All Chapters of The Obelisk of Healing Truths: When History Heals, the World: Chapter 31
- Chapter 40
135 chapters
Chapter 31: The Search for Missing Knowledge
The coppery taste of blood clung as a persistent ghost on his tongue, a grim reminder of the Obelisk's prophecy. Alexander lay out on the cold planks of the bell tower, the vision of the cracking, bleeding monolith burned into his mind. You are starving it. You are killing us both. The reality was a weight around his neck, heavier than anything that the City Council could build. He was a cracked cistern, leaking out his life and the Obelisk's power for personal miracles while the city's disease simmered systemically.He couldn't keep healing. The anguished cries that nudged against his Truth-Sense were harpoons in his own heart. But he couldn't keep answering every one of them with a death-dealing expenditure of his own vitality. The Hands of Purifying Fire were a double-edged sword. He required a scalpel. He required a means of healing that wouldn't cost him his own life to do.The answer came not in the guise of a quest, but in a quiet, desperate thought. The Obelisk was a storehous
Chapter 32: Rediscovery of Ancient Remedies
The attic room above The Guttering Candle was converted into a laboratory. It was unlike the antiseptic rooms in St. Brendan's. It was a dry, earthy scented room, with the sound of bubbling pots and the dusty, holy smell of the old scroll laid out on a white cloth.Alexander's fingers, the ones which had so recently burned with the passion of destruction, were now purple and green from grinding leaves and crushing berries. He worked with a single-minded purpose, the precise writing of the scroll of his guide. Sophia assisted him, her nurse's experience enabling her to learn rapidly, measuring, boiling, and distilling.The first was the Nightblossom. Alexander was instructed by Sister Seraphina to cut the leaves and flowers of the plant, the aerial parts, at sunset, "when the sun's fire has left the world but the moon's cool light has not yet taken hold." It was an aphoristic statement, but Alexander's Truth-Sense vibrated in assent; there was a biochemical basis for the timing, a cres
Chapter 33: Manifestation of Hands of Fire
The tenement was called the "Weaver's Nest," a crumbling five-story anthill of human lives where the city's textile workers resided, loved, and died in air thick with cotton dust and despair. The Crimson Bloom had found fertile soil here, its symptoms raging by day-to-day inhalation of particulates. It was not just an epidemic; it was a biological inferno.Alexander stood in the doorway of the thin alley that opened on the Nest, Sophia at his elbow. The air stank. It was filled with the sickly-rotten smell of cholera, the underlying, nipping tartness of fear. His Bio-Scry map was a nightmare. The entire building pulsed a solid, throbbing red, so heavy with disease that lives were smeared together into one bellowing patch of agony. Dozens of orange spots—City Guards—pared out an ill-formed, ineffective cordon across the block, their purpose not to help, but to corral the dying until they could be effectively dragged away."We can't enter," Sophia stated, her voice pinched with a profes
Chapter 34: From Villages to Cities
The story of the Weaver's Nest didn't spread. It blew up.It was too big, too visible, to be contained by pamphlets or Council denials. The guards who had been driven back by the unseen power disseminated their tales in whispers in taverns. The hundreds of survivors were living testimonies. The tale grew, took wings, and flew across the city in a single day.He was no longer the "Cinder-Soul" or the "Wounded Healer." He was given the title of Fire-Scribe, the one who burned the disease off the world's page.His fame became a tangible energy, a wave that attracted people to the run-down northern section where he was reported to stay in seclusion. The sick and the desperate came in a reluctant, inexorable stream, setting up temporary camps in the streets around The Guttering Candle. They did riot; they waited. Their religion was an unspoken, unhasty, and overwhelming pressure.Alexander learned. He could no longer make home visits. He set up a clinic in the bombed-out lot next to the ta
Chapter 35: Sophia's Vow
The clinic was a living thing, a monster of hope and need that breathed in the ill and breathed out the cure, or at least the steadied. Alexander moved through it like its center, a presence of unhuman composure at the storm's eye. His Active Scan was a low-level hum, a sixth sense that allowed him to sort the wounded with superhuman haste. A touch here, a whispered word there, a vial of purple tincture into an open hand. To the privileged few, the most extreme cases, a moment of intense willpower, a blinding flash of scarlet light at his fingers, and a consequent, gasping fall against a wall as the toll is exacted.Sophia was the heartbeat. She organized the volunteers, watched over the dwindling supplies, cleaned wounds, and reassured the dying when Alexander was too spent or needed elsewhere. She was his anchor, his translator, the mediator between his otherworldly talent and the cruel, human realm of suffering around them.And pressure was etching its way onto her, too. The calm,
