Work Text:
People often overlook the little things. How many flowers do you pass on your way to the cornershop? How many ants have you trampled today? How many cracks in the concrete didn’t you skip over?
The ashtray was the first to go. Fallen behind a kitchen counter years ago, back when people were still smoking in trains and planes. The counters had been swapped out multiple times since, but the back paneling was reused time and time again, no one seeming to realize there had been a gap there in the past. And while the gap had been shut, cracks and crevices always creep through and through one of them a trickle of strawberry jam ran down after an entire freshly made glass shattered from a too quick temperature change.
No one would think anything of it, strawberry jam and ashes, but nothing is ever made of just itself and along the backing the jam picked up a variety of microorganisms, taking them into the ashtray carved out of bone. It had belonged to a hunter way back when and if he’d been warned about using the white buffalo bone as a receptacle, he wouldn’t have listened anyway. The creature had magic properties few knew about, and between the decades old ash, the sugar of the jam, and the traces of fungus and spices, a recipe for a spell was accidentally set. The ratios were off and it would be incredibly unstable to use, but at least no one knew the activation words, right?
Magic is, if anything, about intention. It was a spell of necromancy, of asking that the dead rise in the name of vengeance. The words were supposed to be along the lines of “The death you brought will be your own.”, but as the glass shattered due to a distraction from the given instructions, she screamed “Are you fucking kidding me?! Clean this shit up! I specifically told you NOT to put the hot glass on the marble counter!! Your stupidity is going to get you killed one day!”.
And people think the words matter…. They don’t. At that moment, that woman wanted to murder her brother just as much as a crusader wanted to kill barbarians, and for the intention's purpose, that was enough. They didn’t notice at first through her screams and his mumbling apologies, on his knees picking up the larger shards of goo-covered glass. From the ground he heard it first, the skittering. The sound sent chills up his spine and he froze long before she realized he’d stop listening.
The ice spread to her as she finally shut up and listened. Goosebumps forming on the back of her neck, a dry swallow, sweat prickling her forehead. Then, the chittering joined. The sound of hundreds of small creatures. All those rats and bugs that had been dead long long ago. The floorboards creaked as things moved between the wood. The house seemed to be coming alive. The siblings had no chance of escaping, they didn’t have time to try. Frozen in fear, they didn’t have time to scream as the house fell over them, too brittle by all the things in the walls.
If the world had been fair, or even kind, their bodies would have stayed trapped under the rubble in a forever state of not quite alive. Cruelty is just as in the eyes of the beholder as beauty, and they managed to crawl out with a newfound hunger. They grinned at each other, having forgotten about their life from just five minutes ago. The sun was going down as they popped bones back into place and watched the creatures in the area crawl out of their graves and rush into the rest of the neighborhood.
The ashtray full of jam lay forgotten in the rubble. It would never be found now, as very soon there would be no one left to find it. The instability of the spell made it spread much farther than it should’ve. A ring of undeath that radiated from the old house. And even as the center became unaffected, it was far too late. How many billions of critters lie dead in people’s homes? Enough to lay waste on humanity a thousand times. No one was ready.
People often overlook the little things. The graves they live in, the death they cause, the long line of dead things that lead up to their own despicable lives. Immortality? We live to die. Rinse and repeat. To be immortal is to not live at all. Then again, if the unalive are the dead, then what of the undead?