Chapter 85. A Doctor's Confession
Author: Clare Felix
last update2025-09-28 02:43:54

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
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