Canta runs out of the door, stepping out of the buzzing house and out into the world. The moment he breaks out through the barrier, he stumbles. His eyes can’t keep up with his feet.

The dry, but fertile golden wheat that had surrounded them on all sides is now gray, now that the illusion has been broken. The ruby-red, heartwarming sunshine which had painted the entire world with its joyful magnificence, is gray. Canta blinks, trying to decipher if he’s gone color-blind, but when he turns around, he sees that the inside of the house is still full of overwhelming colors. Reds. Greens. Fetid yellows, born of oozing pus. The world feels like it’s rumbling, but only ever so slightly. Only just barely enough to be sensed in his feet as the vibration works its way up his bones and dissipates in his flesh. He only feels it down on the soles of his boots.

Swallowing his nausea, he steps outside of the house and as he leaves, he notices the color leaves his body as well, the odd force washing him over entirely in gray. Nothing changes in his emotional state, there is no damaging curse or destructive spell or anything of the sort, rather, he just loses his color and that’s it. That’s all that happens. He is as gray as the rest of the world, differentiated only by slight variations in tone and by the patterns in the textures of his clothes and skin.

“Alleluia!” he calls out again, cupping his hands by his mouth. No response.

But more than just that is wrong. Canta looks around, not sure which way to run, which way to start looking first. What’s going on? Why’s everyone dead?! “ALLELUIA!”

Canta pushes open the unlocked door of the next house, looking inside. Empty.

But it’s not just empty in the sense that it has no inhabitants. It’s empty in the sense that it’s empty. There are no furnishings, no carpets, no plates, no plants, nothing. It’s an empty shell of a house which contains nothing more than some wayward dust. It’s fake. He runs outside, barging into the next one.

Empty. Not even a bed.

The next one. Empty.

Paw’s house? Running past the bottle down by the rocking chair on the patio, he slams open the door, looking inside. Empty. Canta turns around, looking down at the bottle by the chair. He picks it up and shakes it out. It’s as dry as a bone, likely never having had any contents inside of itself to begin with.

After checking every building that’s left, Canta runs back out to the center of the town, looking around frantically for some new idea. Did she run away? Did he, lost to his hunger, kill those people and she ran away after seeing what he did?

No, no that can’t be it. There’s a sin in the air, a smell, something’s wrong. There’s a distorted here. A creature, an assassin sent by the demon-king.

His panicked, paranoid eyes look around in all directions and in every direction that he looks, he sees nothing but wheat. An endless sea of gray, colorless wheat that billows in the wind, but it makes no sound as it does so and he feels no wind on his skin, despite it swaying. He opens his mouth to scream her name again. Now, no sounds come out. It’s as if his voice had been completely silenced. He blinks, clutching his throat and tries to scream again.

Not a peep.

That smell too… Where is that smell coming from?!

Canta stops, trying to think. But he can’t get his thoughts straight, not between that disgusting smell in the air, not between that constant, low vibration running into his body from the ground, not between the constantly swaying wheat on the horizon, always catching his eyes. He needs something. Some inkling. Some color to work with.

The bodies.

He runs back inside of the house that they were staying in, the odor of old decay assaults Canta right away. But he doesn’t let it stop him. He begins rummaging through the corpses, trying to find any shred of a clue. His fingers dig through their pockets, pushing away maggots by the fistfuls, the fat, little grubs having long since worked their way through the fabric of the gore-soaked clothes.

Nothing, they’re all empty.

He runs over to Paw, digging through his overalls. Nothing. Canta pulls too hard and the man’s arm releases from his body with a wet schlock, falling down halfway as the rotting fabric of his sleeve holds it in place. Maggots pour out from the inside of his shoulder. Canta screams in frustration, raising his fist into the air and battering the corpse of the man. His body squishes, squelches, his rotting bones caving in, as the half-liquefied bits of him break apart entirely. Canta’s fist pushes disturbingly far into his chest. Paw’s straw-hat falls down from his face, falling onto his lap. Coagulated, rotting blood leaks out of his destroyed arm, pooling on the floor. Maggots stream out of the tears in his sleeve, splashing as they land in the red.

Canta reaches down, grabbing the man’s straw-hat in a final desperate bid. Flipping it over, he looks inside of it. There’s a piece of paper in it. He pulls it out, a piece of wheat, which was tucked into the inner brim of the hat, falls out together with it, landing on top of the man’s lap.

Deer summer sonshine,

if you oar reading this, i went out buy myself. You did not wake up this morning. Paw told me that is normal. He said it is just wheat-fever. I do not know what that is, but I am going to our goblin-spot to find some plants that are supposed to help. Xoxoxo

Pee.es. Did you know that xo means hugs and kisses? I do not know why, but that’s what i read. I thought it looks like a caterpillar!

