All Chapters of The Obelisk of Healing Truths: When History Heals, the World: Chapter 21
- Chapter 30
135 chapters
Chapter 21: A Skeptic's Challenge
The ride to market town Briar's End was a ribbon of dust and hope, heavy with rumors in the wind. No longer merely whispers about the "miracle doctor" of Oakhaven, they had turned bitter into something specific, something menacing. They spoke of a man who could unburn fire, who purified poison from water by sand and sunlight, who restored life to dead things by a glow of hands. Alexander Carter was no longer a man, but a legend, and legends attract devotion and disbelief.Briar's End was light-years from the isolation of Oakhaven. A bustling city where the desperation of the nation blended with the indifference of petty bureaucracy, the atmosphere was thick and heavy with smells of animals, freshly baked bread, and festering trash. In Briar's End, people were so densely packed that illness was a quiet, chronic visitor, and hope was a commodity that was spent sparingly.Alexander's goal was simple: supplies. Salt, needles, hardy cloth, and, if possible, a few books. Basic materials a t
Chapter 22: Whispers in the City
The return journey to the city was a dive into another kind of jungle. The naked ignorance of Briar's End was exchanged for a heavy, boiling mist of rumor. They traveled in a packed barge downriver, and Alexander could feel the rumors like something hard, against his skin.".he stood before a stone angel which spoke to him." ".no, a demon. Traded his soul for power. That's why his hands smolder with hellfire." ".cured a boy in Briar's End just by looking at him. The fit just. stopped." ".Pierce called it witchcraft. Called him a menace." ".Pierce is an arrogant fool. My cousin's in Oakhaven. Tell me the water's cleaner than a lord's wine and the children are chubby again.".The gossip was a hydra, one head contradicting the others but all born of the same body: his deeds. He was no longer human; he was a story told, and the storytellers were shaping him to their expectations and their fears.Sophia was his anchor. Her down-to-earth, sensible presence was the antidote to the wave of su
Chapter 23: The Gift of the Obelisk
The room above The Guttering Candle was an egg of distant pain. The turmoil of the sick city was a low, insistent hum below the boards, a clashing chorus of coughs and screams and the rare ringing bell of an epidemic cart. Alexander lay on his bony pallet, but sleep was a distant country. The Bio-Scry map of the city burned its way onto the back of his eyelids—a universe of hurt with a throbbing black star in the center.Every red light was a charge. Every flash of gold, a chain of blame. The weight of the Second Carving, the Law of Consequences, was a weight of lead on his heart. He was to shatter a system. How does a man topple an empire built on illness? With herbs? With sand? The tools of Oakhaven were woefully insufficient against Aethelred's monolithic greed.A familiar tension began to build at the center of his forehead, a psychic thunderhead. The city sounds receded, not into silence, but into a deep, thrumming quietness. The air within the tiny room became heavy, charged wit
Chapter 24: The Impossible Patient
The knock came at dawn, delivered by a tattered, gasping girl not yet a dozen years old. She located them at The Guttering Candle, her eyes glowing with a hope so desperate that it was painful to witness.“Please,” she gasped, clutching a crumpled, clean-ish handkerchief. “You’re the Obelisk man, ain’t you? Mam sent me. It’s me da. They say he’s got Bloom. But he ain’t coughin’. He just… won’t move. Won’t speak. The hospital men put the red cloth on his door. They said they can’t do any more. They’re just waitin’ for the cart.”A red cloth. A quarantine marker. A death sentence.Alexander's Truth-Sense hummed. There was no ambush. This was pure, raw despair. He nodded. "Take me to him."She led them through a labyrinth of back streets to a dilapidated tenement building. A bloody red rag was indeed tied about the end of a ground-floor door handle. The smell that met them when the door was opened was not the smell of cholera's sweet decay, but the heavy, metallic smell of stagnation and
Chapter 25: Rumors of Forbidden Powers
The tenement room silence following Ronan's speaking of his wife's name was a bubble of impossible reality, fragile and poised to burst. When it burst, the sound that erupted was not applause, but a discordant wave of gasps and sobs and frantic questions. The two physicians from City General stood frozen, their professional haughtiness shattered and replaced with primal, superstitious fear. The younger one fled without a word, elbowing through the crowd outside. The older, Dr. Evans, remained, his face pale, his hand trembling as he reached not for a medical instrument, but to scratch a sign of protection against evil.Alexander paid them little heed. He was empty, a vessel drained of all but a faint spark of awareness. The cost of the Hands of Purifying Fire was not paid in System Points alone; it was a hemorrhage of spirit. He was drained, his nerves scraped raw by the passage of unthinkable power. Sophia was at his side in an instant, her arm around him, holding him up. Her touch w
Chapter 26: Interrogation by the Council
The summons arrived the next morning. Not delivered by a barefoot urchin, either, but by two city guards in polished breastplates, their faces as unyielding as stone. The document itself was heavy vellum, sealed with the official wax stamp of the City Council—a balanced scale superimposed over a caduceus."Dr. Alexander Carter," the older guard intoned, his voice expressionless. "The Council of Health and Public Order requests your presence. Forthwith."It wasn't a request. Sophia moved to stand beside Alexander, her posture defiant, but he laid a hand on her arm. "It's alright," he told her, though it wasn't. "This was inevitable."The stroll to the Council Chambers was a dour, quiet march along streets that seemed to hold their breath. People stopped to watch them pass, their faces unreadable. The guards did not take them to the main civic structure, but to an older, smaller one named the Hall of Verdicts—a building where they prosecuted medical malpractice and public health crimes.
