The village wasn't dead. Not exactly.
It just felt hollow.
Houses leaned like exhausted men, roofs sagging, windows staring blankly. The streets were empty, yet somehow full—the air thick with something you could almost taste: the weight of lives that had stopped moving, stopped caring, stopped trying.
Father, mother, child—all had stopped. The baker stared at bread as if he stared at some stranger. The children pecked at dirt but no longer played. The elderly woman in the corner sang a song that was unfamiliar, as if the voice that came from her own lips was an unfamiliar one.
The priest emerged onto the main street, lantern in his grasp. He had battled demons, cast out spirits, looked into the soul of men driven by lust and madness—and yet there was nothing here.
Not a curse. Not a demon.
Eyes shut, he plunged deep in his gift, the holy sense the gods themselves had given him, the gift that had never failed him…
And experienced. emptiness.
It wasn't magic. It wasn't supernatural. It wasn't even evil.
It was people. Just people.
He felt it in waves:
The children's lack of interest, not cruel, not evil, just. empty.
The wrath of the father, a slow simmer, anger aimed nowhere, hurting no one yet burning everything.
The widow's greed, reckoning coins that she had never worked for, as if the digits would fill the void within her breast.
Despair, hopelessness, envy, lust—it was all smothered together, as thick as smoke, against his lungs, so he found it almost impossible to draw breath.
The lantern dropped. His knees on cobblestones. Trembling hands. Shallow breath.
It wasn't demons. It wasn't curses.
It was us.
Apathy, greed, wrath, envy, lust, despair—are human. All true. All in. The priest realized, and it almost broke him: this decay wasn't created overnight. It was always there. It was always waiting to be seen. And he had only just noticed.