He hears them now, the voices in the air. They’re real, from real people who are running and screaming and fighting in a desperate panic. Apparently their voices had been carried away by the strong wind that also takes the dense smoke with it. The breeze pushes them all off towards the distance. The screams become louder and louder. Indistinguishable, wordless cries mix in together with strong, strict, coordinated tones that come from a commanding voice.

But Canta doesn’t really care about any of that, all he’s able to focus on is the smell that pulls him towards it. It draws him. It beckons him. The smell that overpowers the smoke, the smell that overpowers the ash and the rubble and the strange, sour tinge of rot in the air. There is a damp, dank scent that overpowers all of the acrid bitterness that burns his lungs.

He’s hungry. It smells so good. He just wishes that sound would stop. That gurgling. It’s disgusting.

The houses come up before them, tightly bundled together in a ring, as if the structures themselves made up the walls of their own little city. People run outside through the ‘gate’, dozens of them, panicking, screaming as they rush out to meet the other odd hundred or so who have gathered outside of the scene, having already evacuated. All of them stand behind a line of roughly two-dozen soldiers and casters in white robes. A scraggly, heavily bearded man in metal armor stands at the front of the line. Apparently he’s the man in charge, his hand is held to his side, as if telling the people behind him to wait.

More and more people begin to run out from the chaos. Alleluia grabs Canta, who was determined to run straight inside, straight towards the thing that is making him so hungry without a second thought. He wants to eat. He’s so hungry. So desperately, animalistically hungry.

“Wait,” says Alleluia. “It looks dangerous,” she explains, sounding somewhat off key as she speaks. But Canta doesn’t reply, already too far gone in his desire to want to eat whatever is inside to listen to her, to reason, or to anyone or anything else except for the single force that drives him. He struggles against her firm hand that is holding him in place.

More people keep running out of the town, with even more behind them. But the man at the front in the metal armor, with his long, gold-embroidered white cape, drops his hand, having seen whatever it was that he was waiting to see. “Now!” he orders with a loud, commanding tone.

Canta, gnawing and chewing on the metal hand restraining him, pulls away and drops out of Alleluia’s grasp, as the clockwork-girl watches the anarchy unfold before her with an odd, familiar, blank look on her face, that Canta fails to register.

The row of white-robed casters behind the man in the armor, all drop to the ground at the same time, pressing their hands into the trodden grass at the side of the road. Canta runs, charging, sprinting like a feral creature on the hunt, as he rushes towards whatever it is that he smells. As he rushes towards the thing that he wants, towards the thing that he needs.

He’s so hungry. It hurts.

Prismatic lines trace through the ground, stemming out from the hands of the priests holding the line. The vibrant roots dig along the dirt, pushing beneath his feet as he runs, as if the world itself were flowing forward together with him, pushing forward into the acrid maw that pushes out smoke and screams.

There are voices behind him, commanding, strong voices yelling at some kid or something. But he doesn’t care about that. People run past him, people he spares no glances for. They smell too, some of them. But none of them smell as strong, or as sweet, as the thing that he wants. None of them are as pungent.

The world fills with light, the roots having found the water that they sought. Canta spares a glance behind himself, as he watches a towering wall of prismatic glass shoot up between the two houses that stand on either side of the entryway, sealing him and the others inside. He watches as they hammer against the wall, he watches the resolute faces of the people on the other side of it, not shifting a single inch. The people on his side of the wall begin to twitch and spasm, before all of them fall down to the ground, as if some unseen affliction had taken them all at once.

The smoke swallows him. His eyes start to itch and to burn right away as he listens to the sounds around him.

Something gurgles.

Tall, many-storied houses line up on both sides of the street, the smoke covering their facades and only allowing the occasional shimmer of the bright sun above and the fires below to shine through. As those bright rays bounce off of the glass, their shine seems to stare down towards him, like many curious eyes aimed down from the sky above to watch.

His bare feet run over smoldering wood, but he doesn’t feel it.

Canta runs over bodies. But he doesn’t feel them. Men. Women. He doesn’t feel them. Organs. He doesn’t feel them. Children. Eyes. He doesn’t feel them. He doesn’t feel anything except the agonizing growling of his gut, he doesn’t sense anything else, but the smell, but the gurgling.

More screams come out from ahead him, Canta, practically on all fours now as he sprints, reaches the center of the town, the apex of the desecration. He reaches the place where two things gurgle.

A small plaza, ringed with houses and in the center, is a well.

For the first time since entering, Canta stops, as he looks at the thing before himself and for a moment at least, he loses his appetite.

A hunched over, pale upper body with taut skin pushes itself out of the well, its meat growing wider from its visible rib-cage as if to make a seal around the top of the stone construction. As if the body had grown itself out of the well and then overtaken it with pale, water-logged skin that clings to thick, black bones.

