They had been away from home for months.

Traveling deep into the country, they found shadows.
They found death. They found sorrow.

It was deep work.
During the day, they rode through once-thriving towns and villages.
The silence was only punctured by the sound of thick green buzzing flies.
Houses were crumbled. Their walls were crushed from some weight. Occasionally, they passed soot-covered wagons. A bar. A merchant stand.

The people were gone, dead, or enslaved.
Bits of bodies littered the streets. Some had their mouths open into an unfinished scream. The cheeks stretched to the point of ripping, if not torn in half.

But, that was old death, if death from a week ago could be considered old.
Some villages were fresh kills. Bodies tore in half. In some cases, the head and arms were blocks away from the legs and torso. It was almost as if the creatures wanted to see how far the person’s entrails would lengthen out before they ripped. Men Women. Children. Their eyes stared at the sky.

Aldren had originally started his trek to search for survivors.
He had heard rumors that there could be survivors in the countryside hiding in holes and caves.
Those who had, by luck, been away home. More likely, Aldren reasoned had sacrificed others as a distraction to save themselves.
But, no.

Not a single soul.

At one point, however, Aldren had faith that death would not be the victor.
His god would not send him on a futile mission and, at one point, hope sparked in his heart.

From the corner of his eye, he saw movement.
A lump of gray cloth twitched. Staining, he heard a snap and a squeal.
Life. There was life.

Aldren swung off his horse and swooped the cloth up. It moved more, twisting under his grasp. The squealing noise became more intense. His heart sang. A child. A child had survived. Life survives among death. With a steady hand, he pulled back the cloth and found that he held a fat oily baby raccoon.

Its sharp teeth tried to penetrate Aldren’s thick leather glove before jumping from his arms and scurring into a barely standing house.

What he held was a corpse.
A dead baby, probably no more than a year. Its flesh chewed. The face half-collapsed.
The skin that was left was dark gray and looked like stretched parchment.

He dropped the bundle and reassessed.
Aldren wanted to save. He knew that was his purpose. It was his mission.


That is when Aldren decided it was time to return.
He needed time to think and reaccess. His men were tired and they were running out of rations.

As he watched Grubs light a cooking fire and a couple of men set up the pot to make stew, he wondered what his God was trying to show him. Why? How was all of this meaningful? What was the way?