Always yours,

Your caterpillar

Canta jumps to his feet, thanking whatever god is listening that he had been given the foresight to help Alleluia learn how to write. Though he has no idea why Paw had this note in his hat, was he trying to hide it? He didn’t wake up? Why wouldn’t he have woken up? Canta sprints out of the door, running out of the town, running into the wheat. It tickles his legs.

A sharp pain shoots through him. His face loses its blood and he falls over forward, clutching his stomach. His bony chest heaves outward, independent of his frantic breathing, as every strike of his heart pushes against it.

He’s so hungry.

Canta crawls forward, clambering on all fours for a moment, before finding his way back to his feet and running as fast as he can towards their goblin hunting spot.

Wheat-fever? He’s never heard of that. But the town’s people were clearly feeding them bullshit. He knows why he was asleep, because he was starving to death. He stumbles again, catching his balance as he keeps on running. His body is fed. He can eat all the bread and all the meat and drink all the water he wants. But it won’t do any good if he doesn’t eat.

He needs sins. He craves sins. It’s all he can think about as he runs. The smell of the sin is all around him, but he can’t ever seem to get closer. Visions of finding Alleluia leave him, visions of the townspeople’s mutilations leave him, memories of the torturous months before this leave him, all of the trauma and the desperation leave him. All he feels is hungry.

And that smell, it won’t go away, it won’t dissipate. It’s just growing stronger and stronger and stronger the more he runs and the more he runs, the hungrier he gets. The wheat tickles his legs.

Canta breaks through the field, coming to a familiar clear spot in the midst of it. The spot where they killed goblins every day, to earn their daily bread and here, the smell is the strongest. He stops, placing his hands into the dirt as he scours the area with wide, unblinking eyes for the sight that he craves to see.

Food.

Food.

FOOD.

But there’s nothing here except wheat. He can smell it. It’s here. He looks around, his gut churning painfully, his mouth salivating. It’s like he’s right on top of it. It’s like it’s right here beneath him. But there’s nothing to see but wheat. No Alleluia, no sin, no food.

There’s nothing of SUBSTANCE.

Canta slams his head into the dirt, opening his mouth, shoveling it into himself in a frantic attempt to get the aching in his core to stop, trying to at least win a minute of his functioning mind back. He needs to think.

The wheat behind him rustles. Canta spins around, his mouth full of dirt as he looks at the silhouettes approaching him. He looks at the mangled, tattered, maggot-filled, lurching bodies moving his way. A familiar person at the front.

Paw. His arm has been left behind during the journey, maggots drip out of him in all directions, leaving a trail back to the town. Behind him are the rest of the townspeople, all shuffling, bloated, maggot-filled corpses that now make their way towards him and the only thing that they have in common, apart from the rankness of their decay, apart from the swelling of wet, soggy, pus filled sacks of meat that are the bodies, is that the wheat is touching them.

What is that smell?!

Canta’s eyes go wide. He runs away from the approaching corpses to the other side of the clearing, tearing off his own boots to look down at the bottom of his feet. As he rips off the first boot, he winces as the leather leaves his skin. A long, sticky strand of some mucusy coagulation stretches out between it and the skin on the bottom of his feet. They’re beyond decayed, covered in rotting, green, blistering pustules and inside of them, inside of his constantly regenerating flesh, are squirmy, moving, strands.

He pokes one of the blistered bubbles with his dirty finger-nail, it bursts instantly, spraying a sticky, foul gunk out over his finger. The odor comes over him, a nauseating, sickening, sour smell that is even worse than that of the nightmarish bodies moving towards him. Reaching into the oozing blister, he pinches his fingers and pulls out a long, yellow, pus-coated worm. It writhes in his hands, slapping around in all directions.

It looks like a piece of wheat.

Canta feels himself about to vomit. He turns his head and looks at the field of wheat all around him. At the thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of stalks of wheat. There is no wind moving over the field, yet it billows nonetheless. Because of the swaying, countless bodies of the whole, not one of them is actually a piece of wheat.

The field is made entirely out of worms. The field itself is the body of the sinner.

Canta looks at the thing in his hand that was unsuccessfully trying to burrow into his finger as he held it. Trying to take his body, but never getting past his healing flesh. The undead are almost upon him.

He lifts the worm, the wiggling creature, coated in his own pus, into the air and swallows it, feeling it slide down his gullet. Its body is already pre-lubricated.

Wheat-worm ~100g Calories: 223 *Protein: 20 g Fat: 12 g Carbs: 6 g Fiber: 2.5 g Sugars: 0 g [Sin Level 4: Asphodelian] {You are what you eat}

His eyes roll back into his head. The last thing he sees as his vision fades into darkness and his head thuds against the dirt, is the swarm of dead bodies falling over him, maggots pouring out of their agape mouths, onto his face and eyes.