Enormous wings spread wide as the survivors took to the air. For the first time in their relentlessly efficient existence, they had encountered something not even they could digest. The foxes and hyenas slunk away as if pursued by invisible carnivores armed with immense claws and fangs. Only the insects, who could sustain the losses necessary to make a meal of the deceased, found the ruminant desolation to their benefit.
Field or forest, taiga or town, it was all the same to the Drounge as it proceeded on its never-ending march. What happened when it passed through a city was unpleasant to the point of becoming the stuff of nightmare legend. Some called it the judgment of the gods, others simply the plague. All agreed that the consequences were horrific beyond imagining.
People perished, not in ones and twos or even in family groups, but in droves. Symptoms varied depending on what afflicted part of the Drounge each encountered. Wounds refused to heal and bled unstoppably, until the unfortunate casualty shriveled like a grape left too long in the sun. Lesions blossomed like the flowers of death until they covered more of a sufferer’s body than his skin. The daily clamor of the community; the give and take of commerce, the fluting arpeggios of gossip, the chatter of small children that was a constant, underlying giggling like a symphony of piccolos, was entirely subsumed in shrieks of pain and wails of despair.
So the city died, its inhabitants shunned by surrounding communities. Those who lived long enough to flee were denied sanctuary by their terrified neighbors. They wandered aimlessly, perishing in ditches that lined the sides of roads or beneath trees that could provide welcoming shade but were unable to mourn. Everyone who had come in contact with the Drounge died: the resigned elderly and the disbelieving young, the healthy laborers and the children who could not comprehend. They expired, and so did those who had been in contact with them. Those few who had seen the Drounge and remarked on its passage died differently, slaughtered by their panicked neighbors in a frenzy of ignorance and fear. Eventually, even the plague perished, exhausted by its own capacity for destruction.