1043: Story 1043: Plaguechild 1043: Story 1043: Plaguechild Before the world rotted, the town of Ashbramble was cursed by whispers.
Not the kind from lips, but from cradles left empty.
They said the woods birthed a child every blood moon—a child with no mother, no father, only disease for blood and eyes that saw between veils.
They called it the Plaguechild.
It didn’t cry.
It buzzed.
When the apocalypse hit and the Dead rose, the town was long abandoned.
But the legends clawed their way back, following the survivors like biting flies.
Whispers of a pale, hairless child seen toddling through graveyards barefoot, trailed by black mist and coughing shadows.
Those who saw it never lived to describe it fully.
Their bodies were found bloated, bruised from within—lungs ruptured, eyes honeycombed with tiny boreholes.
The corpses leaked not blood but flies.
A scouting team known as the Iron Four tracked the sightings to a collapsed manor deep in Ashbramble’s woods.
The trees there grew backward—roots curled skyward, dripping red sap like veins torn from the earth.
Carvings of infants with split faces and stitched eyes were nailed to the trunks like fetishes.
Inside the manor: silence.
Until they found the nursery.
The walls were lined with cribs—hundreds, untouched by rot.
Dolls fashioned from bone and dried skin sat in each one, rocking slowly though there was no wind.
A music box played a shrill, off-key lullaby that wouldn’t stop even when shattered.
In the center crib was a journal bound in human leather.
It read: “Do not look into the cradle.
If it looks back, it’s already too late.”
Of course, one of them looked.
He screamed himself inside out.
The Plaguechild was born not of flesh, but infection given thought.
A curse conjured by cultists in ancient times to punish the living with the eternal grief of dying young.
It appears as a child—but never ages.
It reaches out with tiny hands—but drains warmth and breath.
It smiles—but every tooth is a needle.
Now it moves through camps of survivors, cradled in the arms of faceless thralls, infecting both dead and living.
Wherever it lingers, zombies mutate—flesh softens into sacs of spores, their groans become lullabies.
They don’t bite anymore.
They hug.
And the moment they do, the Plaguechild’s mark is passed on.
Your bones hollow, your mind regresses.
You become one of its toys.
The townsfolk say if you hear a baby laughing in the woods, run.
Not toward.
Away.
Because the Plaguechild doesn’t want to kill you.
It wants to play.
Some survivors have tried fire, salt, steel—nothing works.
It doesn’t die because it was never alive.
Just a concept.
A broken idea of innocence infected by grief and eldritch hunger.
A cradle-song that never ended.
And still, deep in the burned-out nursery of Ashbramble, the music box plays.
Waiting.