Sugarplague never arrived as a wave; it sifted down like dust. It crept in on fingertips and countertops, in the harmless glitter of spilled candy and the glaze on morning pastries. At first it was only a rumor—that if you stood too long in the sweetshop air, your tongue would tingle and your gums would itch, as though your teeth were trying to grow out of you.
Within weeks, mirrors became the enemy. People watched their reflections with a dread usually reserved for storms, searching for the first telltale shine: a crystalline edge on a fingernail, a sugared freckle spreading like frost. The infected didn’t cough or bleed. They laughed too easily, spoke too fast, and their pupils shrank to pinpricks, ringed by a faint, candy-pink halo.
Eventually, the cravings came. Bread, meat, even fruit tasted like ash. Only sugar soothed the ache worming through their bones. They gnawed on boiled sweets, on window glass, on each other’s hardened skin, desperate for more. And as entire districts turned glossy and brittle, the old stone statues toppled quietly in the night, replaced by new idols: towering, smiling effigies of candied bone and caramel flesh, built not by artisans, but by those who no longer remembered that they hadn’t always been made of sugar.
