A Letter to the Champion of Light10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡWKMOfBKmc3
Daddy says if I'm good, I can meet the hero one day. He will cleanse all the rot with the goddess of light. We just have to keep believing, and they will offer us more light. I hope he comes soon.
—Page lost to time and ash, written before the fall of the settlement.
Derrick kissed his wife goodbye for another mundane day among the rot. He checked on his son, watching him write more in his diary or letter to the hero—he wasn't sure which. It was mostly to teach him to read and write, though he was thankful his son was devoted to the light. It was a good sign they were blessed.
"Remember the rules when things go bad," Derrick said, waiting for his son to repeat the words he left with each day.
"Hide in the cellar and pray while waiting for light," his son said without looking up, focused on getting his words right.
"Be safe, dear," his wife said beside him, showing worry. He had to laugh at her misplaced fear.
"Trust the light—it's why we're here." He left to start his shift.
The walk was uneventful. Besides the few guards working like himself, there wasn't much to do—they had to stay within the walls. So it led to a lot of drinking, sleeping all day, or sex. There weren't many options. Not that that was a bad thing; it was an easy life.
Near the tower, he saw Paul talking to the commander and flinched a bit. Derrick had a habit of drinking too much, and the commander was trying to crack down on it. But since there was nowhere to go and nothing they could really do, it was an endless battle the commander would never win. Derrick wasn't stupid enough to voice that. He liked his job more than the drink and wanted to support his family, not be a drunk. If he could, he'd love to farm or trade, but he didn't have that option.
As he got closer, he heard their talk—something about a hero coming soon? Really? They stopped when he got closer, and the commander handed him a report with the news and went back inside. He guessed the commander was just making small talk and didn't care about him.
"It's not personal, Der," his friend Paul said, patting him on the shoulder before continuing. "The hero is coming soon—word is tomorrow, and the commander is trying to look good. Needs a win after... well, you know how it was before the Champion. Too many men lost chasing monsters in the dark for too little gain. He wants to prove he's worthy of the Light out here, managing this rabble." Paul gestured vaguely at the garrison walls.
Derrick nodded. It made sense. He tried to look good to the commander too, so the commander would help him advance. It was everyone trying to step up versus being stuck in the rot forever.
He went to the top, not caring for small talk himself. He wanted to get home already. His family was worth staying in this wasteland for, not the empty fields themselves.
On the guard tower, Derrick watched for hours, bored, passing the time reading the latest report—mostly mundane, a lack of supplies until they got more horses—but the one he focused on most was about the hero. Reports said the hero of light would be there tomorrow to cull more monsters. The dwarfs wanted payment, or they wouldn't venture past their garrison.
He was annoyed reading the brief note on the hero report. They put too much faith in the hero of light. He was grateful, they all were, to a point. But the hero was always so distant, so cold the few times he'd seen him. He never cared about their casualties in the rot, just whether the monsters were dead.
Crumpling up the reports and tossing them to the side, he watched from the tower once more. His shift would be over soon. His wife would make him a meal, and he could play with his son and check his writing. Things were good.
They hadn't seen a monster in weeks—proof the champion was doing his job despite his cold nature. Monsters used to be as common as the rot they tried to avoid, to the point that this was a death trap of a job and land to live in.
No, the hero and light followers were pissy, holier-than-thou people, but they got results compared to the drunks, so he prayed to them all the same to stay in their good graces. This job used to be hell and not worth the risk to bring a family. Now, it was easier than cleaning horse dung and twice the pay—just stare for hours and report you hadn't seen a damn thing while the hero randomly showed up and killed things. Rinse, repeat, retire.
On top of that, the rot and decay were being pushed back slowly over time, and it might even be land worth farming soon, giving it more worth. This garrison town was still new—they'd torn down the last one after the hero purified the land enough with those crystals. The goddess kept demanding they go deeper into the rot in the name of the light.
He wished they didn't have to, so he could settle down, but the money made it hard to complain. They had to keep expanding further to get closer to the lake and dwarf stronghold, which would cause friction, but that was an issue for another day. The walls were solid, and they were safe.
A wind blew—normally a nice scent, as nice as could be this close to the decay. No, wait, it smelled off. Not the normal slight death in the distance, but a deeper rot that went beyond just decay. Faint, maybe sweet? But it was there. Like dust? No, that was stupid, but there was something there. He'd been up in this tower too long not to smell the difference.
He breathed deeper, trying to figure it out, then felt something wet running down his nose—blood? He touched his nose. Why was his nose bleeding?
Then movement in the vast wasteland caught his eye. In the distance was a mirage? A walking shadow? No, a monster. It was an ugly, humanoid-looking thing, all black. It was hard to tell, but it didn't look like much. A few arrows, and it would be done with.
