The Wrack Preview

This month, I'm doing something a little different: I'm previewing the first couple chapters of The Wrack, my upcoming standalone novel. (Though it's still part of the Aetherverse, my whole Cosmere style multiverse my various series will fit into.) This is not the final draft, so there might be significant changes to it later on, and (even though I doublechecked) some typos probably slipped through too. The Wrack is tonally vastly different than Mage Errant, and features a much lower-magic setting and a gratuitous number of POVs. And if you're just here for Mage Errant, not to worry, I'll be trying to post a story set on Anastis this month as well if I can. And let me know if you like previews like this, or if you'd prefer it if I stick to original short stories in the future!

Really, let me know any thoughts you have about this one, I'm definitely pretty nervous about trying something this different from what I'm known for so far.

Oh, and if you're interested, I'm doing an AMA on Reddit, on the new Mage Errant subreddit a fan started!

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Chapter 1: The Castle Below the Mist

The first victim of the Wrack was Prince Arnulf of Lothain. 

In general, when one’s prince collapses at a luncheon and begins convulsing, one can safely assume the involvement of poison. When said prince is a warrior in the prime, who lived with gusto and had never been known to be sick a day in his life; it tends to strongly reinforce the possibility that poison had been involved. 

The residents of Castle Morinth, unsurprisingly, assumed exactly that.

The castle was swiftly locked down, and none were permitted to leave, save for three guards judged to share the twin virtues of being particularly trustworthy and of having lacked the opportunity to have poisoned Arnulf.

The latter virtue was, to be honest, the more important of the two. If you’d asked anyone in the castle an hour before, none would have imagined that one of their number would poison Arnulf. He was much beloved by his soldiers, the servants, and even the villagers farther down the pass. 

Prince Arnulf, the fifth son of King Eigen, had been sent to Castle Morinth to take up the mantle of the Mist Warden by his father, and had done a far better job than any other Warden in generations.

It would seem odd for any other kingdom to maintain a sizable armed force far from its borders, but other kingdoms lacked the Maze of Mist.

Castle Morinth sat at the base of a high pass leading up into the Krannenbergs, the jagged mountain range that marked Lothain’s northeastern frontier.

The pass Castle Morinth guarded, however, didn’t cross the Krannenbergs. In fact, no one ever entered it if they could possibly help it.

A massive wall of mist hung just a few miles up the pass from Castle Morinth. Even in the heat of a summer afternoon, the mist never burnt away. It just hung between the walls of the pass, always shifting and twisting. If you watched it long enough, you could begin to almost make sense of the twisting patterns of the mist.

Almost.

Those few who had entered and returned spoke of a twisting maze of mist inside, narrow paths where the miasma could be seen through. Those who strayed off these paths into the thicker mist were inevitably never heard from again. 

As if that weren’t bad enough, the paths were always moving, shifting, merging and splitting.

If that were the extent of the Mist Maze’s dangers, it would hardly be more than a dangerous curiosity. Far from it, however.

Because things also came out of it. Beasts of twisted forms, of vile temperament, of uncouth demeanor.

Sometimes it would be weeks or months between incursions, and sometimes the denizens of the maze would flood out like the tide. 

The maze beasts varied wildly in form. In the last year alone there had been a snake the size of a tree, a flock of predatory flightless birds, some sort of hideous tentacled boar-horror, and a voracious land-eel with the eyes and legs of a centipede.

Past kings had tried merely ignoring the maze and hoping the beasts would stay near it, but eventually, the problem grew severe enough that the kings of Lothain had constructed the fortress to keep the rest of the kingdom safe. The commanders of the fortress became known as the Mist Wardens.

Many past Mist Wardens had stayed safe in the castle while their men defended the pass, but Prince Arnulf had personally lead the charge against each and every one of the beasts that emerged under his watch. His men adored him for it. The villages below the castle grew to love him as well, for allowing their children and herds to roam more safely.

