Chapter 26: The World is Watching - 2
The village didn't smell like death.
It smelled like death's clothes.
Wet straw, copper, bile, mold.
The stench was layered, like the sickness itself had nested in the soil and learned to breathe.
Rein stopped at the edge of the first collapsed hut, scarf pulled over his nose, Zeraka a few steps behind him sniffing the air with a sharp scowl.
"This place is rotting," she growled. "You can smell it through the rain."
"I know," Rein said. "Which is why we're not staying long."
Zeraka crouched and dipped her fingers into a crack in the mud. When she brought them up, they dripped black.
"Blood and plague," she muttered. "Mixed."
Rein stepped carefully down the narrow lane between broken fences and crumbling walls. It wasn't just that people had died here. It was that no one had bothered to clean it up.
A forgotten place.