Its two, long, gangling arms, each long enough to reach around the entire plaza, are both busy. One of them holds a kicking man high into the air; the other, dotted with many long, sharp, spindly fingers, each as long as Canta’s own arm, carefully picks into his meat. Needle-thin, razor sharp nails press into the lower side of his gut with pinpoint precision that seems out of place for the overgrown, lanky monstrosity, as it picks out his liver, tiny piece, by tiny piece. The man’s screams don’t even manage to form properly anymore, a froth, long since having formed in his mouth.

The thing that gurgles doesn’t move its drowned, emaciated body. But its head flops backwards over its hunched shoulder and turns sharply to the left to look straight towards Canta. Long, knotted, black hair hangs down sideways. Poison water flows out of its sideways mouth like slimy drool. Canta stares at the misshapen face of the thing. Perhaps it was once a human. But now, its mouth is too wide and filled with too many hundreds of short, stubby teeth that come to a jagged edge for that to still be true. Its mouth is filled with a flood that never stops. The poison water coats the stones, coats the dead people. The smell of it fills the air, the tinge of it is carried off by the heat of the fires as it evaporates and fills the lungs of those who breathe it in.

As it stares at him, its long, spindly fingers continue to pick out the last of the man’s liver, lifting the tiny, less than bite-size pieces up over its head at an angle in order to delicately drop them into its mouth, as it attempts to savor every last sliver.

But it never manages. Every piece of meat that it plucks, every strand of red that it drops into its mouth, simply splashes into the water in its throat which never seems to empty and it trickles out down to the ground below, which is already long since soaked in a washed out red.

It gurgles, its smile never leaving its face as it drops the man, now that it had what it wanted from him. He lays there, panting and heaving on the ground, his body spasming as the poison water he has fallen into overtakes him. Canta doesn’t remember much about casters, but he thinks that if the people outside are priests, that they can maybe still save someone in this condition, if he hur-

There is a wet crunching, as the gangly thing’s fist crushes the man’s skull into a pulp in an instant, splashing red-water and the mush of his skull in all directions. Its other hand slaps against the ground, before it reaches out for Canta. Its arm, as long as a tree from the forest, lifts itself up into the air, its bony hand stretching out, its long, gnarled fingers, pointed with black-needle-tips stretching out, as it reaches as far as it can. As is reaches for the thing that it wants.

The tip of its grime and blood covered nail stops an inch from his face. Canta can smell it. He can smell the sin that he desires, that he craves. It smells so strongly, so powerfully. His stomach rumbles as if crying in agony, as if unable to wait even a second longer. The thing gurgles, trying to stretch further, trying to reach him at any cost. He is the last thing around for it to eat.

It gurgles, poison water flowing out of its mouth as it stretches out for him longingly, as it reaches for him hungrily. Canta feels the deep-hunger return. He feels his eyes glaze over. He feels the damp, drowned skin of the giant finger held tightly beneath his hands all of a sudden. He feels the long finger wrap itself around his meager body, as he sinks its teeth down into its.

Canta flies through the air, as the thing pulls him back, pulls him towards the well, entirely indifferent to his tiny biting of its finger, as it smiles and gurgles in delight and reaches for him with its other hand.

He chews and chews, gnawing his way down into its finger, biting through the wet, soggy skin as he burrows down into the flesh and then to the gristle between its knuckle. Putrescence fills his mouth, rotting flesh fills his gut which feels unusually hot like the rest of his body. Canta, his face covered in coagulant, old blood, spares a second to look down.

Five razor sharp, long needles push into his side. Red sprays everywhere. He can feel his legs kicking, he can feel his body spasming, as his eyes go wide and he sinks his teeth deeper into the creature, biting down to the bone of the long finger that grasps him. There is a hot pulsation in his frame, as it slices off a tiny, minuscule piece of his liver. He watches, his mouth filled with marrow and water-logged meat, as it drops the first piece of him into its mouth.

He watches as the piece of his body slides out of the drooling water of its throat and falls to the ground to mix in with all the rest.

The needle hand comes back for more.

As it reaches him, as it pushes into his gut a second time, the thing smiles wider than ever, as it sees that its bounty has been restored. Canta trembles, as he feels a long, needle-like finger run tenderly over his insides as if to signify its deep, carnal satisfaction with the meat of his body. The thing that gurgles takes another piece of him and he does the same to it. The two of them, feasting off of each other’s forms, partake in a rare communion that nobody on the outside could ever really understand.

“Let go of him!” yells Alleluia, interrupting the intimate moment.

The air past his head shifts, rushing with a deafening roar as something massive flies past him. The giant arm that holds him falls limp in an instant, as the world is filled with the crack of thunder.

A beam of charred, jagged wood, heavier than the weight of several grown men combined, soars through the air and pierces through the thing that gurgles’ whisper-thin chest, pushing its hunched over spine cleanly out through its back.

Canta falls to the ground, landing on the long, now limp arm of the creature. His mind is lost to the deep-hunger.

He runs straight towards the well, crawling, rushing along the limp arm beneath himself like an animal along a fallen log, as he jumps, his mouth wide open, his teeth barred, straight into the welcoming smile of the thing that gurgles, of the thing that looks up towards him with hungry, long since dead eyes.

It smells so good.

[Sin Level 7: Crinaeae]