His generous nature, handsome face, and booming laugh did their share in making him so beloved, of course. 

As far as those around him were concerned, Arnulf was a living legend. He could ride twice as hard, fight twice as long, and eat twice as much as a normal man.

Given that, and the fact that Castle Morinth was far enough from the capital that it rested almost untouched by court politics, no one should have had any reason to poison Prince Arnulf. 

The three desperate guards that left the castle that summer day all rode down the pass towards the villages below, in search of the castle healer, in the vain hope of saving their prince.

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Captain Oson, the highest ranked of the three soldiers, was the one to find Healer Benen, who was riding his horse back from one of the herder’s villages.

“Hail, Oson!” the grizzled, burly healer called, then adjusted his leather eyepatch. 

Captain Oson drew his horse alongside Benen’s as he caught his breath from the swift ride down. 

“Something come out of the Maze?” Benen inquired, offering Oson his wineskin. 

Oson gratefully drank from the wineskin. He hadn’t thought to bring his own in the rush, and he wasn’t as young as he used to be.

“I must admit, to my shame,” Benen said, “that I’ve been looking forward to some action. It will make a welcome change from farmers insisting that their cattle are acting strange.”

Captain Oson shook his head. “It’s Prince Arnulf. He’s been poisoned.”

The affable healer had kicked his horse into a gallop before Oson could even offer the wineskin back.

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“Tell me everything,” Benen demanded, as he stormed through the castle halls.

“The prince was halfway through his luncheon, then he just… fell over,” the head maid said, wringing her hands. She looked on the verge of tears. “He started making this awful noise in the back of his throat, and kept shaking like he’d lost control of his body.”

“What was he eating?” Benen asked.

“Stew with barley bread and cheese, nothing unusual,” the maid said.

Benen frowned. Nothing unusual for Arnulf, perhaps, but the prince was the only noble Benen knew of that preferred coarse barley bread over wheat bread.

“I’ll need you to fetch the prince’s food to his chambers,” Benen said.

“My lord?” the maid asked.

Benen, for once, ignored being referred to as a lord. His parents were honest craftsfolk, not nobles, but the servants and village folk up here were convinced that seers were somehow a step above them, and wouldn’t dream to treat them any different than they’d treat lords and ladies.

Benen hated it, but he’d been unable to convince them to stop. 

“I need to check the food for poison, and I daren’t leave the prince’s side once I get there,” Benen said.

The head maid nodded. As they crossed the great hall, she snagged a guardsman, and the two of them began gathering the remains of Arnulf’s luncheon.

The healer ignored them for the moment, going through the door at the back of the great hall. 

There was a short hall leading to a spiral staircase through the door. The guards at its base let him through wordlessly, and he quickly ascended to the prince’s chambers above the great hall.

He could hear shouting in Arnulf’s chamber as he climbed the stairs.

Benen was hardly expecting the sight of Arnulf thrashing about in his bed, a half dozen of his soldiers trying to hold him down. He varied back and forth between incomprehensible muttering and horrid, rasping screams.

“Healer Benen!” a soldier called. “The prince is…”

Benen pushed past the woman and marched straight for Arnulf. He slipped in between two of the soldiers holding the prince down, and rested his hand on the prince’s forehead. 

The prince was feverish, but nowhere near as much as his symptoms would seem to warrant.

“His fever is low,” Benen muttered.

“That’s good, right?” one of the soldiers asked. “It means he’s more likely to survive?”

“Fever is the body’s first weapon against contagion,” Benen said, quoting the Moonsworn’s holy book. Many of his fellow healers would frown at him quoting the Moonsworn, but they could all have their names forgotten, for all Benen cared. Whether they were southern spies or not, the Moonsworn could save three patients for every one his fellows could. If the Moonsworn said humours and vapours were nonsense, they were nonsense, and if they claimed fevers were the body’s weapon, Benen believed them.

