All Chapters of The Obelisk of Healing Truths: When History Heals, the World: Chapter 91 
				
					- Chapter 100
				
135 chapters
				Chapter 92. The Prison Carving
			
The cell had been excavated into the foundations of the Citadel. No window, no bed, nor even straw to lie on. The ground was damp, dripping a steady, cold sweat onto the stone. There was only a sickly yellow slit of light that crept beneath the iron-banded door from a torch in the corridor. The air was thick with the smell of mold and the soft metallic sting of dried blood. This was not a place for prisoners who had a future.This was a waiting room for the pyre. Amelia curled on the ground, back against the chill, rough wall. The cuffs still had been removed from her wrists and ankles, fastening her to a huge iron ring which was screwed into the stone. The weight was enormous, an unceasing, savage reminder of her powerlessness. The bravado she had shown at the trial, the defiant calm she had known as the flames circled around her, had collapsed in the utter darkness of the dungeon. Here, there was no crowd to witness, no spectacle to make her.There was merely the silence, the cold, 
				Chapter 93. Healing Through Walls
			
The cell was a universe of sensory deprivation. Vision was the dim yellow line at the edge under the door. Sound was the drip of water and the scuttle of unseen motion. Olfaction was dampness and decay. Contact was the persistent, rubbing pressure of iron. Time passed measured in the slow, rhythmic thud of the Obelisk's carving on her eyelids: Chains cannot bind the healer of truth.But on the second day, something new entered into her world. A cough.It was not the dry, rasping cough of a wet throat. It was a rattling, wet, deep one that spoke of fluid in the lungs. It was the cell to the left, punctuated by low, despairing moans. The Blight was in the dungeons. Of course. Condemned were a pre-screened bunch for the pyre; what was the point of medicine on them?Amelia listened, her healer's sensitivities vibrating even where she was now. She could see the patient—a man, by the intensity of the cough—crouched on the stone, shaking with fever, his body combating itself into nothing. He
				Chapter 94. The Escape
			
 The murmur that had begun as a cell-secret had widened into a current, then a tide, then a hurricane. The mood of the dungeon had altered no longer merely in character but in degree. The constant, wretched coughing which had been the soundtrack to desolation had been followed by another noise: speech. Low, bemused speech between prisoners who had believed themselves hours from death, and were now astonishingly, bewilderingly themselves.The first patient Amelia had healed, Jorgen, was now recovered enough to bang on his door, his raw but angry bellow."She cured me! The witch they're afraid of cured the Blight in my lungs! They're burning a saint! They're burning our only hope!"His cry was seconded by the woman whose son slept soundly now. "My boy lives due to her! Are we going to let them murder her?"Hope, if sown in absolute darkness, does not bloom as a gentle flower. It explodes as a fissure in a dam. It starts as a hairline crack of possibility. It grows and the pressure behin
				Chapter 95. The Epidemic Peak
			
Leaving the Citadel hadn't been sweet like winning. It had been sweet like jumping from a burning ship into an ocean of plague. The city that Amelia and Ethan entered was a dead body in its later stages of decay. The brief, sparkly moment of rebellion at her trial had been snuffed out, replaced by the overwhelming reality of the peak.The plague was not a thing that happened; it was the environment. The air itself was poisonous. It smelled sweetly sick, like rotting flesh, a smell so cloying that it stuck to hair and clothes and on the tongue. There was no hum of an active city, its constant, low-grade thrum muted. In their place a mixture of misery—a crying of the newly widowed, hoarse, raw coughing behind shut windows, and underneath it all, the dismal, industrious rumble of carts.The dead-wagons. They trundled through the streets both day and night, the drivers' faces wrapped in rags, their eyes hollow. They no longer collected isolated bodies. They were sweeping, removing blocks 
				Chapter 96. The Rival's Redemption
			
The universe had narrowed to a single, hard purpose: the fight against the Cult's biological horror. Amelia, Sophia, and the threadbare web of volunteers were stretched thinner than paper. Every vial of serum was a treasure, every clean bandage a victory. They operated out of a new, constantly shifting base—a dusty bookbinder's shop whose owner had died in the Blight—and the air was thick with boiling herbs and despondence.It was there, in darkness on a rain-beaten night, that a ghost appeared at their doorway.Amelia was counting out their dwindling supplies, the Obelisk's carvings on her arms aglow with a warm, spent light as she worked out dosages in her head and guessed at mortality. The knock was neither the frantic pounding of a beggar nor the heavy crash of the Ashen. It was a hesitant, shy tap.Ethan, ever the suspect, crept to the door, a blunt metal ruler gripped tightly in his fist. "Who's there?"A voice, cracked and gravelly, came from the other side. "It's… it's Marcus 
				Chapter 97: The Prophet's Curse
			
