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Esme doesn’t say anything, just stays put, her hands clasped in front of her. Her face is nearly as blank as the workers’.
Though several should be able to see me from this angle, the farmers don’t respond to my approach. In my mind, I gather my magic and reach out to the soil to check if it’s as dry as it appears or infested with parasites…some explanation for the death overtaking the bounty.
My earth magic recoils inside me with a force unlike any I’ve ever felt. Stunned, I shake my head. I can’t think of anything that would force my magic to bounce back so viciously. Even the eyril fields, though poisoned, had a certain feel to them. Hungry, twisted, aggressive. Not…
Hollow? Lifeless. Magic-less. Everything-less.
The opposite of a living world.
But not dead either. An echoing sense of loss pulses through my chest, and I press a hand against my ribs, struggling to breathe.
“You see it now.” Esme’s voice conveys no triumph, only tired regret. “This is a Withered field, where everything’s…worse than dead. At least a dead plant can still be eaten. A Withered plant offers nothing. No flavor or sustenance. Even the bugs won’t touch it. Failed crops happen, so people assumed we just had some bad luck. But it never went away. Instead, it spread.”
I stifle a gasp so she won’t notice how rattled I am.
“It’s been spreading for months.” She gestures at the fields around us.
“And the farmers?”
She gazes out at the people in the field, the corners of her mouth tipped down. The longer we observe, the clearer it becomes that they’re repeating a single action over and over.
“They’ve likely got the Hushing Sickness too.”
“Why didn’t the Graywatch take them?”
She shrugs. “Maybe they didn’t make it this far. Or they just couldn’t take any more.”
I think of the exhausted, terrified people stumbling behind the riders. “There were healthy people among them.”
“We don’t know how the Hushing Sickness or the Withering spreads. They could be infected and just not showing symptoms yet.”
“Do you really believe that?”
Esme’s jaw bunches, but she doesn’t otherwise reply. Her eyes stay on the people in the field, the sorrow welling within her palpable.
Eventually, I nudge her forward, and we enter the village at the field’s edge. If you could call it a village. It feels more like a collection of buildings housing ghosts who haven’t figured out they’re dead yet.
A woman sweeps an already-clean street, her face slack and empty. An old man sits on a bench, his hands folded in his lap, his eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance. His lips form silent words. Counting, maybe, or reciting thoughts he wants to remember.
Children gather silently in the square, tossing a ball back and forth. But they don’t laugh, shout, or even talk. Just perform the same repetitive motion of catching and throwing. Catching and throwing.
Like golems programmed for tasks they never understood the purpose of.
The air smells of nothing. No dust, no smoke, no laundry soap, or roasting meat.
“When did this all start?” My voice comes out rough.
“A few months ago. But it’s gotten worse in these past few weeks.” Esme hugs herself despite the morning’s warmth. “At first, we thought it was an isolated occurrence. Regional bad luck.”
“I haven’t heard about this in any other kingdom.” I want to get a closer look at those affected, but what the hells am I going to do? I’m no healer. I know nothing about this, and I can’t risk becoming infected myself. “What did your people do? Which gods did you piss off badly enough to deserve this?”
“This isn’t divine punishment. It’s…” She pauses, flapping her hands as she debates what to say. “Gods have presence, so you know what you did wrong and why you’re being punished. This is the absence of everything. Like the echo in a cave long after the original sound has faded.”
I glance around at the haunted village, the gray fields, and at the hollow-eyed people going through motions without meaning.
She’s right.
This feels nothing like the divine. I’ve stood in the doorway to the gods’ realm and felt the flames of their wrath.
