Her body ached.

Her muscles grew stiff.

Her blood burned her with its frozen heat.

Agnes was dying, and that almost didn’t scare her.

If she didn’t think about it, if she only thought about the here and now, the blinding pain; she almost welcomed death.

But then she would close her eyes and see. She would see pearl white teeth and sweet doe eyes staring up at her. The pale blonde tufts on her little head.

Her baby.

The baby she had lost.

She never wanted to bring a child into the world, at least not this one. Not when the deepest pits of hell had spewed open, releasing untold horrors onto the land.

Everyone Agnes had ever known had been consumed by its darkness. Had grown beastly and devilish, with sharp teeth and bulbous eyes. Skin stretch over too much bone.

She remembers Finn. Her darling Finn.

Watched his bones crack and his eyes turn milky white.

But before that, when it was her, and her baby and Finn. They were happy. She needs to remember those happy memories. She can’t lose herself to this consumption.

She can still save them.

She can bring them back.

The sun beats down on her, and small green growths reach towards it. Like it will be their salvation rather than scorch them into the cracked dirt below.

The shrubbery around her is wilting and dead, the animals bloated and decaying. Waiting to be picked clean by the monstrous hellspawn she is soon to become.

Her finger nails were dried and peeling from her skin, her skin turned tough like tree bark.

Her body ached terribly, but she must continue. She must find a cure. But she doesn’t know where to go. What to try anymore.

She cannot burn the disease away, cannot freeze it out or starve herself in hopes of ridding herself of her bloody cravings.

She collapsed on the baked earth.

She wanted to cry but her body had no tears left to give.