The fire had exhausted itself.
Smoke still curled through the corridor. Sour and heavy, it scalded Reese's eyes as he stumbled forward. The screaming was gone, swallowed or smothered. It had been replaced by silence, which was worse. It pounded at his eardrums like a dull weight interrupted only by the hissing of dying coals and the gurgling splash of something he could not force himself to identify.
His hands were blistered, redder than a burn is supposed to be. He'd burned them. The animals. The corridor, the walls, even the doorframe Sister Olma's fingers had scraped in desperation as they dragged her away.
He didn't remember aiming. Didn't remember deciding. It had just happened. As if something inside him had cracked and burst like a flame. As if his bones had caught fire and flared from within.
The orphanage was a shell now. Its skeleton is exposed in splintered beams. Its breath was the wheeze of dying embers.
He descended, dragging the warped candlestick like a crutch. His legs faltered, the hall spinning sideways. Sounds stretched and warped like worn tape. The world had toppled, but he had to fix it. He was meant to make it right.
The visitor's voice echoed, cold and unyielding, "Cleanse them or lose everything."
And he hesitated.
The children were changed. The adults were dead. The black blight seeped like roots through the orphanage in the walls, spreading beneath the floorboards.
He was the only one who knew. The only one who could stop it. He had to.
A new stench rose, burned meat. But beneath that something is wrong. Sweet and rotten. It clung in the top of his throat, metallic and gagging, like blood flavoured honey. He gagged and spat but the flavor remained with him.
It's in me too.
The thought arrived cold and final.
Was it burned away or had he just fed it?
He discovered the twins in the pantry crouched on the floor beneath a bale of barley. The air was heavy with sour milk and dusty grain smell, but beneath that the air reeks with the stench of infection.
One twin lay still, her eyes wide, pupils pinpricked. The other whimpered, fists twisted in her sister's nightdress.
They survived.
Reese dropped to his knees, palms scraping splintered wood. He reached out, trembling.
"It's all right," he gasped. "I'm here. I'll save you."
The quiet twin didn't blink. The grabbing his arm with her nails digging to his wrist. Reese gritted his teeth and lead them away, following his gut toward a safer place.
But the walls were suffocating.
The black stains on the floor thickened veins pulsing, twisting through the wood like living vines. The air pressed in, thick with smoke and sweetness. The sweetness of rot. The sweetness of death.
The twins' bare feet left prints in the ash. Something moved on the stairs. A shadow and then a lunge.
Reese swung wildly, the candlestick crunching against bone. The thing that had once been the bookkeeper's apprentice snapped back, its ribs clung to the banister. Its spine twisted like a wrung rag. Its mouth opened sideways, not to scream, but to laugh.
Reese screamed. Fire burst from his hand, wild and uncontrolled.
The thing sizzled. The wall behind it vanished in flame. The fire surged upward, devouring.
Then came the agony.
It ran through him like a thunderbolt, consuming his arm. His skin rip, old wounds breaking. On his palm, the blister split open, but not with blood, but with gold light. Clean and Blazing. Painful and blinding. The fire scorched off the burnt skin, revealing underneath it a pink raw flesh.
Purification.
The word popped out in his mind, coming from another voice within his head which was not his. He gasped out blood and bile, and pulled himself out to a standing upright.
There were others to save.
In the laundry wing he came across two more, a little girl and a mute boy, both holding a rusty spoon like a knife. They were huddling under the stairs, their eyes moving everywhere.
Reese led them back to the twins. The quiet twin still didn't blink. Her sister held her hand, knuckles white.
Reese smiled weakly, lips cracked.
"I'll keep you safe," he whispered.
"It's not too late. I'll save you all… like the knights in the stories."
But salvation is never easy. A boom echoed down the hallway. Then came a voice, Pell's voice distorted, layered, as if spoken by many mouths.
"Riiioooon!"
The boy screamed and bolted. Reese chased him, skidding in blood, burned palms flailing. But he was too late. By the time he reached the hallway, the boy was gone his body torn in half.
Reese's fire came too late.
The severed ribs split open. Something writhed inside. A hand emerged, Pell's hand, slick with gore. A second later, the rest of him slithered free, peeling from the boy's skin like a discarded husk. It wasn't Pell anymore. It wasn't the boy. It was something worse.
"NO!" Reese shrieked.
His fire came too late. The girl who had sheltered with the boy wept black tears. The corruption spread fast, too fast. The clean were now twisted, infected, or dead.
He watched another body stretch, limbs elongating like melting wax. She sank into the bedframe she clung to, her belly splitting open, a mouth forming there, jagged teeth clattering, her voice bubbling through the flesh.
"Reese… help me!!!"
The infection didn't kill.
It devoured.
Even death was no escape.
Broken bodies reformed. Arms wrapped around cupboards. Legs twisted around beams. Heads exploded from pipes. As long as there was something left to take, the stain endured.
Reese collapsed onto the chapel floor. The walls breathed. The windows broke with cracks like spiderweb spreading everywhere. And underneath the shattered timbers through the blood stained floorboards, a black smoke began welling up.
It moved like smoke. Spread like vines. Wrapped around his ankles. Curled up his legs. Enveloped the orphanage. It smothered the moonlight. It devoured sound. The fog pulsed. The stain had taken another soul.
He couldn't breathe and couldn't think.
He'd failed, he was not a hero.
He's just a boy who had fire in his hands and too much guilt in his chest. He'd lost what he loved. He had saved no one.
His hand still burned. The fire no longer needed permission. Light flared in the walls. The mist recoiled. And Reese, sobbing and alone, let it happen.
The explosion split the night.
Windows shattered. Beams tore upward like ribs from a chest. A geyser of fire consumed the orphanage, lapping the sky. The black fog screamed as it burned.
Then—
Silence.
Nothing but ash.
Nothing but fire.
Nothing but the echo of a boy's cry,
seared into the ruins.
---
A few hours later...
Rain.
It rained harder, unstoppably, until the ash and grime changed to mud. The wood was no longer smouldering anymore, as the rain had gone out the blazing coal. But the world that was once consumed by fire now rested dying beneath the waters as if the heavens mourned at that which was gone.
The visitor walks slowly along the scorched earth, every time rain drops only a few inches away from him it will bounce off as if touching an invisible barrier. He stopped his feet at the center of this destruction where there Reese lay unconscious. His eyes clouded by intense emotions before returning to calm once more. He waves his hand and Reese levitates into the air then he follows the visitor behind him as they move out from this place, accompanied by nothing but rain.