Raught

By Fvn (CW: Very dark/despair, body horror, sickness)

I watch the cascades of simmering crimson light in the air through the small crack in my window as the sun sets on the streets below. Dunva'la's once beautiful cobbled streets and mortar buildings, once filled with so much splendor, lay barren now. Shrouded in a miasma of crimson Dust which danced on the breeze. I know all too well what it really is. Why it litter's every alley and corridor of my home. It's what remains of those whom I had once known.

All of them now coalesced as the clouds of malignance scattered throughout this once great ruin of a city. The Raught was the name the beggars had given it, as it struck them first and moved fastest through their ranks. My old friend Ki'bar the performer, was where I caught my first glimpses of it.


It started as a strange rash which wrinkled and distorted the skin into odd patterns before slowly bursting outward in rust-like growths covering the appendages. Soon, Ki'bar began to lose the use of his fingers, toes, feet then hands. Finally his limbs gave out as Raught slowly worked its way towards his core. Each piece of him would shrivel over time. Drying away slowly before falling off and collapsing into piles of flesh like crimson dust. He was not the heartiest of sorts. Poor Ki'bar only lasted a week, and by the end his suffering was so great that all I could do for him was end it.

Over the following month more of my friends grew ill. Iji the fifer, Brother Kaimen, Ruma the merchant, and even little Saj'ar, one by one had been taken. I could only watch as they decay into nothing but dust. Their skin, flesh and even their bones were now no more than the malignancy which now proliferates this once beautiful place.


I dare not venture out for those who do last naught more than minutes now before they are consumed. It is in the air we breathe now and I fear it might be too late Dunva'la, too late even for me...