The original epidemic of the Ash-Sleep Fever had been a reaper, cutting down the weak with a ghastly, desiccatory efficiency. This was a meat grinder.It began in the Grimeward, where the first plague had risen. A wife had been tending her husband, who was fevers, and suddenly screamed. Not in grief, but horror. Her husband, listless and hot only a few hours earlier, now convulsed. Scarlet, thin tears formed at the edge of his eyes, streaming bloody paths down his ash-grey temples. After a moment, he coughed, a wet tearing sound, and a fine spray of red flowed from his lips, spattering her face.He died before sunfall.This was not Ash-Sleep. This was different. This was worse. They called it the Crimson Agony. The incubation was mercifully short. The fever came like a burst of lightning, so intense that it would sometimes induce seizures. And then the bleeding started. Capillaries bursting with effort, victims bleeding out of their eyes, their gums, their noses. As the virus—for such
				Chapter 98. Carving of Fire and Water
			
There was a lull in the destroyed bakery that was tangible. It was the silence of a city waiting for the final, fatal breath. Amelia stood against the cooled oven, its cold rough brick a contrast to the otherworldly heat that had once abided there. In her hand was a sole, exhausted vial that contained the remnants of the crude serum. I was exhausted. The hope it had offered appeared like a dream, lost to the icy glow of a catastrophic dawn.Ethan was outside, foraging for food that no longer existed, for information that was ever only bad. Sophia slept a few feet from him, her breathing calm, evidence of the strength of the serum, but also of its shortcomings. She had managed to store a few handfuls. The city was killing itself by the thousand.Hope was no longer a feeling; it was the oxygen she breathed. The Obelisk's cold calculation echoed in her mind: Projected population loss: 87%. The numbers were cold, but the reality was in the bitter odor of pyre smoke that now hung over the 
				Chapter 99. A Cure Shared
			
The power coursed through Amelia's blood, a whirlpooling, shuddering balance of fire and water. With it, she could have been a goddess. She could have marched the suffering streets, a fire-tipped avatar of healing, touching the suffering and making them whole in a moment. People would have loved her. They would have made a new cult around the woman with the radiant arms. She could have substituted miracles for the Prophet, rather than arguments.The temptation had been a siren call, a promise of control, of order, of a saved world by one benign hand. Her hand.She stood in the destroyed window of the bakery, peering out while a dead-wagon rattled by. The scale of the suffering was too large. Even with her newfound power, she was still one person. How many could she really save in a day? A hundred? A thousand? And thousands more died. The Obelisk's blessing, all its grandeur notwithstanding, was still a tool for lone salvation. The plague was a problem of the many.Ethan moved in close
				Chapter 100. Council Collapse
			
The transmission of the cure did not bring peace. It brought reckoning.Weeks had elapsed since the serum had been a quiet revolution, an underground wave of hope that flowed through the rotting streets of the city. But hope, once it has accumulated its critical mass, does not stay quiet. It explodes. The knowledge that life was possible, survival not a privilege granted by the strong but a right to be seized by the lowest hand, was a firebomb. The match was lit when a Council patrol, keen to regain an eroding power, tried to storm Mother Agatha's make-shift clinic.They crested the hill with the sun, expecting to find a cowering old lady and a couple of jugs of contraband. What they found was a street lined with garbage and with furious men and women armed with cleavers, rusty blades, and with months of seething rage. The patrol was overwhelmed not with skill, but with raw righteous numbers. The news spread quicker than the Blight ever had: The citizens are resisting. And they are su
				Chapter 101. The Cult in Shadows
			
The quiet after the storm was the most misleading sound Amelia had ever seen. The city existed in stunned suspended animation for three days. The screams and brawls were over. The Citadel smoldered, its charred skull gazing out over the streets. The corpses of the Council and guards lay gone, dragged to the funeral pyres by the same arms that had overthrown them. A fragile, exhausted quiet descended. In the vacuum, Amelia had enough courage to believe. She and Ethan and Sophia patrolled the streets, no longer fugitives, but anxious liberators.They nodded to them with a respectful, even reverent, newfound attitude.They saw her as the precipitating agent, the one who had presented them with the cure and, as a consequence, the courage to claim their freedom.Make-shift clinics flourished, the serum brewing in hundred vats.For a few precious days, it seemed as though the city might begin the agonising task of healing.But the stillness was not peaceful. It was the moment of suspended b