Searing Vittles

Following the devastation of Earth by the arrival of the Ash Gods, the remaining 3% of human survivors were cleaved down to less than one-third of the remaining population by a fatal disease known as the Searing Plague. This plague spread via air transmission, and this fact was easy to deduce from watching its spread among groups of survivors. However, despite this well established fact, numerous myths and rumors regarding the origin and method of spread of the plague abounded among the groups of survivors left standing after its decimation of humanity. Chief among these rumors was the myth of Searing Vittles. This myth claimed that the Searing Plague originated in human food, and worse water, leftover after the Great Cataclysm. The rumor was that the aliens somehow poisoned all of the edible food that was not destroyed in the Cataclysm, and that when stockpiles of rations were discovered by survivors and eaten they were infected with the earliest strains of the plague. Later on, it would adapt to be transmitted by air, but it originated in canned foods, starches, fruits, vegetables, and meats not consumed by the inferno. As such, many people avoided eating food from before the Cataclysm at all costs, preferring to scavenge food from the new, desolate land of Ashrain. Consequentially, due to the scarcity of resources, the majority of these people died from starvation or dehydration, further depleting the population of human beings left on the ruined planet. Because the Searing Plague left the unified collectives of humanity scattered and divided, no clarification was distributed widely amongst them regarding the true origins and nature of the disease, and so tragically the myth of the Searing Vittles persisted, leading many more to their deaths in the years to come.