The makeshift clinics were chock-full. The Cult's "Plague Procession" had paid off: a grim surge in new infections.Amelia made her way through the congested wards in the rubble of a tavern building, her arms aching with a leaden, bone-weary throb.The carvings of Fire and Water throbbed with a slow, low hum as she worked, but it was a draining effort.She could purify the Blight from a corpse, but one with a horrifying price.With each healing, it felt as though a little piece of her life force was spent.She was targeting her energy toward the worst of cases, the ones already near death, while Sophia and a handful of other volunteers were administering the serum to the newly exposed. The air reeked with cries of pain and the smell of antiseptic and fear. It was an attrition battle, and they were losing it.It was during this mayhem that Kael, the street-healer, discovered her. His own face, normally fixed in a mask of hard pragmatism, was white, his eyes dark-shadowed with a new hor

The press, a rickety, hand-cranked relic that Ethan Ward had laboriously restored, creaked to a stop. The last page of his tale, still damp with ink, lay on top of its pile of siblings. No ordinary tale was this; it was a blockbuster. He had titled it simply: "The Architects of Agony: How a Shadow Cult Engineered Atheria's Plague."For months, he had worked on it. Grainy daguerreotypes of cult symbols carved into sewer walls. Shipping manifests for chemical precursors identical to the toxins in plague-bombs. The confession of a broken, dying man who'd served as a courier for the Septic Sage before his conscience—or his lungs—gave out. Ethan had made the connections the City Watch would not make, a line from the grisly sermons of the Prophet to the cold, calculating logistics of the Factotum, and onward to the bioweaponry of the Septic Sage. He named names. He pointed fingers. It was true, naked and undeniable.He did not feel a sense of triumph, but a cold, hard conviction. This would

The river mill was a grave waiting for its second victim. Ethan's breathing had fallen into a weak, shallow rhythm under Amelia's tireless ministrations. The elemental forces within her—the searing Purge and the calming Restore—flowed into him in a constant, draining cycle. She was a dam against a raging infection, and the effort was etching new lines of weariness around her eyes.The outside world, the agony of the city, had dwindled to these four walls of this damp, cold room. Sophia sat on a heap of sacking in the corner. The serum had saved her life but not her strength. She was gaunt, her skin holding the waxy pallor, and every cough from her own injured lungs a reminder of how close they all danced along the edge. She registered the tremble of Amelia's hands, the perspiration on her forehead despite the chill.She registered the complete concentration, the single-minded devotion to the man on the floor.She was quiet for a day and a night. She tended to their meager supplies, bo

The test hung before them, a gauntlet thrown not just at the feet of the Prophet, but at the very pillars of his religion. For an eternity of a moment, the only sound in the underground temple was the wild thudding of Amelia's own heart and the slow, terrible drip of the blood of the children. And then the Prophet shocked her. He laughed.It was not a loud, triumphal cry, but a low, ominous laugh of true pleasure which sounded eerily behind the black mask. The cultists, who had braced themselves for violence, relaxed, their posture shifting to one of anticipation. They recognized that tone. This was not the introduction to death; it was the beginning of a lesson.A heretic doesn't die like a warrior," stated the Prophet, his tone smooth and patronizing. "A heretic's lies must be uncovered, so that everyone will know the truth. You claim your power is more than the holy purification. You claim you can repair that which we have in reverence. Let it be.".He motioned with a gloved hand.

The stunned silence in the Silent Cathedral did not last. It was a void, and nature—specifically, human nature—abhors a void. As the last reverberations of the Obelisk's voice faded and the gold radiance receded from Amelia's form, the air was thick with a dazed, despondent murmur. The cultists, who had been so coherent in their savagery just moments before, were now a group of stunned, cowering individuals. They had witnessed a miracle, one that obliterated their entire view of the world.The Prophet, Silas, was the first to break. His mind, so laboriously built on a bedrock of nihilistic dogma, thrashed around seeking hold on the shifting terrain. The triumph in his vision had been replaced by a panicked, cage-like calculation. He would not accept what he had seen. To believe it was to believe that all he had taught—the supremacy of rot, the inanity of hope, the divinity of the Shadow—was a falsehood. His very sanity, his power, his identity hung upon the negation of the testimony o