Frowning, he pried open Arnulf’s eyelid. His pupil was constricted almost to nothing. “Any illness bad enough to do this should have triggered a much stronger fever. Some poisons are known to cause low fevers along with their other symptoms, however.”

“You can cure him?” another soldier asked, desperately. “You can use your magic on him?”

Benen had opened his mouth to explain for the thousandth time that magic didn’t work like that, when Arnulf tore his arm free from his soldier’s grasp. The prince convulsed, clawing himself across the face hard enough that he drew blood.

After Benen had helped the others pin and tie the prince down, the healer carefully cut off Arnulf’s tunic, taking care not to cut the thrashing prince as well.

He did his best to ignore the blood dripping down into Arnulf’s beard.

Once he had the tunic free, he realized that it wasn’t just Arnulf’s arms and legs clenching. The muscles across his entire body appeared to be clenching and spasming violently.

This… this wasn’t anything Benen had seen before. A thought occurred to him.

“Did the mist-beast the other day bite or sting him?” Benen demanded of the soldiers around him.

“The big armored beetle thing?” one soldier said. “Didn’t even come close to touching him before he planted his lance in its eye.”

Perhaps some of the beast’s ichor had splashed onto Arnulf and poisoned him?

Benen sighed, then reached for his eyepatch. The soldiers around him edged away, as though afraid he’d curse them or some such nonsense. Superstition reigned supreme this far from the capitol, he’d found. 

The healer pulled away the eyepatch, revealing the polished, light green peridot sphere in his eye socket. Delicate lines were engraved into its surface in precise patterns, and it seemed to glow slightly from within.

Benen took a deep breath, shut his living eye, and dove into the spirit realm.

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Despite what the peasant folktales claimed, Benen had never seen any actual spirits in the spirit world. No ghosts of the dead, no demons, no horrible creatures that preyed upon the living.

No, the spirit realm was far more peaceful than the real world.

Benen knew that if he opened his good eye, he’d still be able to see Arnulf writhing in his bed and the soldiers clustering worriedly. He knew everyone else in the room would just see him standing there stock-still, his peridot eye faintly aglow.

Benen felt like his hair and beard should be drifting in the gentle currents of the spirit realm, but they had no power over matter.

Around and above Benen stretched an endless, restful sea of transparent, pale green energy. Gentle streams of spiritstuff drifted past him, like currents passing through a gentle stream. It looked serene at first, but his vision quickly adapted, and he began spotting the turbulence where the physical world impinged upon the spirit realm.

As an apprentice, it had been months before he could dive into the spirit realm on command. It had been months more before he could stay there— he kept getting vertigo, feeling as though he were about to plunge into the infinite abyss of the spirit realm.

Now, though, he could do it on command and hold there as needed.

As his vision continued to adjust, he carefully measured the distortions against the lines that crossed his vision— the very lines carved into the crystal sphere of his eye. Despite what the peasants and soldiers thought, the markings weren’t any sort of magic rune— they were merely reference marks, to help him better get his bearings in the spirit realm.

After about a minute, he started being able to parse the turbulence in the spirit currents. As spirit-stuff flowed through the world, its currents were churned by the material world. A seer could learn to interpret that turbulence, to use it to see within solid matter. 

Learning that art was by far the most challenging part of the endeavor.

Having his left eye put out as a boy so he could gain the ability to see the spirit flows had been a fairly challenging aspect of learning magic as well, of course.

Gradually, slowly, the world came into focus. The stone walls sheared the spirit currents according to their mineral crystals. The wooden bedposts twisted the flows around their own grains. The threads of the blanket fuzzed and disrupted the flows. 

And there was Arnulf.

To a seer untrained in healing, the currents flowing through the human body— or that of any animal—  appeared to be pure chaos. This was largely because bodies didn’t have the simple composition of baser matter, but were instead filled with a hundred different materials. Bone, blood, bile, fat… the list went on.

Compared to a human, a block of stone or board of wood was hardly so complex.

