A raspy breathing fills the room. The air that the man inhales pushes through his throat releasing a sound akin to a metal file against rocks. With every falling of his chest, another scratching exhalation leaves his nearly lipless mouth, pushing over his blackened teeth. He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t blink, not having eyelids anymore. His eyes are milky and ruined.

All he has, is the rising and the falling of his breast, which only ever does so in short, quick motions. Any longer than a simple heaving an inch upwards is likely too painful for him. So the frantic, shallow breathing continues, never skipping a beat. In a grim comparison, Canta realizes that the bloody, decayed mess of a dying man, mutilated beyond belief by an oil fire, sounds like the billows attached to a forge; serving no purpose but to pump air.

It was well past sunset when they arrived here, the two of them having walked through the forest and then hidden for a while, before cautiously approaching the houses. Alleluia had stopped him, pointing to the clawed tracks in the dirt. The riders had already been here. In all likelihood, the people here were told about them and perhaps even warned to stay on the lookout. It was a dangerous situation and Canta knew that she was right.

But he still spared a glance in through the broken shutters of the house, out of which streamed a warm, orange light. The glow leaked out of the visible gaps in the closed shutters, as they are too heavily decayed to allow a clear separation of the inside and outside anymore.

The houses around them, the path, the other structures and all of the adornments and visible furnishings look old, worn through. Not in the sense that they had been mistreated or uncared for. Rather, they’re simply old and well-used and worn out because of that alone. It is as if everything here had been built during better days, during times now long forgotten and it all simply had reached the end of its lifespan.

That’s when he saw the face of the burnt man, staring out his way through the gaps in the shutters. He never said anything, he never made any noise. He just stared and kept breathing and Canta stared back, not sure if he was doing the same.

Despite Alleluia’s only mild protests, Canta had knocked on the door. It opened a minute later to the bewildered face of an older woman. A smell permeates the air, the sin is present and strong, but so is the smell of cooked meat, the latter overpoweringly so. Canta realizes that he is having trouble differentiating. The entire front hallway is scorched and ruined, as if something had exploded here.

Having had the sin-eater described to her by the riders who were only here perhaps just hours ago, she recognizes him immediately and falls to her knees as she slides against the entry-way wall, her hands clasped before herself. She’s apparently pious, with deep-held religious convictions.

Canta had thought it was all a little overly dramatic, but he appreciates some real, heartfelt reverence. The woman, despite never having met him before, still trusted him more than the riders from the city, saying that ‘men make mistakes, gods do not.’ Canta isn’t sure either if that’s true, he has strong doubts about it, actually. But he thanks the, apparently kind, woman and heads around to the man in the bed.

Now they stand there in the room and Canta watches, mesmerized, as the body of the charred, bloody mess of a man struggles to sustain itself. There is a smell of cooked flesh in the air and Canta would be lying if he said that it didn’t do something for him, somewhere deep in his gut. But he presses it down, fighting it with a fake revulsion which he constructs in his mind, if only to ease his own conscience.

“Praise be!” cries the old woman. Canta rolls his eyes, but he only does so because he’s turned away from her. The burnt man is watching him, but his eyes don’t work. “I knew the gods wouldn’t have us suffer like this.” She walks over to the man lying on the bed. Canta has no idea how he’s alive. He doesn’t have any skin, rather, he’s just a red mass of ash and sinew. He opens his lip-less mouth, but nothing comes out.

“What happened?” asks Alleluia.

“There was… there was a fire,” explains the woman as the glow of the lantern reflects off of her pristine, unblemished skin. Canta thinks that there having been a fire is a rather obvious statement, but he doesn’t butt in. New-Canta doesn’t do that.

His stomach twists and he walks over to the man, trying to figure out what his sin is. He stands next to the older woman who has given up tending to him. There isn’t a single bandage or rag to be seen. Not that those would have helped, but it’s about the effort. The bedding, the bed, the wall next to him, it’s all red. The man’s dead eyes follow him as he moves. He opens his mouth again. But nothing comes out, except a sharp exhalation after his chest collapses in on itself once more.

“A fire?” asks Alleluia.

“There was an accident,” explains the woman. “He dropped a lantern and…” she doesn’t say anything else. “Please help me, sin-eater,” asks the woman. Canta leans over, not exactly sure what it is that she wants him to do? Probably absolve the man of his sins before he passes. Is she his mother? Wife? Aunt? He has no idea. She really doesn’t seem very distraught, considering the circumstances. Sparing a glance down to her hand, he sees no ring on it, as she rises up and over the bed. The woman opens the shutters and the window, letting in some fresh air.

He sniffs the flesh of the burnt man.

Canta’s eyes open as he smells nothing but meat. Turning his gaze, he looks at the eyes of the burnt man, he looks at his face, at the smooth edges where his lips should be. He realizes that they haven’t been burnt off.

They were cut.

