A sickness

Just as the failure of the heir was happening, in many other locations there were many horrific events taking place among the common people that had survived so far under the dire situation.

Those that had been forced to stay outside a city wall and fend for themselves were many and they had to resort to many methods to survive or help their loved ones survive.

Old people committed suicide so that their families would not be burdened by them and would have to split their food and supplies even more than they should.

Babies and children were given quick deaths to prevent them suffering from hunger and sickness, afterwards some of the parents joined their families by committing suicide.

In other places where there was the most despair during the flood, humanity had turned to the point of desperation making them abandon what makes them human.

The previous morality and laws that they had lived by or what had restrained their true hidden nature was holding them back.

Many began to survive by climbing over the corpses of those around them, exploiting and even wishing harm upon many others.

With nobody to take charge of this change, many groups came together for various reasons whether it be for justice, survival, power or to cause others pain and suffering.

Surviving females that were without protection were captured and treated as tools to vent the men's frustrations on or as bargaining chips to create alliances.

Surviving children were used as tools to kill, steal and gather things for the adults but were only able to keep a small amount of food and water or continued to starve depending on their owners treatments.

The strong preyed on the weak and abused their power because there was nobody to enforce the laws and punish them.

The weak continued to suffer and had to either learn how to survive not only the flood but also human nature once it had reached the lowest point.

Those that had moved away from the city walls formed their own groups, attacked other survivors and passing carriages to raid for anything they could use.

Others chose to survive by eating human flesh and began to eat the weakest or least influential people in their groups.

Those that had some hunting knowledge went deep into the mountains and forests to try to find a place unaffected by the flood where they could acquire food from hunting or gathering fruits and herbs.

When someone had symptoms of being sick they were exiled from the groups to avoid a spread but those that were unable to do so had suffered from the disease spreading.

Rotting corpses of dead bodies were washed up from underneath the ground from where they had been buried and caused further spread of disease.

In some cities or towns with walls around them that had allowed entry to others, supplies had already begun to dwindle and with the growing conflicts within the city between the citizens and the refugees, the unity of the people was further splitting under the growing numbers and the lowering supplies.

Power struggles between noble and merchant families, businessmen, the citizens, refugees, mercenaries, criminal groups and others continued.

Some surviving villages and small towns without enough protection that had been least affected by the floods suffered from having too many intruders on their lands and even were attacked by some groups.

It was not just the natural disaster that caused human suffering but humans too.

If what they all had been experiencing would be hell and suffering then those closest to the borders would be experiencing heaven and salvation.

However in the deepest parts where the despair had reached new heights over this time and continued to accumulate, there were some movements by another group.

In a small village lay a small boy who had a sickly look and seemed to have been suffering for a long time.

The boys eyes were lifeless and full of despair as he stared at the cracked wooden ceiling within the barn that he was trapped within.

The village had been running out of supplies and could not make any risks to venture outside to a city to make exchanges.

One of the crop fields had been left undamaged so what had been grown was split among the surviving villagers but as the death toll increased and disease began to spread, they all began turning on each other.

The boy once had an older sister and a loving mother and father but as time passed his family were becoming weaker due to cutting down on the food they had eaten.

The people of the village had begun to turn on each other some time after, his parents faced pressure from another family to push the marriage of his sister and their son forward.

In exchange for a small amount of food to keep their son alive, they eventually gave in and sacrifice the daughter to them not knowing how she would suffer during this time.

Little did they know that this was merely the beginning of their troubles.

The village head had been one of the people to push the marriage forward along with the family do they seemed to form some sort of agreement in secret.

How could his parents possibly know how dark the hearts of the others had become during this time and guess what would follow next.

The next couple of days after the wedding happened, there was a time when everyone was served with meat within their portion of food.

The village head boasted that they had not been abandoned and god had provided them with enough luck to capture and kill a large beast animal that had stumbled into their territory.