The night pressed heavy on Serenity Creek. Clouds smothered the moon, and the air hung thick with humidity. Yume, Levy, and Cana had set their small camp just outside the plantation fence, close enough to observe the blight but far enough to avoid its cloying, acrid scent.
The campfire crackled, the only sound breaking the silence. Nearby, a chorus of cicadas sang, their song a steady, hypnotic drone. The trio settled into an uneasy quiet.
Levy, hunched over her parchment, scribbled furiously with her quill. She was absorbed in her work, documenting every detail she had observed. Her brow was furrowed in concentration as she drew intricate diagrams of the blighted plants, her focus a shield against the unsettling atmosphere.
A few feet away, Cana acted casual, leaning against a post with her flask in hand. But she wasn't drinking. Instead, she kept her deck of cards close, flipping them one by one. The cards were a nervous tic, a silent way of testing the energy of the night without drawing attention. Her smile was gone, replaced by a tense, focused stare.
Yume sat still, his gaze fixed on the boundary line between the healthy and blighted fields. His body was relaxed, but his mind was a coiled spring. He watched without blinking, a hunter's patience in his eyes. He wasn't looking for a pattern; he was waiting for a movement, a whisper, a sign of what was to come.
The air grew heavier. The scent of coffee and damp earth was a distant memory, replaced by the bitter, chemical stench of decay. The fire's pop was sharper now. A sudden stillness fell over the fields. The cicadas' song cut off.
The silence was absolute. Oppressive. Something was coming. They knew it. They felt it.
And they waited.
***
It was just past three when the world cracked open.
A sudden, sharp hiss erupted from the blighted rows, a sound like steam escaping a pressurized pipe. It was a warning.
A blinding, searing light tore through the field, not erupting so much as unfurling like a living wound tearing open the world. The ground shook, and the air split with a sharp crack like a tree snapping in two. The light devoured the darkness, merciless and absolute.
"What is—?!" Levy shouted, her voice swallowed by the roar.
"Hell no!" Cana shrieked.
But Yume was already moving. "Stay down!" he commanded, his hands sweeping outward. Two of his Pandora Orbs erupted from the soil, humming with a low, metallic thrum. They spun into a lattice of pure force, wrapping the trio in a protective dome as the light slammed into it.
The impact was deafening. The orbs vibrated violently, a deep resonance that seemed to eat the searing light, absorbing its destructive force. Inside the dome, the team crouched low, watching as leaves ignited and branches turned to bubbling tar, their shapes collapsing into black dust. Coffee berries exploded in bursts, flinging charred pulp across the soil.
Seconds stretched into an eternity. Then, as abruptly as it began, the flare withered, fading into silence.
The team rose slowly, the barrier dissolving. What lay before them left no room for doubt. The once-living bushes were nothing but brittle skeletons. Fruit lay shriveled and twisted, and the soil was coated in an ashen residue that glimmered faintly, like something unearthly had seeped into its veins.
Levy crouched, her hand trembling as she took notes, her focus a desperate attempt to contain her fear. Cana exhaled a shaky breath, her face pale, for once completely sober. The horror of what they'd just witnessed left no room for quips or bravado.
***
The air after the blight's outburst still carried a strange, acrid heaviness. Each step through the ruined patch crunched beneath their boots, brittle leaves collapsing into black dust that clung to their soles. The destruction was overwhelming in its clarity. Whatever this force was, it wasn't natural.
Levy crouched near the base of one withered stem, her quill scratching hurried notes into her leather-bound book. She plucked a fragment of bark, holding it under a magical lens. The grooves shimmered faintly with pale motes, like sickly starlight trapped in dead wood.
"This isn't just decay," she whispered, her voice filled with a terrible weight. "It's a forgotten curse. Aether Drain." She looked up, her gaze meeting Cana's. "It leeches life, converts it to raw magic, and leaves nothing but a husk. These plants weren't just killed—they were harvested."
Cana had planted herself cross-legged a few paces away. Her usual confident spread of cards was a mess on the ground, some flipping upside down as if in protest. She wasn't smiling. Her hand, which had been clutching her flask, now hovered over the cards, her brow furrowed in concentration.
She picked up one that had fallen, her voice low and sharp. "Northwest. The pattern keeps pointing there. Cave systems. Something's festering in the stone—too steady, too consistent. Whatever's causing this, that's where it's anchored."