Chapter 27: Corruption Exposed
The lull in the Council chamber after Alexander's rebellion was thicker than the dust on the law books lining the walls. Chancellor Hale's cold smile was a promise of bureaucratic violence, more fearsome than any shouted threat. The two guards at the door moved forward, their hands on the hilts of their short swords. The inference was clear: his choice was obedience or arrest."You will wait here," Hale said, his tone returning to its dry, administrative monotone. "The Council will review your… situation. Don't attempt to leave."He rose, and the other council members rose with him, making their way through a side door into a private antechamber. The heavy oak door groaned closed, and Alexander was left to himself and the two guards. The air was stifling. He could feel the weight of the institution bearing down on him, a machinery that was designed to grind away at individuality and impose conformity. His Truth-Sense hummed with the residual energy of their rejection—a smug, immovable
Chapter 28: Poisoned Truths
Alexander did not return to The Guttering Candle. Maeve's fellow workers would look there first. He vanished into the city's underbelly, using what Maeve had told him of derelict passageways and rotting sewers. The stench of trash was preferable to perfumed corruption in the Council chamber.He had taken refuge in the bell tower of a derelict chapel in a semi-abandoned sector, its sacred purpose long since lost. He watched over the city from his high perch. The Bio-Scry map in his mind still seared with the angry red of the Crimson Bloom and the pulsing black star of Patient Zero. Now, though, he saw something new. Faint, pulsing orange points across the city—Council guards, Aethelred security, searching for him.He spent a restless night haunted by the words in the memorandum. Non-Viable. Asset liquidation. Unique opportunity. The language of genocide, whitewashed for official reports.The dawn broke, and with it, the poison.It started in the more affluent districts first. Couriers
Chapter 29: Healing Sacrifices
The bell tower was no longer a place of peace; it was a prison. The city's hatred clung to the air in a palpable mist, and Alexander felt its acidic bite even many stories up above the pavement. The orange blips of his pursuers on his Bio-Scry screen increased in number, their search patterns more coordinated. He was a rat in a city's corridors that wanted him eliminated.But the infected stayed on. The Crimson Bloom still smoldered. The aching black star of Patient Zero on his inner map was an annoying reminder of where the corruption had originated. He could not attack it head-on—not yet, not unless he knew what it was. But he could not stay hidden while individuals died, their faith in him coalescing into fear or worse, dissipating into apathy.He began to shift under cover of darkness, a phantom in the plague-tainted darkness. Sophia was his sole link with the world beyond, her face etched with deeper furrows of worry as she risked the ascent to bring food and news to him."They'r
Chapter 30: The Obelisk's Deeper Warning
The fever dream was a battlefield of suffering. Alexander thrashed on the cold stone floor of the bell tower, his flesh running with sweat that was ice water and fire all at once. He wasn't healing anyone, but his body was reacting as though he was, shaking with the pretend expenditure of energy he wasn't expending.Beneath the delirium, the Obelisk's grasp was not a tempting enticement. It was an abduction.The universe tore itself away. There was no fade, no dissolving into nothingness. One moment he burned on the earth; the next, he was lying on his back at the monolith's base, the stone cold against his burning cheek.The Obelisk did not stand. It trembled, quivering with a deep, inner agony. The carving on its surface—the First Truth, the Power, the Purifying Fire—were not glowing their familiar steady light. They strobed, flashed wildly, like an out-of-rhythm heart. Cracks, thin and glowing with the same angry red as the Fire carving, spiderwebbed out on its faces.This was not