Yet even as he was getting his bow ready to aim, another odd sight caught his eye: something was swimming on the surface near the beast. It was doing long laps around the garrison as if circling them, testing their defenses.
As it swam, Derrick saw it—a shimmering haze, faint but visible against the bleak landscape, exhaling from the creature like breath on a cold day. As the wind blew, the smell of its breath was carried on the wind—a deep rot smell. Now that he noticed the beast, was that the dust he was smelling? No, not dust. It was spreading spores. It was a plague monster, and it was trying to kill them with spores.
Panic, cold and absolute, seized him. Not rot in the water, not infected meat. Airborne plague. His family! The cellar! Now!
He scrambled down the ladder as fast as his shaking limbs could carry him. Forget the commander, forget orders. He had to get them underground now.
"Derrick! Get your ass back up there—you have another hour in your shift. I'm not covering for you if you have to take a shit."
"THEY'RE HERE! IT'S IN THE AIR! SPORES! GET BELOW! HIDE!" He screamed the words, raw with terror, as he fled past Paul without stopping. Explanations were death. Every second counted.
"YOU DON'T HAVE TO LIE TO GET OUT OF WORK!" Paul shouted after him, shaking his head.
Halfway up the ladder, Paul paused. Something felt wrong. The air tasted bitter? Sweet? He couldn't place it, but his throat started to burn. By the time he reached the top, his vision was swimming. Did his foot slip? Why did everything burn?
The realization hit just as the agony began. He screamed.
The commander heard the yelling while doing paperwork in the guardhouse nearby. Derrick's panicked shriek about "spores" and "air" registered as drunken hysteria. Just another liability in this gods-forsaken posting.
He was always listening—a bunch of hicks versus the trained soldiers he wanted, but they needed expendables on these walls, not their best. Drunks and those skipping shifts were common since only the most desperate were willing to live in decay and rot.
He supposed he was no better than those who lacked the skill to curry favor with the light. Stuck managing this rabble, hoping to impress the champion tomorrow after too many failures in the past—sending good men to die in the dark chasing monsters that hid too well among the rot, losses that paled next to the champion's solo purges. He needed a win. Proof he deserved the Light's grace out here.
He stepped out to restore order and calm the yelling. No need to spook the commoners over nothing. Rot killed slowly—weeks, sometimes months.
He noticed Paul writhing on the ground, clutching his throat. Dammit, he got an infection, probably from tainted grog. That's what spooked Derrick into running like an idiot and spreading panic.
But something was wrong. Paul had been fine minutes ago. Rot didn't work like this—it was slow, insidious. You ate it, drank it, lived with it for weeks before... This was different. This was fast.
He looked around and saw another man watching in blind stupor, swaying on his feet. Then another fell to his knees, retching. Derrick's panicked words echoed in his mind: Spores. In the air.
A cold, impossible realization crept in. Airborne rot. He'd never heard of such a thing, but the evidence was writhing before him. Panic, real panic, tried to rise, but discipline clamped down. Order. They needed order now.
"YOU THERE!" he shouted, his voice already feeling raw, to the nearest dazed guard. "GET A TORCH. WE NEED TO CONTAIN THE INFECTED AND BURN THEM HERE. NOW!"
It was the only thing he could think of. Purge the source. He wasn't sure who the carrier was, but they had to be close if it was airborne and even affecting him. If they burned the source, they should be able to recover when the champion brought the light tomorrow. They just needed to hold for a bit.
The man looked at him in a daze, unsure if he'd heard right.
"NO, SIR! Yes, sir!" he said as he stumbled away.
Even as he gave the orders, the commander felt his own throat beginning to sear, like he'd swallowed coals. He swallowed hard, the pain spiking. Gods, no.
As Derrick ran past houses and stores, pushing through people, curses followed in his wake. His vision blurred, his thoughts scattered. Spores. Air. He could almost feel them coating his throat. Cellar. Family. Where was home? Why did everything burn?
The realization hit just before the agony—he'd breathed it in too, deeply, while shouting. He screamed as his flesh felt like acid eating at him, tearing at his throat from the inside. He stumbled and fell. People watched him fall, unsure what had happened. Some tried to help, others fled in fear.
It was those screams and shouts that alerted Derrick's wife that something was wrong as she and her son went out to investigate. She remembered her husband's words: Get in the cellar and pray for the light. It always worked in the past, and the hero seemed to show soon afterward. They hadn't had issues in months.
"Come, sweetheart," she said, pulling her son close, her heart hammering against her ribs at the sounds of chaos. "Daddy said to hide when things get scary. The hero will come tomorrow."
"But what about Daddy?" her son asked, clutching his writing book, eyes wide with fear.
"The light will protect him," she whispered, the lie tasting like ash on her tongue as she hurried him into the dark cellar, bolting the door.
