All Chapters of The Obelisk of Healing Truths: When History Heals, the World: Chapter 81 
				
					- Chapter 90
				
135 chapters
				Chapter 82. A Burning Clinic
			
The news was delivered by the mouth of an urchin, a tiny, soot-faced girl-child named Pip who was one of Ethan's most reliable runners. She found Amelia huddled in a new, temporary sanctuary—a stinking little place behind a working tannery that reeked of urine and decay, a good hideout for a fugitive."The clinic, miss," Pip gasped, her eyes wide with a fear that wasn't for herself. "The blue-cloaks… they've come with torches!"Amelia's blood went cold. The clinic. It was more than just a building; it was the physical embodiment of her life's work. Each bottle of tonic, each sterile bandage, each scratch on the floorboards from cots dragged across them spoke of a battle waged, a life respected. It was her haven, and Sophia's. And Pip said there were patients still left inside. The feeble ones who couldn't be moved, the ones Sophia had been hiding from the Council's "cleanse and burn" squads.She did not think. She did not scheme. A primitive compulsion, lower than fear, took charge. S
				Chapter 83. Fire and Ash
			
All the world had been distilled to one, bitter impression: pain. It was a symphony, and she was in the orchestra. A wailing, high note from the blisters on her hands and face. A thrumming, pounding bass from the ache in her muscles from dragging bodies. A sharp, percussive beat from each ragged breath that convulsed her smoke-burned lungs. Amelia knelt on cobblestones, beyond feeling the crowd, the guards, or the crumbling ruin behind. There was only pain, and under that, silence worse than any scream. It was the silence of those she had not managed to reach.She had saved five. Old Man Hemlock, the seamstress, two more. Five lives pulled from the jaws of an unfair, raging death. A noble tally. A miracle tally.But the clinic had rescued twelve.The math was a chill, sharp knife twisting in her stomach. Seven were left. Seven sets of lungs that had breathed the toxic smoke until they could breathe no more. Seven hearts that had stopped as the flames engulfed them. She knew their nam
				Chapter 84. The Voice in the Stone
			
The world had drawn down to the size of a hurt. Amelia moved through the city's decaying underbelly like a specter, her body a metronome of agony conducted by the fire. Every movement of the burlap she'd tied on her seared hands sent lightning rods shooting up her arms. Every breath was a gritty struggle, her lungs now raw from constantly being near the smoke. The blisters on her face pulled tight with every feeling, which was none. Her face was an ash mask and a dried-up serum.She found shelter not in a crypt or tunnel, but in a place so abandoned it did not remember life at all: the kiln of a derelict brickworks. The great round oven, cold for four decades, was a dome of burned clay, its mouth a dark hole opening out into a rubbish tip of broken tiles. It was a suitable tomb for what she had become. A vessel burned and unnecessary.She lay there for two days, not moving. She drank condensation from the clay walls and let the pain bind her to a reality superior to one within her min
				Chapter 85. A Doctor's Confession
			
The clinic ashes were still warm. Three days after the blaze, a pale grey dust had lay upon it all, an endless snow fall of regret. Amelia moved through the ruins as if a ghost haunting the corpse of her own mortality. She was not there to recover; there was nothing to recover. She was there to remember. To lay hands on the burnt rock and buckled metal and permit the bodily pain to root the psychic storm in her. The Obelisk's revelation—that the plague had a master—had turned her world into a hall of mirrors, with each reflection showing an unseen puppeteer.Thus, when she beheld the figure cautiously navigating the wreckage, she did not recoil. She felt a chill, impersonal interest. It was not a guard; they had obtained what they wanted. It was not one of the Ashen; they would have come with less hesitation.The man was tall, wearing a doctor's coat that stood out starkly white amidst the filth, now streaked with soot around the hem. Stepping past splintered wood into a strip of weak
				Chapter 86. Cure in Ashes
			
The kiln at the back of the brickworks was no longer an ossuary. It was a laboratory. A frantic, sacrilegious taunt, but an experiment nonetheless. The pain of Amelia's burns had been her constant, churning shadow, but it had lessened to a scream and then to a low rumble, a murmur beneath the hysteria of her mind. Crushing as the Obelisk's revelation had been—that the plague had been a purposeful weapon—it had not dazed her into paralysis. It had honed her. The enemy was smart. So, the remedy had to be smarter, rather than just strong.But master plans required a birth. And the only birth left was the end of her previous life: the ashes of her clinic.She returned disguised by a drizzle that painted the world grey and muted sounds. The ruins steamed, water striking fiery spots deep in the rubble. The vision was a new wound, yet she approached it now not as one who wept, but as a scavenger. She had a surgical purpose: to go looking for the seeds of a solution in the aftermath of destru
				Chapter 87. Sophia's Recovery
			
