Mist boiled from the rivers as hundreds, if not thousands, of figures stumbled out of the black haze. Their shapes were wrong—too thin in some places, too swollen in others—and their movements jerky, as if their bodies fought against themselves. Red-eyed faces twisted by the Abyss still retained faint, haunting traces of humanity.
Strangely all of them, despite the attack on the village not happening long ago, looked like human corpses left to rot in a river for days.
A woman with half a face still weeping black fluid lurched forward, shrieking in a voice that sounded like three speaking at once. Another's arm was fused with the body of a child, their two mouths screaming in unison.
For the newly awakened refugees, it was a nightmare made real.
"They were people," someone whispered. The line wavered.
