections and sending them to whatever god they believe in.

Or believed, since they’re dead.

The air around me turns to ash, tasting wrong on my tongue, but I’m not happy about my victory. These were people. To survive the last twenty years, to possibly have hope again thanks to me…

I can’t linger on it, nor can I save any of these people. It’s clear everyone who stayed down here is gone. I should make my way up to the marketplace and see if everyone made it out of the tavern, or if the shadowstorm kept growing until it swallowed all of Laconia.

What would I do if it did? What would I do if I’m the last person alive in the entire kingdom? I don’t like how hopeless that makes me feel.

The thought of returning to the marketplace came easy, but the action of going back turns out to be anything but. I’m lost in the storm, not knowing which way’s which, and it seems after every turn, more afflicted are waiting for me.

I don’t hesitate again. Anything that steps into my path meets an untimely end and turns to ash, one way or another. I don’t let the pain in my arm stop me; the wound feels pretty deep. Deeper than the cut I got from Gladus. The pain is hot, scorching, and I can feel the blood dripping down my bare arm as I move through the streets.

I’m turned around, so it takes me forever to find the stairs that lead up to the markets. Hell, by the time I make it to those stairs, I bet every single afflicted in the vicinity has tried to find me and kill me. None of them succeeded. If there are any left, it can’t be that many. I lost count of how many I killed.

They might not be people any longer, but that doesn’t make it easier.

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