The man’s mouth moves and, perhaps it’s because of his instincts, perhaps it’s because of his recent affinity for paranoia, or perhaps he’s just a particularly gifted people-person these days, but if the man had lips, Canta is sure they would be mouthing one word.

‘Run.’

A sharp whistle, a midnight chime, cuts through the crisp night air, just as Canta jumps to the side. Something flies past his head, coming in through the window. “EVIL!” he shouts, the word being the first thing to come to his mind for some reason, rather than ‘trap’ or ‘look out!’

Alleluia yelps in surprise as he catches himself just before her feet, quickly rising back up as a deeply orange glow fills the room. The old woman has risen to her feet, her hands are covered in a burning fire which glows far brighter than any of the lanterns in the room. Her eyes begin to melt inward, leaving only a white-hot glow in their place. The firelight-shine reflecting off of the strange arrow with his name on it, that is embedded into the floorboards, just behind where he was standing, having come flying through the window.

Flames snake around her fists, winding up along her arms like coiling serpents until eventually, her whole body is consumed by the inferno. Several voices ring out loudly outside the window, the sounds of their steps coming towards the house.

Canta hears it in his head again. ‘Run’.

The woman is entirely consumed by fire, her skin, her clothes, her flesh, her bones, all of it leaving her warped gestalt, leaving only the screaming visage of a husk, buried in an inferno.

Canta grabs Alleluia’s hand. “RUN!”

The front door shatters as it’s kicked in. A man in armor charges inside and is promptly sent flying back out into the group of soldiers behind him, as Alleluia kicks him square in the chest, his breastplate denting inwards, caving in to his clearly broken ribs. Yanking on her hand, Canta runs towards the back of the house.

The thing that burns glides after them. The woman, having turned into some kind of creature, some kind of elemental of some manner, now pursues them. But she doesn’t walk. Rather, she simply… slides. She hovers, the tips of the flames that make up her toes just barely touching the ground, as she slides towards them, like a piece of a game being pushed over a board by an invisible hand. Canta realizes that she is the one who had smelled of sin. He didn’t even notice it. The smell of meat was too overpowering.

If Canta had assumed before that Alleluia was a demon, then he now has a new mental image of what such an entity might perhaps truly look like.

Flames leak out of her in all directions, consuming the bedroom behind her and the half-consumed man already in it, who is no longer able to scream. Fire crawls down her body, running along the floorboards, along the walls, along an unfortunate soldier who didn’t fly quite far enough. The burn snakes up his armor in a thin line and it wraps itself around him over and over, as if someone were tying an ignited string around his legs and no matter how much he screams and kicks, it keeps spinning tighter and tighter.

Canta loses sight of the man, as he himself is now yanked around a corner, but the soldier’s screams stay present in his ears. In a familiar feeling, Canta is picked up into the air as Alleluia jumps, he closes his eyes, expecting to be smashed through a window to break it.

Glass shatters all around him. Prismatic shards fill the night, illuminated by a mixture of radiant starlight and wild-fire. Confused in that time-slowed second, Canta looks around as they fall and realizes that Alleluia has thrown herself through the window backwards, shielding him from the glass.

The two of them land outside in the grass. Time returns to a normal flow, but Alleluia doesn’t set him down, instead, she runs, hoisting him over her shoulder. Perhaps it’s faster that way. He’s not a great runner. Canta watches, hanging back over her, as the entity, made entirely of fire, doesn’t climb through the window. Instead, it simply slides through it. Its lower body simply vanishes for a moment, as it pushes itself out of the window, never changing height or climbing and then reappears a second later. Flames lick the damp grasses, which hiss audibly as if releasing an anguished scream that mixes in with the rest. The house behind them now fully erupts in a violent blaze, the light filling up the night.

Soldiers run around the house, running after them.

As Canta hangs there, staring at the men in pursuit, staring at their armor which glows in the light of the fire, he suddenly understands what the nature of this trap really is.

They had set him up. They had mutilated the owner of this house, burning him to the brink of death and slicing off his lips and tongue with a knife. The smell, apart from being bait, had the effect of obscuring the assassin’s sins. They knew this. They know a lot about sin-eaters. They had done all of this to some random innocent, just to set the trap.

How many more ‘traps’ are out there then? Right now? Villages, houses, settlements in all directions from the capital city, how many people there have been gored, mutilated, tortured simply to set a snare that he might never even see? They couldn’t have known that they would go this way, which means they’ve set such traps everywhere. Every day. Every night. For as long as they have been out of the city.

That means, everywhere, all around in all directions, people were being maimed left and right on the off chance that the two of them would stop by.

Demons.

They’re demons, realizes Canta, his eyes growing wide, reflecting the last of the wild-fire.

They vanish into the forest. But the fire, having consumed the houses in a flash, now pushes into the woodlands after them in pursuit, as the tree-line is scorched away.