The town was in chaos. Everywhere, people ran and screamed in fear, while others screamed in pain. They swore a plague was spreading, and no one knew who had it and who was safe. Until they screamed—not the scream of fear, but of rot eating flesh.
The commander kept shouting, his voice now a ragged gasp, trying to lead the dying to a section and force order. "TO THE SQUARE! BURN ZONE! NOW!" But few were listening. It made no sense—rot never spread this fast, airborne or not. How was it infecting everyone so quickly? Who was the source? Why was it not working? This was not his first time containing rot. If these idiots just listened.
His own throat was a furnace, his commands dissolving into wet, painful rasps. If they just burned the dead quickly... Yet even with those thoughts, the fools weren't controlling the flames.
As fire spread from burning corpses, it started to catch buildings. He tried to shout again, to restore order, to contain the spread, but his voice was gone, replaced by a gurgle. He gestured wildly, pointing at the spreading fire, then at the bodies. Contain it!
As people panicked and ignored his frantic gestures, those watching from the side assumed, since the commander was burning everything, it was all that was left to do. "Burn it all!" became a new mantra spreading among the screams. "Cleanse it with fire!"
He wanted to scream that they were making it worse, that they needed to hide, cover their mouths! Why was nobody understanding? His throat was dissolving, his vision tunneling. The truth was absolute—it was in the air. He'd failed utterly. No recovering from past failures; everything was burning from the outside around him to within his body.
Even as his thoughts turned blank from that cold, final realization, his body convulsed, adding his own choked screams to the horrific chorus.
In the cellar, she tried comforting her son, telling him it would all be okay, just to pray. The sounds above grew worse—screaming, crackling flames, crashes, the terrible mantra of "BURN IT ALL!"
"Mama, my throat hurts," her son whispered, a thin trickle of blood appearing at the corner of his lips.
She felt wetness on her chest first, warm and sticky, then saw it—dark blood trickling from his nose onto the page of his writing book.
"No, no, sweetheart, no..." Her son's silent crying turned to whimpers, then sharp, ragged cries that escalated into full-throated screams of agony, his small body writhing. She watched, frozen in horror, as her son died in her arms, consumed from within.
The sound shattered her mind. The light hadn't protected him. The hero wasn't coming. It was all a lie.
Madness, cold and sharp, flooded the void left by her broken heart. If the goddess of light wanted them all to die, then she would embrace the flame and make it happen. She laid her son gently down, kissed his cooling forehead, and climbed the cellar stairs. She didn't fear death anymore.
Grabbing a fallen torch from the chaos outside, she plunged into the madness.
"FIRE! FIRE CLEANS ALL! BURN THE TAINT! SAVE WHO WE CAN!" Her voice was a shriek, raw and unhinged. "OR IF BY GOD'S WILL, WE ALL BURN!"
"All must be cleansed." It became a mantra joining the chorus of the mad and the dying.
Zealots, driven by terror and the burning in their own lungs, started torching bodies as soon as they fell, regardless of whether they knew the person had rot or just stumbled. They torched houses, stores, anything that might harbor the invisible death.
But then even these zealots would scream as their own flesh finally succumbed, the flames consuming them alongside their victims. In a final, desperate gamble, the last few left alive—spared the worst of the rot but surrounded by fire and death—started setting everything ablaze, hoping the conflagration would purge the airborne plague, praying the goddess of light would save whoever miraculously survived the inferno.
Reason had failed. All that was left was total purgation.
Only a few among them had covered their mouths by fluke or divine chance before the rot was inhaled and tried to escape outside, seeing the blind panic and flames as a worse death. They were stopped at the main gate before they could flee. They saw the monster before them—all black, eyeless, a silent omen of death—so they turned back, chancing the rot and flames rather than facing the beast.
Those few who went out the other side, the smaller postern gate, thinking themselves cleverer by escaping the heart of the madness, found the true architect of their doom.
A massive slug, easily the size of a cart, swimming effortlessly on the surface of the blighted earth. It was circling, and as it moved, it pulsed rhythmically. With each pulse, a thick, shimmering cloud of spores exhaled from its many mouths, carried on the wind toward the garrison.
It saw them, and its mouths stretched into wide, terrible grins.
"Let me hear you scream! It sounds so sweet!" the voices chorused, a sickening counterpoint to the crackling flames and dying cries from within the walls. "Let it welcome our lord, whom we wish to meet!"
The confusion of beasts able to speak didn't last. The sight of the spore-beast, the waves of rot carried on the wind, the sea of fire behind them, and the monstrous omen at the main gate—it was too much. Madness or despair claimed them where they stood.
All for trying to live in a world of decay and rot the goddess promised to cleanse and save them from. Now, only piles of dead remained among the billowing ash raining from the fire. None were spared. In one way or another, consumed by plague, flame, despair, or monstrous horror, they all met the same fate.10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡnBR5crOTq5
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