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Chapter 123. First National Outbreak
The hush in Fallowmill was the loudest sound Amelia had ever heard.It wasn’t an absence of noise, but a presence—a heavy, suffocating blanket of despair that had smothered the cries of the sick and the prayers of the dying. The only sounds that remained were the impersonal, mechanical ones: the hum of the mobile incinerators, the crunch of PMC boots on broken glass, and the occasional, sharp crack of a distant gunshot.For three days, Amelia had worked within the walls. The Sun-Salt Purification was active, a series of crystalline arrays she had constructed at the central reservoir that now made the water gleam with an almost imperceptible inner light. The Heartwood Elixir, synthesized in a makeshift lab from pine resin, specific alkaloids from local weeds, and a catalyst of her own empowered blood, was being distributed by the few soldiers Kincaid trusted. The violent, hemorrhagic fevers were breaking. The rot was slowing. In the core of Fallowmill, a small, fragile bubble of stabil
Chapter 122. The Pandemic Sculpting
The armoured truck was a metal coffin on wheels, smelling of stale sweat, oil, and the sharp tang of fear. Colonel Kincaid sat rigidly opposite Amelia, her gaze a physical weight, analyzing, dissecting. Minister Croft fidgeted with his tablet, the blue glow illuminating the deep bags under his eyes. Amelia ignored them both. She focused on the vibration of the tires on the broken road, a steady hum that was the only constant in the chaos of her mind.Then the humming stopped.Not the truck—the world.A silence so profound it felt like a physical blow fell over her senses. The grumble of the engine, the muttered conversation between the soldiers in the front, the rustle of Croft’s suit—it all vanished. In the void, a single, deep thrum began, a note so low it felt like the planet itself was groaning.The Obelisk erupted into her consciousness not as a passive monolith, but as a living quake.It shook. Violent, seismic tremors that sent cracks of white-hot light spiderwebbing across its
Chapter 121. The Nation Shudders
The air in the makeshift clinic, a repurposed schoolhouse on the outskirts of the city, was thick with the smell of antiseptic, sweat, and dread. Amelia moved between cots, her hands—now subtly etched with faint, glowing lines only she could see—pressing against fevered brows. A touch was all it took. The Obelisk’s power, a cool, subterranean river flowing through her, did the rest. The raging, unnamed fevers broke. The lesions of the "Stone Pox," a cult-manufactured disease, receded. Hope, fragile as a bird, returned to the eyes of the villagers.But Amelia felt the weight, a leaden fatigue that went deeper than bone. Each healing was a withdrawal of truth from the Obelisk, a rewriting of a small, localised lie—the lie that this person was meant to die. And each withdrawal came with a cost, a psychic toll paid not in coin, but in the echoes of the suffering she absorbed.A young man, his breathing now even, grasped her wrist. “The Angel of the Standing Stone,” he whispered, his voice
Chapter 120: The Carving of Burden
The Swift-Sleep hadn't been contained. It had been. managed. Contained implied control, and Amelia had none. She was a dam made of sand, trying to stem an ocean of wickedly designed rot. She wandered through the city in fugue, a specter limping from one crisis to the next. The silver light of the Obelisk, once a brilliant aura, was now a mere, guttering candle around her hands, burning fiercely only when forced to the hard, blinding work of purging the new plague.She had lost count of the outbreaks. Free Haven was a ghost memory. The aid centers closed, their volunteers dead or in hiding. The Dawn Guard had been killed, not by sword blow, but by the coward's weapon of a hurled glass orb. The city had drawn into a terrified hush, broken only by the spasmodic, quickly stifled cough that was a death sentence.After a day in her makeshift pest-house—a ruined stable where she had managed to save three out of twenty before collapsing over against a wall smeared with blood—Amelia was once a
Chapter 119: The Prophet's Counterattack
The optimism created by Ethan's Chronicle was a fragile flower in a snowy field. For a couple of days, there had been a very real sense of purpose in the city. Civilians' militias picked up rubble. Secret food supplies, embarrassed into sight by the exposure, were grudgingly handed out. The patrols of the Dawn Guard no longer had the aura of a rebel militia but more the semblance of an actual peacekeeping force. In her hidden attic, Amelia breathed, a moment to wish the tide might reverse on the sheer, unstoppable power of truth.The Prophet's response was not a dismissal in ink. It was a howl written in fever and blood.It began in the Free Haven, a clinic run by a portly, stubborn woman named Marta who was one of the first to fly the grey banner of dedication to Amelia's practice. It was a last refuge, a crowded, chaotic but kindly place where the rejected and the desperate were given an approximation of care.A new patient was admitted at sunset, a dockworker shivering with a famil
Chapter 118: Ethan's Chronicle
The attic was a kingdom of paper and shadows. The atmosphere, thick with the smell of cheap ink, drying glue, and the perpetual background scent of the baker's ovens far below, reminded him of the two worlds of Atheria: the daily struggle to make daily bread, and the war in the streets that was being fought on a celestial plane. Ethan Ward's fingers were black to the cuff. He strode with a wild, focused urgency, a purposeful man.Stacked around him, on boxes and wrapped on floorboards, were the fruits of his captivity and exile: no gun, no food, but words.His own works, completed section by section.The testimony of freed prisoners, scribbled on scraps of sackcloth and torn parchment. The blistering, memorized orations of the Prophet Silas, now set down in his own tight, utilitarian hand. This was not another column. This was the case. A prosecutor's closing argument to the Atherian people. He captioned it, bluntly, brutally, The Atheria Chronicle. He wrote not as an impartial witnes
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