Several illnesses emerged among the people during this phase after the fall. Mysterious ailments swept through communities like an unseen shadow. At first, the symptoms were subtle: fevered murmurs in the night, trembling hands, and a pallor creeping across faces. But soon, these signs gave way to horrors beyond what anyone could have imagined. Families gathered around their sick, whispering prayers to gods who no longer seemed to listen. The air carried a sense of unease—thick and oppressive, as though even nature recoiled from what was unfolding.
“I don’t understand,” murmured a healer, her hands trembling as she wiped her patient’s brow with a damp cloth. The man beneath her touch twitched involuntarily, his eyes rolling back into his skull. “It’s not like any sickness I’ve seen before.” Her voice cracked under the weight of her growing dread.
The village elder, standing nearby with a grim expression, shook his head. “It’s spreading too fast,” he said in a low, measured tone. “Faster than we can even bury them.”
The word "bacteria" began circulating in hushed conversations among those who dared speculate about the cause. It wasn’t a familiar term; it sounded foreign, almost alien to their ears. Some scribes had stumbled upon fragments of ancient texts that mentioned these "bacteria." The texts described them as invisible entities responsible for decay and disease. But what bacteria were remained shrouded in mystery.
One scholar, poring over the brittle pages of an old tome by candlelight, leaned back in his chair with a sigh, his face pale from sleepless nights. He muttered to himself as he ran his fingers through his dishevelled hair, “If these bacteria are truly responsible… then they’ve become something else entirely—something we don’t understand.”
What frightened the survivors most was not just the sickness itself. Its aftermath was worse. The earliest records whispered something unthinkable: that these bacteria were somehow tied to the dead rising from their graves. Even the idea sent shivers down spines, sparking panicked debates late into the night.
“But how?” demanded one young apprentice during a heated discussion in the town square. His voice wavered with desperation as he faced an older healer. “How could something so small… so invisible… cause *this*?”
The healer’s reply was grim. “I don’t know,” he admitted softly, glancing toward the horizon where smoke from funeral pyres curled into the sky. “But whatever it is… it doesn’t stop when the heart does.”
The dead rising was not common in those early years—at least, not at first. When it did happen, it was sporadic and unpredictable, adding another layer of terror to an already broken world. People spoke in whispers about loved ones who had passed peacefully one day but were seen walking aimlessly through fields the next. These weren’t tales of aggression or mindless rage; instead, the resurrected seemed eerily calm, almost confused—as if they were caught between two worlds.
One farmer recounted his experience with a trembling voice: “It was my wife,” he said, staring blankly into his mug of ale at the local tavern. “She’d been gone three days when I saw her again… out there by the well.” He swallowed hard, his knuckles whitening as he gripped the mug tighter. “She was… humming that song she always used to sing while doing laundry.” His voice cracked on the last word, and for a moment, silence fell over the room.
The detection of this bacteria came through methods long lost to time. These methods involved mechanisms whose existence now seemed like myth or legend. One name stood out among the scattered records: Dr Brian Simpson. His writings hinted at an era of understanding far beyond what remained in this fractured world.
“Dr Simpson claimed he used something called a microscope,” one archivist explained during a gathering of scholars eager for answers. He held up a brittle parchment inscribed with faded ink as if it were some holy relic. “And yet… none of us even know what that is.”
The description on the parchment painted an image both fascinating and baffling: an apparatus capable of magnifying objects thousands of times over until even the tiniest details became visible. Simpson had lamented his lack of access to something called an MRI—a device whose purpose was entirely unknown but seemed crucial to his work.
Through this microscope, Simpson discovered what he described as “a high level of fluorescent microbes” clustered around the central nervous system (CNS). His notes revealed his growing intrigue, and unease, about their behaviour.
“They’re alive,” he wrote in one passage scrawled hastily across the bottom margin of a page. The ink bled slightly where his quill must have pressed too hard against the paper. “These microbes form connections… intricate ones… almost as if they’re creating a second nervous system within their host.”
This discovery raised chilling questions: Were these bacteria controlling their hosts? If so, how? Simpson speculated that electrical impulses might be involved, a theory bolstered by observations of how lightning strikes or magical shock spells caused spasms in both living beings and reanimated corpses.
“But how could they achieve such fine-grain control?” he mused aloud during one recorded lecture before a group of sceptical colleagues. His voice carried equal parts fascination and frustration as he gestured animatedly toward diagrams pinned on the wall behind him. “We’re talking about movements that require precision, walking, grasping objects… even mimicking speech patterns!”
Simpson’s findings also noted that these bacteria bore no resemblance to human cells, or animal cells for that matter. This revelation only deepened the sense of alienness surrounding them.
In summary, Simpson concluded with words that would haunt those who read them: *“The walking dead are real.”*
His accounts described these undead individuals as eerily non-hostile, at least initially. They behaved as though they were still alive, going about tasks they’d performed in life with startling accuracy despite their injuries.
One surviving witness recalled seeing her neighbour, a blacksmith by trade, working at his forge mere hours after succumbing to illness. “He didn’t speak,” she whispered years later when recounting the event to her grandchildren around a flickering hearth fire. “Didn’t even look at me when I called his name... just kept hammering away at that horseshoe like nothing had happened.”
And yet… there was something deeply unsettling about their presence; something that defied explanation or comfort.
Simpson’s final note ended abruptly: *“Are they truly themselves? Or has their soul departed, leaving behind only flesh manipulated by these microbes?”*
This record was found inscribed on parchment, unlike anything known today, the ink indelible against time’s decay. Its significance would only become apparent much later…