Chapter 36: Blood in the Marketplace
The Salt Bazaar was the commercial heart of the city, a dirty, pulsating, noisy sprawl in which the smell of foreign spices fought to cut through the stench of unclean flesh and rotting rubbish. It was the only source of nourishment for the poor, where they might purchase food for a meal, cloth rags, and for a moment be part of a living, breathing whole. It was a place of fragile, desperate joy.Alexander and Sophia were there to restock. The mundane, worthwhile items: needles, thick thread, salt, a fresh pestle and mortar to take the place of one which had cracked under its constant use. They navigated through the sea of bodies with practiced care, hoods up, their Truth-Sense and keen eyes scanning for the telltale orange spots of City Guards or the more lethal, icy signatures of Aethelred's men.For one moment, it was almost normal. The raucous haggling, the laughter of the children interring the crowd, the smell of street food incinerated on barbecues. Sophia pointed to a stall whe
Chapter 37: The Price of Healing
The blood on his face split and dried into a crusty brown plate. Alexander still felt the ghost heat, a cold, accusing jolt to the numb, icy chill spreading through his soul. The marketplace had been evacuated, with nothing but wreckage of fear remaining: overthrown baskets, trampled fruits, and two bodies swathed in coarse sacking. One, a victim of a poison he had pushed into forgetfulness. The other, a casualty of a poison to which he had no antidote: human cruelty.The City Guards arrived late, their orange signature creeping along on his Bio-Scry map in a creeping, bureaucratic delay. They asked him questions, took notes, and viewed Alexander as the nuisance, not the informant. The official version, he realized, would be twisted. Fire-Scribe's Attempt at Healing Culminates in Tragic Violence. The narrative was already being written by hands that were unseen.In the attic bedroom, Sophia tried to clean him up. She used a wet cloth to gently remove the blood from his face, her hands
Chapter 38: Ethan's Discovery
The city seemed to breathe again. The shock of the marketplace massacre had created a fragile, nervous hush. The propaganda wheels of the Council were spinning at top speed, producing leaflets describing a "single, deranged killer" and "regrettable collateral casualties," carefully avoiding any mention of pre-targeted poisoning or the miraculous healing that had so brutally been overturned. The official version was a veil, hiding the truth.But beneath ground level, where despair and ink had mixed, there was a different story being told.Ethan Ward had been one who'd once believed in the system. A young idealist at the city's most celebrated broadsheet, The Clarion, he'd believed that journalism was simply a case of setting down facts and waiting for justice to be done. He'd been soon disillusioned. His stories on unsafe factory conditions had been spiked. His revelations of political corruption were watered down to nothingness. The owners of the Clarion had close ties with the same p
Chapter 39: Delicate Alliance
The city burned. Ethan Ward's secret had been the spark, and now a low, smoldering cloud of fury and fear was churning out of every ward. The Council acted swiftly and ruthlessly. The City Guards were everywhere, their presence no longer a passive containment but an angry occupation. The Whisper was declared seditious literature. Possession was a crime for which one could be imprisoned. The printers at the Inkwell went underground, their presses silent under cover of raid and arrest.Ethan Ward was the city's most sought after, second only to the Fire-Scribe himself. He slunk along in sewers and abandoned tunnels like a rat, but this was a rat on purpose. The release of the truth had been the first punch. Now he had to ensure that it wasn't a knockout punch. He had to find the one person who could make revelation into revolution.Finding the lair of the Fire-Scribe had not been as hard as he had thought. Secrets were currency that they spent sparingly in a city whose walls and windows
Chapter 40: The Doomsday Warning of the Obelisk
The fragile partnership with Ethan Ward was a fresh weight, but a logical one. For the first time since he'd come to the city, Alexander felt a hint of strategic ground beneath his feet. The incessant, fire-drill reaction was giving way to a plan. A dangerous, likely doomed plan to raid a Ministry warehouse, but a plan. It was a target. A direction.He was in the attic, crouched over a crude map of the warehouse area Ethan had sketched, when the world dropped away from beneath him.It wasn't the gentle pull of calling. It was a rough, physical jerk. One moment he was reading lines of ink; the next, he was racing through a whirlpool of wailing pressure, his senses ripped by a soundless roar. There was no time, no nothing. He simply was, in the presence of the Obelisk, and it was perishing.The giant monolith was shaking. The profound, seismic shudders convulsed its shape, and with each spasm, new cracks tore across its surface, releasing streams of that same horrific black smoke—the co