The diversity of their constituent parts was far from the only difference, however. The internal movement of the blood, the flow of lightning across the nerves, and the strange chemical processes of the gut all further changed the shape of the body.

It had taken Benen most of a decade to learn to properly read the spirit flows as they passed through the human body.

He frowned as he passed his gaze over Arnulf. The prince’s wild muscle spasms were making this far more difficult than it should have been, distorting and hiding the turbulence from his organs.

Benen contemplated giving Arnulf tincture of the poppy for a moment, but decided against it. It would settle the prince’s muscles so he could see past them, but he had no idea what poison ran through Arnulf’s veins. The mixture could hasten Arnulf’s death, for all he knew.

He briefly wished for an eye of emerald. Peridot was a poor replacement for true green beryl— an emerald eye could discern the turbulence of poisons with ease.

There were, however, only three emerald eyes on the whole continent, and none had ever set foot in Lothain.

Benen reached up and rotated the peridot eye in his socket, adjusting the reference marks.

He relaxed his focus a little. It was counterintuitive, but it made the spirit current ripples from deeper in Arnulf’s body stand out more.

He frowned, then opened his good eye. He felt briefly nauseous for a moment as he tried to overlap the spirit world and the material world, before his vision stabilized. The angle of the spirit current was off a bit, so he shifted to take better advantage of it, then ran his eyes down Arnulf’s body again.

There.

The spirit current passing through Arnulf’s liver looked wrong. It was a subtle thing— ripples a little shorter and more chaotic than usual, curves a little too sharp— but it was definitely there. 

Arnulf popped out his peridot eye, and the vision of the spirit world collapsed into faint flickers visible in his empty socket, like the flashes you might see when you clenched your eyelids too tight.

“What did you find?” one of the guards asked. 

Benen ignored him as he tucked away the crystal sphere in a protected pocket of his satchel. Peridot might be cheaper and more common than emerald, but peridot crystals of sufficient size for artificial eyes were still worth more than most prosperous craftfolk would make in several years. He withdrew another sphere— also peridot, but with a cunning glass lens welded to its front. Ironically, though it required a smaller peridot crystal, this eye was far more expensive— it required an exceptionally skilled jeweler and an even more skilled lenscrafter to craft. The lens couldn’t be glued to the crystal, for glue would interfere with spirit sight, but rather had to be attached with cunning slots and pins. 

He carefully dusted off the sphere with a clean cloth, then slipped it into his socket. He blinked a few times, then dropped back into the spirit world. This eye magnified his view, letting him see much smaller, finer details of the spirit currents, at the expense of the bigger picture.

It was no surprise, given he didn’t recognize the poison’s symptoms, but the spirit currents gave him no clues as to what poison had been used either. The poison was most densely concentrated in Arnulf’s liver, but the healer found traces of it in all of the Prince’s twitching, convulsing muscles, and, to Benen’s distress, the quantities seemed to be actively increasing, as though it were leaking out into the rest of the body from his liver..

To his surprise, however, none of the poison could be seen in Arnulf’s stomach.

Scowling, Benen turned to the side-table where Arnulf’s food had been set. He was no spirit-chef— indeed, he found their entire practice to be ostentatious and wasteful in the extreme— but he was no stranger to examining food for poison via spirit sight. 

And there was no poison in Arnulf’s food.

“His luncheon wasn’t poisoned,” Benen said. “It might be a slow-acting poison— I know of a few, like starweb leaf, whose symptoms come on all at once. It could also have been a faster poison delivered to the Prince by some other means, as well. If we could…”

Arnulf screamed and convulsed. Benen had never heard a sound kin to it from a human voice before— it sounded as though it were tearing the Prince’s very throat apart. Most of the soldiers and servants in the room stepped back in fear, but two brave souls— a soldier and a chambermaid— dove atop the Prince, in an effort to still his thrashing.

To no avail, however. The massive warrior, even tied to his own bed, threw both off like they were mere children. His eyes were open but unseeing, and spittle flecked his beard and mustache. He strained forward, as though trying to escape some terror.

