The soldiers stiffen up a little as he walks past them, but neither of them try to stop him as Canta casually walks down the stairs, past the next group sitting around a table, who all jump to their feet, not sparing them anything more than a single glance, especially after seeing that their table is empty.
Canta steps outside into the rain, feeling it wash over his body. Immediately, his too large clothes become soaked, not a few seconds after his feet step onto the wet stones, and he closes the door behind himself.
Even in the rain and the wind, he sees some unlucky soldiers clearing the street of debris. All of the bodies seem to be missing; all of the blood seems to have been washed away, not having had a chance to seep in too deeply and stain the world.
The rain is oddly refreshing, though, at least for him. Canta walks through it, allowing the water to wash him clean as best as it can, as he stops and stares at the well. Turning his head, he looks at the house that he remembers from Nina’s vision.
It isn’t the same house, however. It looks entirely different, as if it had been fixed and renovated and reconstructed more than once. Looking back on it, the place he saw in his mind then wasn’t a small town like this one, it was a little village. It was far less developed and had fewer inhabitants.
Maybe that was a long time ago. Maybe Nina had been down there in the depths of the empty well for a while, until something had disturbed her from her silent rest. Although, he can’t imagine what dark force could do that. Canta makes a note to ask a priest; he assumes they know about these things.
Lightning fills the sky, coating the entire town in a sharp, white light for the briefest flash of a second, before it fades and lets the night return and as it does, as the interruption settles, Canta becomes aware of a different sound that differentiates itself from the splashing drone of the rain.
Voices. Groans.
He turns his head, looking at the warm yellow light that streams out of a large downstairs window on the other side of the plaza. It looks like the building is… or at least was, a store. He approaches the window, looking inside. The entire storefront has been cleared to the sides to make room for simple cots made out of wood and fabric. All of them are full of bodies. Some of the bodies are covered fully with cloth, making them obscured. Others lay open faced, the people there groaning and shifting from their injuries.
A couple priests walk through the room, doing what they can for the sick and the wounded, while another moves from dead body to dead body, kneeling next to them to say what appears to be a final prayer of sorts.
As he stands there in the rain, watching the scene unfold before him, he wonders. Did Nina do this? Are these deaths Nina’s fault? She was the creature, after all. Or do they fall onto her father’s shoulders, who caused her to become what she became?
Then again, the deaths caused after her transformation didn’t ‘count’. If they did, he would have heard about it during her judgment, or trial, or whatever that was supposed to be. At least the universe had some mercy.
Although, he wonders, if not her and if not him, then who else does this destruction fall on? Perhaps it was the force that caused her to rise from the grave so long after her death? Perhaps whatever unseen force had caused her to become, as the priest Valenti had called it, ‘distorted’.
His full stomach growls, shaking him much like the reverberation of thunder in the distance, as he thinks about what the originator of a sin like that would taste like.
Yashira. Nina.
Canta thinks about them both, realizing that he's already said both of these names, actually. They’re stuck in his head, and their presence doesn’t scare him like the third name that he has in there, rattling around the inside of his skull. But as he stands there, getting soaked to the bone, his thoughts wandering everywhere inside of his head except for there, where that one name is right now, he wonders -
- Is there a connection?
Is there a connection between Yashira and Nina? Both of them have long since been dead. Both of them had arisen as these odd, distorted things, like vengeful ghosts, rising out of ancient yet freshly defiled graves. Weren’t monsters different back in his old life?
He remembers them being different.
They weren’t as ghastly or as ‘wrong’ for the most part. They were just… a part of the world. He remembers slimes and big mushroom monsters; he remembers goblins and things like that. They were all just normal monsters.
But not ‘monsters’ like these. These distorted entities are different.
Suddenly, the door opens next to him, and a worried face looks out his way, pale and bloodless. “S- sin-eater,” stutters the priestess. Canta looks at her. She has long black hair that is braided into two long tails. “Would you like to come inside?” She steps aside and holds the door open. Canta, looking for any reason not to go back ‘home’ just yet, nods and walks past her.
“Thanks,” he says, waving to the priestess who stiffens up like the door that she holds, as he walks past her. Water drips down his body onto the hardwood floors, but Canta sees that the room is already far past that. Blood and the stains of poison have already both seeped into the flooring, beneath both the bodies of the living and the dead.
The first thing that he notices, apart from the looks of the nervous priests, is the smell. Not the real, physical smell of the dead. Of rot beginning to set in, of the bile and fluids leaking out of the bodies, of the poison water. No, he notices the smell of sin.
But it isn’t a strong smell. Hardly a whiff. He notices it from all of them. The priests. The dead. The wounded. Everyone carries a scent. He turns around, sniffing the air once. The priestess, nervous, jumps back a step.
“I’m sorry! It’s been a long march,” she explains.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“Huh?” Canta blinks. “What? No, not you. Don’t worry,” he says, turning around. In truth, she smelled too, not that badly though, at least not in regards to her sin. Physically, she, like all the other priests and soldiers, smells like she looks. Overworked.
Canta, not sure what it is that he’s doing exactly, walks towards the beds, looking at a sleeping man. His face tinged a pale shade of green. Poison flows through his veins, even his untrained eyes can see that. Canta turns to the priestess, pointing at the man with his thumb. “Hey, shouldn’t you cure his poisoning?” he asks. “Use a spell or something.”
