The Journey of Cecil

It's been seemingly months since the town has been plagued. A disease is walking through the streets and it only seems like it's getting worse each day. The symptoms look simple but they kill easily, first you start to see a greenish hue in your skin, then sores start to appear. In the mirror, a person may see that their eye bags have changed from a bluish undertone into rosehip red hue. The fingers, toes, and lips seem to be the first to go, turning black and being able to easily be torn off, but anyway they'll fall off the body. Eyes of the infected are bloodshot and the tongue had a darker green hue than the skin, any pink hue of it leaving. It killed within days, leaving food for rats, which ran rampant.
The rat problem seemed correlated to this plague and it seems they've become more blood-hungry. People started to drop the bodies into pits of rats because of this. It was a way to completely get rid of the bodies that held the disease, being eaten in seconds.
On a farm was a young man named Cecil, his sickly mother told him, "If you're going out for a walk tonight, please be safe, I wouldn't know what to do if you got infected."

He'd simply nod and his mother then put her hands on his cheek looking at him, tearing up, telling him, "Please, promise me you'll be safe."

He would do as said, promising to her, "Mum, of course I'll be safe, I promise, I will not get sick, and I will be back in an hour. I just need some time away from the farm. Now please, get some rest, you need it."

His mother blinked away her tears and nodded, letting him go, understanding and taking this promise, laying back in her bed. A little while later Cecil got ready, putting on his boots, gloves, a coat, and a scarf. He was told to put all these clothes on to try and lessen his chances of being infected. With this, plus a leather satchel that was held on a hook by the door, he went out; walking away from his farm to the village, hands in pocket. No one was seemingly on the street for the plague and it was night, Cecil enjoyed the calm though.
Then, whilst on his walk, he heard rattling down a dark alleyway, he looked down at it with curiosity. Once he looked down, a metal pole rolled to him, it was a torch sconce. He'd pick it up and look at it, seeing the top is engraved with runes he did not understand; then he stood up, and looked down the alleyway, seeing nothing. With that, he continued on his walk with the sconce in hand, soon it was time for him to come home, putting the sconce in his satchel.
Whilst on the walk home, he'd see smoke rise into the sky just in front of him, in the direction of his home. At first, he thought his mother might be setting up a wood fire until more smoke poured into the light sky. This brung panic to Cecil's eyes and into his mind, starting to run home. He ran and ran, soon being at the front gate of his house, seeing the field it sat up upon, set on fire. To spend as less time as possible, he jumped the gate and ran to his house, which was set ablaze.

He burst through the wooden door, into a room filled with smoke, which made him cough, the heat unbearable. With a hurried pace, he looked around the home for his lone mother, breaking into room after room, until finding her. She was face down, pinned under fiery rubble on the floor, Cecil saw this and ran forward to her. He wasn't even able to say goodbye as the rough crumbled above his mother, obstructing any path to her.
With tears in his eyes, he knew he couldn't stay, running out of the house and away, panting, his scarf getting caught and ripping off in the process. He continued running until the blazes subsided from his vision, stopping in a forest. He slowed down and leaned against a tree for support while he breathed quite raggedly. Within moments he started to tear up, the grieving process starting then and there.

As tears streamed down his rose-tinted cheeks he'd fall on to the cold forest floor. The home he grew up in and the woman that raised him was now gone. He was only able to sob for just a fracture of a second as he heard an arrow hit the tree he was at, on the other side. The sound made him jump and he looked over on the other side, seeing the arrow, with a note attached to it.