Friday, July 11, 2014

Manticore by Emir Skalonja


People dropped dead by the dozens; their decaying bodies littered the rural roads of a tiny village on the outskirts of London that no one knew by any particular name. The village sat in the middle of nowhere, shielded by a dark forest to the east and rising hills to the west and north. The road south of the village that led to London brought curious travelers in and out of the village, and in 1351 brought nothing but plague and death. By this time much of Europe had been ravaged by the pestilence, a punishment sent down by god to exact it’s vengeance on the sinners, on those that had forgotten the righteous path. People cowered in church and begged the almighty to do away with this awful disease yet their prayers had fallen on deaf ears.

Death swooped down on its rotten, scabbed wings and took the inhabitants of the village without any prejudice, whether it was a man, a woman or a child, leaving them helpless, crippling them with its cold grasp. Though miles from London, the villagers could see the black smoke rise from the big city, the smoke that carried the ashes of those that had fallen prey to the horrible disease. The villagers reported a foul odor from these ashen clouds that traveled in their direction on those windy days.

In all major cities and centers of any significant population all across Europe, those still healthy enough gathered the corpses and piled them up in city squares where they would be burned. Yet people still fell ill en masse and the population all across the continent began to dwindle.

The village that no one knew by any particular name, for it was merely a passing ground for travelers, lost its people every day. Yet there was one peculiar detail that at first ordinary man could not pin point. Even though people fell ill with Bubonic Plague, there were very few graves in the village. The few grave stones that stood on a tiny hill from the main manor of the lord that had run the village were old and predated the plague by some years and those corpses that inhabited the burial ground had died in battle or of natural causes.

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