Yume stood, his gaze sweeping across the fields and up toward the ridges in the distance. He unrolled a map of Serenity Creek, laying it flat on the ground. He picked up a few small stones and pieces of charcoal, marking the leyline disruptions he could feel.
"The flow's wrong," he murmured. "It bends here, fractures there, like something dug its claws into the current. If the curse is channeling through the leylines, that cave's not random—it's deliberate placement. Someone chose it."
His words set their thoughts in grim alignment. This wasn't misfortune. It wasn't even a wild curse. It was planned.
Levy closed her book with a snap, her expression sharp. "Then we don't just have a curse. We have a culprit."
The night air pressed close, thick with humidity, but it felt colder somehow after that. The three exchanged glances—no bravado, just grim acknowledgement. Time was no ally. If the blight had already advanced this far, every farm and family in the valley stood on a knife's edge.
***
The climb toward the northwest ridge was grueling, their boots dragging through wet underbrush, torches sputtering against the damp. A hollow wind carried the scent of mildew and something fouler—iron, rot, the tang of death.
By the time the dark mouth of the cave loomed before them, the storm overhead had gathered in full. Thunder rolled in uneven growls, rain pattering against stone. The entrance was ringed with black moss, its texture slick and glistening unnaturally, as though it drank the torchlight rather than reflected it.
"Well. If I were a curse, this is exactly the kind of damp hole I'd shack up in," Cana murmured, her tone sardonic but laced with unease.
"Stay alert," Yume replied, his eyes narrowed, every instinct sharpened. "Whatever's inside—it doesn't want us here."
The deeper they pressed, the colder it became. Their breaths fogged before their lips, torches hissing as moisture clung to the flames. The cave walls bore scratches, gouges etched deep into the stone—some clawed, others deliberate. The air grew still, the silence now an oppressive force, broken only by the sound of their own footsteps. It smelled of sickly sweetness, decay, and something else—a faint, lingering scent of burnt magic.
"These aren't random," Levy said, running her hand across one set of gouges. "Old runes… fragmented, like a conduit."
The trail wound upward, narrowing until the trees thinned and only jagged stone framed the path. Mist seeped from cracks in the cliff face, curling like ghostly breath. Even without Cana's earlier cards or Levy's leyline readings, Yume could feel it—a wrongness humming beneath the earth, low and constant like a heartbeat out of rhythm.
"Here," Cana murmured, halting before a yawning cleft in the rock. Her usual casual tone was gone, replaced with a hard, quiet weight. "This is the place."
Levy's hands hovered over her notes, trembling despite her effort to keep steady. "The leyline shifts converge here. If the blight is being fed, this is the artery."
The cave swallowed sound as they entered, walls slick with damp and smelling of iron and rot. Their footsteps echoed hollowly, the air colder than it should have been. No insects. No wind. Nothing but the oppressive silence pressing in on them.
Then—Cana's sharp intake of breath.
Against the rear wall, illuminated faintly by their light, hung a body.
It wasn't just death—it was desecration. The corpse was suspended by a rope, limbs twisted unnaturally as though churned from within. Flesh looked half-digested, eaten away by something not of this world. Veins blackened and swollen crisscrossed the skin, eerily mirroring the infected coffee plants.
From the mouth leaked a crusted trail of ash-like residue—the same substance Yume had seen staining the fields.
For a moment, none of them moved. The silence was suffocating, broken only by the faint creak of rope as the body swayed.
Levy gagged, her hand flying to her mouth. Her mind, so used to dissecting magical theory, recoiled at the sight. "It's not just a curse… it's a forbidden ritual," she whispered, her voice laced with a mixture of terror and dawning comprehension.
Cana's face was a mask of pure horror. Her hand tightened on her flask, but she didn't raise it. She just stared at the grotesque scene, her usual bravado completely gone.
Yume stood still, his gaze hardening into cold clarity. His face was a mask, his eyes narrowed. He could feel it—lingering threads of magic clinging to the remains like cobwebs, whispering their malevolence into the stone walls.
"This," he said quietly, his voice a low, cold hum, "isn't just blight." His gaze hardened, meeting the horrified eyes of his companions.
"Someone bound the curse to a living host. Fed it until it consumed them."
The words settled like stones in their chests. The cave seemed to breathe around them, shadows twitching as if listening. The body creaked faintly as it swayed, its quiet motion a final, macabre violation of the valley's promised serenity.