There was a crack, and Benen’s eyes, living and dead, shot to the bedposts, thinking Arnulf had broken one.

It wasn’t the wood that had broken, however.

Arnulf had shattered his own bones in his convulsions. His left forearm seemed to have grown a new elbow— one lumpy and deformed. Even with the wrong eye in his socket, Benen could clearly make out the rapids in the spirit currents where they passed through the break.

“Hold him down!” Benen shouted over the Prince’s inhuman screams, and dove for his medicines.

By the time the time the soldiers had pinned Arnulf down, and Benen had retrieved his tincture of the poppy, Arnulf’s screams had become awful, rasping whispers, as though the man’s throat really had torn apart. Benen roughly splashed a little of the powerful sedative in Arnulf’s mouth, hoping it would quiet the screams, so he could get the man to drink more.

It took nearly half an hour to get enough of the concentrated poppy down Arnulf’s throat to force him to slumber. It took more of the tincture than he’d ever given to any man or woman before, save for in easing the death of the mortally wounded. 

Part of Benen feared that if the poison didn’t kill the Prince, the sheer amount of poppy might do the job.

The exhausted soldiers were pale and terrified, and Benen feared he didn’t look much better. His false eye had rolled a little in his socket somehow, and the reference lines were strangely askew. He took a deep breath and adjusted it, as much to gather his wits as anything.

Even as he slumbered, Arnulf twitched and writhed, like a man tortured with hot coals.

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Prince Arnulf’s death wasn’t a gentle one.

The massive doses of poppy tincture Benen provided barely alleviated the Prince’s suffering. Twice during the endless night that followed his collapse, he managed to shatter the splint they’d put on his broken arm. Past midnight, Arnulf bit off the tip of his own tongue in his convulsions. The tips of his fingers and toes began to blacken horribly, and every time he awoke, the same dreadful, pained rattling echoed out of his broken vocal chords.

The healer did what he could for the Prince, but only the poppy helped. None of the purgatives and poultices he attempted seemed to do anything. Benen even considered bleeding the prince, knowing full well what the Moonsworn would do if they found out he’d violated their strictures against it.

In the end, Benen was reduced to simply taking notes on the poison’s symptoms, on Arnulf’s rising fever, on the steadily increasing levels of the poison in his blood and, somehow, in his liver.

Just before dawn, the warrior’s heart simply gave out from the strain.

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Chapter 2: Spirit Messages

Benen trudged up the stairs of the main semaphore tower, each step feeling like seven leagues. 

The tower had long ago been built as a dovecote, but the doves had been moved to another part of Castle Morinth when the spirit semaphore had been built.

There were, in the spirit realm, certain stable currents that could last for years, decade, or even centuries, and that traversed tens or hundreds of leagues. There had been much debate about them over the years— the Moonsworn and Sunsworn merely thought them a curiosity of the spirit realm, a byproduct of their twin goddesses’ eternal revolutions. The Sei had thought them the exhalations of their stern god, and judged attempts to interfere with them heresy. The Radhan’s interest in them had only extended so far as distant hopes of using turbulence in the currents to predict storms. The Conclave Eidola, of course, had known them to be, like the rest of the spirit realm, the means by which the ancestors kept watch over their descendants.

The currents, however, proved slippery things, hard to affect and prone to slipping back into their previous states.

Then, nearly a century past, a Sunsworn noble, Vai en-Addem, had built the first semaphore in the tallest minaret of his manor house. The mad artist had intended it as a performance work, telling no one of his plans. When the current began filling with the turbulence of his semaphore, seers and scholars in the nearby city of On-Hagrad had panicked, starting a small riot that had baffled the local merchants and laborers. To this day, Hagradi townsfolk still made jokes about the learned being a superstitious, easily frightened lot.

