Blame

Lee knocked on the door, waiting for an answer while all the buildings around him began to settle down into their new places.

Before even two seconds had passed, the door was thrown open and a hand had grabbed Lee by the front of his robes, pulling him into the building, the door slamming shut behind him as he tried to regain his bearings and balance.

Lee looked upwards towards the child on the bed, his body still covered in the poultice and his breathing slightly more eased than before, when he had first arrived.

His mother had barricaded the door with her body, and was barely stood up, panting and leaning heavily against the wood. She looked away from Lee, almost the entirety of her focus on keeping the door blocked with her body, her knees wobbling whenever the thuds of the stilts which made the buildings walked crashed down, the ground shaking.

The candles flickered, threatening to extinguish, whenever their holders rattled, almost plunging the room into darkness each and every time.

Dust poured out rhythmically from each and every step of the buildings, great heaps falling whenever one building had finally run out of energy, and then collapsing where it last was.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I shouldn't kicked you out when the buildings were going to move! You would have gotten squashed or stepped on! I'm sorry! I'll accept responsibility for this one!" she shouted out her thoughts and sentiments, her tone far from apologetic.

Lee staggered slightly, and then stood up properly.

"Were you hurt?" she called out, finally pulling her eyes away from the door behind her to look at him.

"No. I was outside the village," he answered her, bending his body forwards in anticipation for the next world shaking thud that the house would experience.

The little boy on the bed moved along with each and every quiver that the ground beneath him made, his limp body slightly bouncing along with the larger tremors.

Lee took his inactivity as a statement of how bad his illness was.

"And you fucking ran back in! I know you're not human but what the fuck!?" she screamed out at Lee, her voice twisted up in rage and the promise of terror, but her words stirred some emotion inside Lee that he had never heard before.

He wanted to cry.

Her words made him want to cry and he had no idea why.

It was a warm and foreign feeling, but it carried an undercurrent of pain and regret, nonetheless.

"I'm human!" Lee answered her, deciding to shunt his feelings to the background to be dealt with later, when he was finally alone, calmer, and generally more well equipped to process them.

"No, you're fucking not!" the teenager answered him, her voice stern and steady," You touched the water, and you're not dead, so you're not human!"

Lee froze at her words, the next tilt of the earth sending him sprawling to his knees and faceplanting the floor beneath him, pain radiating out from his nose, his cheekbones feeling as if they had been bruised.

He brought a hand to his face immediately, keeping himself up with his other, free elbow, and felt around to see if there was anything broken from the impact, figuring out that his nose, in fact, was not nearly as broken as he thought that it was initially.

"What're you talking about?" he asked her, hearing the bleeding edge of panic in his own voice, trying to stand up once more in the middle of the floor, with nothing around him to hold onto through his endeavours.

"Everyone who touched the lake water after the stupid mansion sent somebody to the temple died because of it," she explained angrily, her legs and feet skidding outwards as she braced herself as another boom echoed through the wooden house.

"We don't know what they did, but when all the kids came to splash around in the water, they all died in their sleep. The fisherman also died, and only the hunters from the forest lived, because there was a river in there," she explained, gasping for breath at the end when a huge deposit of dust fell on her head.

Lee heard her gritting her teeth and growling in frustration and anger.

She looked up at the ceiling, and waved one fist up at it, before becoming covered in dust even further. Coughing from the repeated assaults by the aggravating ceiling, she looked downwards to the floor and heaved in and out great big breaths.

Lee looked over to the opposite side of the room towards her son and spotted the tarp that had been set up over the child to keep him safe from the falling dust and the destruction around him.

He slept still and undisturbed around him.

"How long ago was this?" Lee asked the teenage girl, as soon as she stopped hacking out her lungs and had her breathing under control and somewhat level.

"The town over died out four years ago from the plague. It took some time for the village. Some of the hunters killed themselves to join their families, but others just left. I came back because there were rumours of ghosts in the village. I needed to see if my family was still here, so I came," she explained, her voice wobbling and teetering of near the end.

She breathed in a heavy sigh.

"So why are you here. To exorcise the ghosts and send them to the afterlife?" she suddenly asked Lee, her tone now as hardened as it was before, loosing all the softness it had gained from when had discussed her loved ones.

"N- no. I'm here with somebody who wants to... help them," Lee decided to answer her, stumbling over both his own legs as the earth shook once more, and his own words.

He couldn't tell her about the God who was in town.

Who knows what might happen to her if the God learned that somebody living was here?