“We will only take the worst of the worst,” Magister Isolde Karremann said.
“We will send anonymous caravans across the kingdom to bring them to Drachenfels Keep,” Magister Elwin Alfaren added.
“At least let me tend to them,” Magister Selena Hart demanded.
What had begun as a grim idea grew teeth. If studying dead bodies failed them, perhaps the living must be studied. The notion festered into darker questions. What if we tested their blood? Their organs? Their souls? What if we took infected people and, by trial and error, tried spells and cures on them to learn the Breath of Death? What if we infected people ourselves so there would always be specimens?
The what-ifs were monstrous. The what-ifs were vile. They lingered like a stench the Court could not wash away.
But the what-ifs became a plan. A process. And where was a place with enough live bodies for proper study? People who, perhaps, deserved it somehow, so the executors of that plan could sleep at night?
Prisons. They went for prisoners. Those who had murdered. Those who had raped.
Only the worst of the worst.
Rogue caravans crawled across the land, spreading like ants,creeping into prisons, jails, outposts, and watchtowers. Shackled men and women were collected like mail to be delivered to Drachenfels Keep, the abandoned mage spire that could withstand storms and secrets alike.
There, Bashir and Henrich built their laboratorium. The magisters had carefully gathered those whose art already stank of rot—bloodmages, necromancers, those who played with the essence of disease and corruption. Those already half-rotten inside. Every name was whispered, every one sworn to secrecy.
And unbeknownst yet to the king, the experiments began.
The prisoners already infected were the first subjects, strapped to reclining chairs, magic threading through their blood. The arcane moved in their veins like fire and frost together, a map unfolding inside the wielders’ minds. Each page turned was a scream. Each spell dug deeper, tearing through flesh and sanity until nothing human remained. The sound of it would haunt every night that followed.
Everyone had their part to play. Elwin rerouted Crown gold to fund the experiments. Isolde forged the death writs one after another. Selena stayed beside the dying, the shawl covering her mouth rusted with blood, whispering calm into their ears so they could, for a moment, forget what was being done to them. So they could survive another hour, another test.
And Kael, he was only called when the first prisoners died.
Under the tower, they dug a crater, a deep pit for the bodies ruined by the experiments. Bruised, scorched, their insides melted or exposed, they were thrown to the bottom like offerings to the dark. After a while, Kael needed a break from the stench, so he stood outside and listened to the screams instead.
As time passed, the process refined itself. They had to keep the prisoners alive or run out of subjects. They had to infect them themselves. The work became slower, crueler. Selena was crucial. Her empathic magic kept them breathing, emptied their minds, took away memory until they were husks. Their eyes went vacant, their souls scrapedclean. Those who lived longest could no longer speak or cry, only groan. The dungeon became a hive of groaning things, filled with the echo of its own agony, echoes of the living, trapped between pain and silence.
They still deserved it, didn’t they?
Eventually, they ran out of prisoners. But they were close to a cure, so close they could taste it in the air. They couldn’t stop now. So they lowered their standards.
Thieves. Smugglers. Brawlers. Rioters.
And when Henrich Eisenberg finally came clean to the king, because forged death records only lasted so long, the king simply looked away.
He turned a blind eye and let it continue. Because they were doing it for the greater good. Because saving the world was worth the price of hell.
One morning, too early for dawn to rise, Kael turned the entire pit to ash. They had run out of space. The air crackled white as his storm fell, and when the light faded, the pit wasn’t gone, only changed. What lay below was a heap of dust with limbs still intact. Arms. Legs. Feet scorched black. Heads half-melted, eyes oozing, still staring at him through the smoke. By that time, he got used to the smell.
That day, as he had on many others, Kael sought to cleanse his mind. He went to the academy, to Archmage Evangelina Corvo’s lecture. He listened to her muffled voice through her shawl, gentle even through the cloth, teaching first-year students how to channel weather energy to predict rainfall.
Those days were his only peace during the plague. Within her voice, the groans from Drachenfels could not reach him. In her presence, the world was quiet. He sat in the shadows, unseen, watching her, his mind threading through the stillness like a man starved for light. She was tender, radiant, impossibly good. She was his way of bearing the ruin he’d helped build. Even knowing she was promised to another, he made her his medicine, his cure.
One night, when she stayed late in the library to prepare lessons, she almost caught him. She lingered among the shelves of animalism, reaching for a book on farm beasts. He watched her from the opposite aisle, his pulse steady as thunder before the strike. Then, her eyes met his through the gaps in the books. She gasped and stumbled back. By the time she turned again, he had vanished into the dark between the shelves.
He’d hidden not because he feared her, but because she must never see what he was. The man of storms. The executioner who’d turned bodies to ash by the hundreds. He was content to keep her as fantasy—fragile and pure, safe in the distance where she could never know what he had done. The fantasy that she could be his, that her smile might belong to him alone, and that it would be enough to quiet the storm inside.
Reality, though, was cruel. He was the Court Wizard, made of storm and sin. She was everything he couldn’t touch without breaking. So he watched her, clinging to the fantasy like a dying man clutching his last breath. It was the only thing that kept him alive these days.
Months passed. Winter became spring. Spring turned to summer. Leaves browned and curled. The sun waned. And at last, when the final body fell into the pit and one last prisoner gave a broken groan, the cure was finished.
After months of screams and blood and bone, they had done it. They had saved the kingdom. The world would breathe again.
But even salvation demanded a final cost. As the vials were being prepared, Kael rushed to Henrich Eisenberg’s quarters. His mentor, his oldest friend, lay dying, lungs eaten from the inside. Kael watched him die before him and held his hand until it went cold and heavy.