The potential of Vai en-Addem’s invention had quickly been seen, and within a decade, the first semaphore line was running between the On-Hagrad and the nameless Sunsworn holy city. From there, they’d spread all across the great southern continent of Oyansur. Despite Sunsworn efforts to keep the technology from spreading north across the isthmus, it made it to Teringia a few decades later, and soon the entirety of the small northern continent had been covered by semaphore lines.

Spirit semaphores were difficult and expensive to run. They had to be placed inside the spirit currents, in those rare places where they dipped near to the ground. Repeater stations had to be placed along the currents to pass along messages before they degraded to much. Every message had to be encoded, otherwise they would take far too long to send. If you wished to keep the contents of a message secret, you had to encode them even further, since literally any seer could watch the messages being sent merely by watching the current. To make it even more frustrating, messages could only be sent in one direction, along the path of the current— which meant that many messages were sent on looping, circuitous routes from one current to another, often with many interruptions to be hand carried between two semaphore towers.

That didn’t even get into the sheer, absurd expense of building a spirit semaphore. The sophisticated clockwork mechanisms required rare gems, precisely blown pieces of glassware, and had to be exactingly constructed by skilled workers on-site. The metals had to be carefully chosen and matched so that when they shifted size in different temperatures, it wouldn’t force the machine out of alignment.

Still, for all their countless disadvantages, spirit semaphores had revolutionized society. Messages could cross Teringia in days, instead of weeks or months. They could travel all the way to the foreign, strange lands at the southern tip of Oyansur, if you had a mind to, and could guarantee that there was a recipient you shared a language with. Kings and emperors immediately saw the utility of the semaphores for war and governance. Merchants had been close behind— information was always essential to commerce.

The semaphore network had grown so important that entirely new towns and cities had arisen near convergences of multiple spirit currents.

It was still expensive to send information via the semaphore network, of course— the average craftsman or merchant couldn’t afford it, let alone the average laborer. 

Castle Morinth, by any standard, should have been Lothain’s biggest hub in the semaphore network. There were literally dozens of nearby spirit currents capable of carrying messages, stretching across most of the nation. 

There were only two problems with that. First, the fact that literally all of the currents traveled away, not towards, Castle Morinth. Or, rather, they traveled away from the Mist Maze. Along with the strange monsters it spat out, it was a source of some of the longest spirit currents on the continent. Any messages to the castle had to be carried several dozen leagues by horseback.

The second problem, of course, was that there just weren’t enough messages that needed to be sent by the castle, the Prince, or the cattle herders of the villages below them. 

So the castle had just two semaphore towers— one atop the curtain wall’s southwest tower that could send messages to the nearest military garrison, and one in the old dovecote that could send messages to Lothain’s capital city of the same name. 

Benen popped out his current eye, and instead pushed in an amethyst sphere— after carefully and thoroughly cleaning both. Amethyst eyes were ideally suited towards using the semaphore network. Despite how common amethyst crystals of sufficient size were to craft into eyes, they’d skyrocketed in price over the last few decades, as the size of the network grew. 

Most healers would have considered it below them to maintain a semaphore alongside their usual duties— semaphore seers were seen as mere drudges, the lowest rank of those who could see into the spirit realm. They only took a few months to train, once they’d developed the basic skills of seeing. Benen had often heard other seers claim that absolutely anyone could become a semaphore seer, unlike the more rarified ranks of other seers. 

Absolute nonsense, in Benen’s opinion. Anyone could learn to be any sort of seer, so long as they were hardworking, intelligent, and willing to sacrifice an eye.

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Benen sighed as he reached the top of the semaphore tower, and took a moment to catch his breath before getting to work.

He started by removing the protective dust covers, setting the thin brass plates on the table to the side. Next, he undid a series of latches fastening down the semaphore arm, unfolding and fastening their lengths for readiness. Some of the longer ones were as long as six feet in length. 