“We- we’re taking shifts!” exclaims the priestess. “Most of us are out of soul-points, we haven’t slept for a few days.” Canta, looking around him at the deep bags under their eyes, is inclined to believe this. “So we can’t use any more cure or healing spells, until the others wake up with their points restored.”
“Huh…” he says, turning back to the man. Didn’t he learn a spell like this from Yashira? Looking for any excuse not to have to go back, Canta lifts his hands to the body and focuses, having no idea how to even use it to begin with. He racks his brain, thinking about the cure spell and about the oddly hairy arm his hands were hovering above.
“You can heal?” asks the priestess.
(CANTA) USES: [MINOR CURE]
[12 (WIS) * 3 (LVL)] = 36%
Rolling - FAILURE
Nothing happens. Frowning, he tilts his head, noticing that it feels a bit lighter than just a second ago. The spell didn’t work by the looks of it. “Apparently not,” replies Canta, dryly. He blinks twice, feeling oddly dizzy. Apparently, casting is a rather draining experience. He opens his window and looks at his soul points.
[SOUL : 14/20]
Canta shrugs, looking over his shoulder at the priests who all look his way. “What? Cut me a break, I was reborn like two weeks ago, okay?” He turns around, feeling a little embarrassed, but also frustrated. He lifts his hands again.
“Don’t,” says the priestess, walking over his way and lowering her voice as if about to say something that the others shouldn’t hear. “It’s okay, you don’t have t-”
(CANTA) USES: [MINOR CURE]
[12 (WIS) * 3 (LVL)] = 36%
Rolling - FAILURE
[SOUL : 08/20]
“Fuck’s sake!” barks Canta, feeling his legs shake beneath him. He should probably stop, but he’s in too deep now. If he gives up, what will they think about him?
He doesn’t know why he cares about that, honestly. But for some reason, he does. Or maybe he just wants to feel good about himself. Suppressing the nausea in his gut, he closes his eyes again.
“Slow down, it’s okay,” says the priestess. “Thank you for trying!” she says, having walked over to him. “But -”
(CANTA) USES: [MINOR CURE]
[12 (WIS) * 3 (LVL)] = 36%
Rolling - SUCCESS!
[SOUL : 02/20]
Canta falls to the floor, his knees buckling beneath him. It isn’t as if he is physically exhausted. But he is nauseatingly dizzy all of a sudden. Even with his eyes closed tightly, he can feel the world spinning beneath himself. His hand goes to his mouth as he feels his stomach compressing, trying to force its content to come out. But even after his stomach contracts itself several times, nothing ever rises to his throat. Canta lets go, leaning back against the legs of the cot behind him.
“Are you well?” asks the priestess. Canta watches her, noticing how she seems to be upside down. This doesn’t stop her from grabbing a bottle of water and bringing it to him.
“Never better,” replies Canta, taking it from her and downing a large amount of it at once. He flinches. “This tastes like mud.”
Muddy Water
~400mL
Purified - Make Up - Trace Minerals: 5.00% Water: 79.00% Other 16.00%
“It is mud. It’s from the floor of the river,” she explains matter of factly. “The sediment should help your stomach settle down.”
“You gave me dirt-water?” asks Canta, making a disgusted face. Although, in truth, this isn’t even close to the worst thing that he’s put in his mouth, and he knows it.
“Y-Yes!” she says, stiffening up again fearfully. Canta sighs, shaking his head. It actually does help him feel a little better. “It’s standard procedure for soul-sickness. Sorry! I won’t do it again!” she exclaims, closing her eyes tightly as if she expects him to lunge at her any second now.
Canta looks up at her. “You people are all really uptight, you know that?” he asks, lifting a finger from the bottle to point at her. “Thanks for the mud,” he adds on with a grumble, making a point out of it to take an extra long, slow drink before he gets up to his feet again.
He looks at the man he had cured, a smug smile on his pale face as he sees that the green tinge has left his skin and that the black stains have left his veins. His poisoning has been cured.
But the dying man’s breathing, still shallow and slow, comes to a sudden stop as if having waited solely for Canta’s eyes to fall on him.
His smile vanishes. “– You ungrateful fuck!” barks Canta, grabbing the fabric of his tunic. But the man doesn’t budge, his head rolling limply to the side.
“I tried to tell you, sin-eater,” says the priestess, walking around to the other side of the bed. She grabs the blanket at the dead man’s waist and pulls it up over his face. She lowers her voice to speak to him. “The poison has already taken too much. There’s nothing that could have been done.”
Canta’s eyes go wide in disgust, although mostly at himself for some reason. He looks at the body, then at the priestess, who gently pulls his hands off of the man’s collar, and then around to the room, where he sees the other people laying in wait.
They aren't waiting to be cured. This isn’t a field hospital. Nobody here is going to be cured.
Everyone here is just waiting to die, all of them, leaving this mortal plane with nothing but the poison in their veins and the horror in their glossy eyes.
Canta clenches his fists in agitation. The universe, that force that seems so intent on fucking with him, specifically, at least in his own eyes, is at it again. This time, it does so in the waking world, rather than just in the trials of a soul. Canta looks back at the body of the man that is now freshly covered with a white sheet.
It smells like death. But there is a second smell, a weak, faint odor that hardly smells like anything at all. It is petty, minor and venial. It is the smell of a sin that is too small to even be worthy of notice. But that’s all Canta has to fight with.
“Hey, you got any old bread or something?” he asks, looking up at the priestess who was administering a final prayer. “I have something better than that,” he says, pointing at her clasped hands, his eyes turning to the few people who are still left alive, not yet taken by the sickness.