Episode 5: Garrick’s Grief
306 Words
The hand that gripped Lina’s wrist was cold — not with the chill of death,
but with something far worse:
memory.
She spun around—
But saw nothing.
Only dust.
And silence.
And the cheese…
still pulsing like a forgotten heart.
Then came the voice.
“They burned me,” it whispered.
“Not because of what I did, but because of what I knew.”
The shadows along the cellar walls began to twist,
forming the outline of a man.
Tall. Thin.
Wearing a butcher’s apron, blackened with soot and sorrow.
It was Garrick.
But not as the village remembered him.
This Garrick was broken. Hollow-eyed.
Made of smoke and grief.
⸻
He spoke not in anger, but in mourning.
“I made the cheese to save them,” he said.
“Their children were dying. Their crops were rotting. I found a way… I fed the hunger beneath this village.”
Lina’s breath caught.
“You fed… what?”
Garrick raised a trembling finger to the ceiling.
“Not heaven, child. Never heaven.”
“There’s something beneath the well. Older than stone. Older than God.”
“And it’s still hungry.”
⸻
Lina stepped back, heart pounding.
“Then why curse the cheese?” she asked.
“Why poison your own work?”
Garrick’s shadow began to fade.
“I didn’t. They did.”
“They feared the truth… so they called it a curse.”
“And when they burned me, they thought they burned the hunger too.”
He looked at her, eyes full of centuries.
“But curses don’t burn. They ferment.”
⸻
The cellar walls began to shake.
The symbols on the cheese glowed red.
And far above them, the village bell — silent for years — rang out.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
The Reckoning had begun.
- Writer