He fetched the crank out of its resting place in one of the empty boulins, the cubbies where the doves had once nested, and inserted it into the appropriate socket. He grunted and strained at the mechanism until he’d raised the semaphore up into the center of the current that traveled in through one tower window and out the other— the latter of which had been broken into the wall to stop it distorting messages. The thin wire meshes in the windows were enough to keep birds out of the tower without distorting the messages.

They did leave the tower hellishly cold in the winter, however.

When he’d raised the semaphore to its appropriate height, he locked it into place, returning the crank to its cubby-hole. He then fetched several new gems from their boulins, replacing those on several of the semaphore’s brass arms.

If this had been a full-size semaphore, that wouldn’t be necessary, but Castle Morinth had only warranted smaller, cheaper semaphores, the kind an army might carry with them on the march. 

Eventually, he’d finished making adjustments to the semaphore arms, and strode over to the chain bench.

The chain bench was a long shelf set into the wall at chest height under a large group of boulins. Dozens of sizes and cuts of chain links could be found inside— some huge and smooth, others small and toothed, others twisted. 

It took nearly an hour for Benen to assemble the message chain. Not that it was particularly difficult— he was an old hand at the process, and could assemble even the most heavily encoded long message in a third of the time at most.

No, the hard part was writing the message itself. How did you tell a king that his son had been poisoned, and that not only was the poison unknown, but that the the poisoner and motives were as well?

As he worked, the healer kept glancing out the nearest window with his living eye at the courtyard below. Castle Morinth’s Eidolon priest worked below, carving the prince’s name into the castle’s monolith, so that Arnulf might join the ancestors, and not the hateful ranks of the forgotten dead.

Finally, he finished clipping the message chain together, and carried it gently to the semaphore. He fed the end of the chain into the semaphore. The first few links were neutral sized, and weren’t strictly part of the message. The next few links detailed the recipient via a short identifier code. The links at the end were neutral sized as well.

He hesitated for a moment, then clipped the ends of the chain together, forming a loop. He wanted to make sure this message made it through.

Benen fetched another crank from its boulin, inserting it into its aperature, and began to gently turn it. It turned easily and smoothly, and the chain began to ratchet smoothly through the semaphore. As it did so, the arms of the spirit semaphore began to twist and spin, the cunning clockwork mechanisms responding to the different sizes and cuts of links in the chain. The spirit current began to twist and churn in recognizable patterns downstream of the semaphore, flowing gently away through the tower window. 

He kept turning the cranks for as long as he could hear the sounds of the priest’s hammer and chisel, repeating the looped message again and again.

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Captain Oson fell ill that night, and followed by two other guards, three cooks, and a chambermaid.

Benen wept as he administered the last of the castle’s poppy tincture, and was forced to move to skullcap and catnip to alleviate the pain. They might be suitable for relieving tooth aches, sprains, and headaches, but they did little for the people being wracked with pain.

Benen kept his hope that this was poison rather than contagion alive for days, as more and more of the castle fell ill, and he ran out of herbs to alleviate the pain. He filled his ears with wax to keep out the screaming echoing through the castle. He cursed the ban on the Moonsworn from all Lothain’s fortresses. He tried not to think about the servants and soldiers deserting the castle, fleeing down the pass seeking safety.

Captain Oson was the first to come out of his delirium. He’d broken three fingers on his right hand, torn out half his hair, and pulled muscles across his body. His fingers and toes were blackened, with little feeling left to them. 

The captain spoke in a broken whisper, his voice stolen by the screams of his illness. He ran a high fever still, but the screaming, writhing, delirium, and pain had passed.

In his broken, rasping whispers before he fell asleep, Oson spoke of a world robbed of color, of feeling as though his mind swam through mud. Of lingering pains throughout his body. Of relief that his fingers and toes were spared that pain.

To Benen’s peridot eye, the spirit turbulence of the poison had shifted. It still persisted throughout the body, but it seemed as though some key component had vanished from it, leaving it a shadow of its former virulence.

His hopes for poison over plague vanished as the screaming started in the village.