The kiln-laboratory held its breath. Only one, feeble candle lighted the scene, a dancing flame casting leaping shadows across the bent clay walls. On a pallet spread with reasonably clean straw in the center of the small room, Sophia was dying.The Blight had attacked her with violent and swift force. The air from the incineration of the clinic, the stress, the grief—it had shattered her hardened frame. The fever had returned with a fury, greater and more severe than before. Black flowers had burst on her chest and arms, a field of death. Her respirations were a shallow, rapid rasp. She had lapsed into unconsciousness hours before.Amelia knelt beside her, the vial of serum shaking in her own hand and feeling abnormally weighty. The same grimy, murky substance had interrupted Cooper's demise into death. But that was different. That was Sophia. Her anchor. Her friend. The only one who'd never wavered.The Obelisk remained silent. There were no etchings of probability, no data streams 
				Chapter 88. The City Uprising
			
Hope, once lit, is a more contagious fire than any plague. No poisoned wells, no fits of coughing, are needed to spread it. It spreads on whispers, on glances, on the mere, indisputable fact of a life renewed.Cooper lived through it, too. He walked. It took Amelia's desperate injection three days to take effect, but the hollownecked skeleton of a man who had been on the edge of the pyre stood unsteadily on his legs and, with Ethan's help, staggered out of the derelict stable. He wasn't a miracle man. He was starved, hollownecked, and he moved with the tentative slowness of a newborn foal. But he stood. He breathed. And he was seen.Sophia's recovery was a slower, more intimate miracle, yet one that was the groundwork on which the public one was built. Ethan, keeper of the word, took the threads of truth and spun them into a fabric that could not be silenced. His rewritten pamphlets did not dispute his theory or assertion. They testified in simple, irrefutable fact."Cooper lives. Cur
				Chapter 89. The Council Strikes Back
			
The chant was an earthquake, shaking the foundations of the Citadel. Amelia! Amelia! Amelia! No longer a cry of plea, now a call of demand. From the height of his balcony, Councillor Thorpe watched the crowd, his knuckles white as he gripped the stone railing. This was no riot that could be put down on a few dozen cracked skulls. This was a turning inside out. The ruled were ruling themselves, and their law was one name.Fear, sharp and cold, penetrated his rage. They had held the Blight-Witch at bay by making her illegal. Now, the populace was enshrining her. Her antidote, even untried to his eyes, was a more effective weapon than any arm. She offered a future, and a future the Council's dominance of engineer-'ed despair could not tolerate.They have lost all fear," his captain of the guard snarled, his face pale. "We cannot hold the square if they charge."Thorpe's mind, a labyrinth of cynical mathematics, found another route. If you can't stop a wave, you must deflect it. If you ca
				Chapter 90. Trial of Flames
			
The great hall of the Citadel was no justice hall. It was a theatre of power. Sunlight, reddened by the stained glass of great windows, threw its bloody light upon a sea of faces. The rich, the fearful, the Council's loyalists—packed onto the benches, gazing wide-eyed in a mixture of horror and gaping fascination. At the far end, seated on a raised dais, the Council sat, Councillor Thorpe at the head of it. To his right-hand side the High Inquisitor stood, a black smear against the marble. And to his left, a new, chill presence: the Prophet, his bog-oak mask serene, his carved arms folded. The alliance of state and extremism was complete.In the midst of the hall, manacled wrists and ankles, stood Amelia. They had taken away her dirty cloak and put her in a simple, coarse-woven shift. The uniform of a common offender. But they were not able to take that stance from her. She stood tall, her shoulders back, chin high. Her facial burns had healed, but in the theatrical light, they looked
				Chapter 91. Ethan's Gamble
			
The wail of "Amelia!" that had rung through the city had turned bitter to a dark, anticipant silence. The air was thick with the stench of fear and the acrider, fouler scent of wood impregnated with pitch. Ethan Ward waited in hiding, watching as the pyre was built in the square. Each log that the Council laborers placed was a ringing of the hammer on the lid of hope. They weren't just constructing an execution site; they were constructing an emblem.The signal wasn't ambiguous: this is what happens to the ones who upset the status quo.Ethan's knuckles were white with knots as he gripped the moldy windowsill. His journalist's mind, usually an icy calculating observer, was hot with rage and a crazed, calculated grief. He had seen the look in Amelia's eyes as they dragged her away. It hadn't been the look of someone who expected to be rescued. It had been the look of someone who already made herself a martyr.But Ethan was not ready to let her go.His risk, however, was not saving her