No one had seenit coming. Not its swiftness. Not its reach. The castle went into lockdown the moment the first case of the Breath of Death appeared in the capital. The city followed. Guards sealed the gates, wardens raised posts at the bridges, and the sound of curfew bells tolled each dusk like a funeral chime.
At first, the dead were mourned properly, each death tended with ritual. But the bodies rose faster than the days. By the end of the first wave, mass graves were dug outside Befest, and hopeful priests walked the lanes chanting warding prayers. Their abbey halls became sickrooms.
People were confined to their homes. No one crossed the walls without travel papers stamped with the royal seal. Millers, tradesmen, and farmers wore blue armbands to pass the cordons at dawn. Those who defied the new edicts were dragged to the stocks. By the close of summer, the three states had shut themselves in.
Of all the nations of Terra, Vanhaui sealed its borders first. Trade ceased. Foreign ties withered. Every council turned its full attention to the plague. Magisters wove wards to slow the spread, to keep people apart. At the academy, scrying globes were set up so magi across Terra could speak and bear witness without leaving their chambers.
And for some, those born in distant lands with kin scattered far from Vanhaui, it was a torment that gnawed at the heart. One mage student, Evie Corvo, adept of weather magic, often waited hours in a winding queue simply for the chance to touch a scrying globe and speak with her parents. Some weeks the globes fell dim or were claimed by others in greater need, and she went long stretches without a single word from home. Such was the lot of all who lived far from their blood. They bore their longing in silence, clutchingmemories like talismans while wondering if their loved ones had survived another dawn.
The collapse that followed tore through the land. Theaters stood dark. Inns emptied. Smithies hammered only for the guard and the healers. Patrols dispersed musicians, artists, dancers, the very life of Befest’s streets, and fined them for gathering. Infected houses were marked with chalk lilies on their doors, bread and water left on the steps until there was nothing left to leave. Grain dwindled as travel froze. The plague took millers, croppers, herdsmen alike. Within months, famine came.
Then ration tokens were issued, and people fought and bled for them. The first night of winter, hungry crowds gathered outside ration depots. The snow fell heavily that day, covering citizens in a blanket of cold and despair. The despair that crawled into people’s heads like poison. A fight erupted. And the fight turned into a mob. Bread carts were overturned, guards retreated under a hail of stones.
On that cold winter night, the city was set ablaze. Torches hurled through houses. Food stalls were pulled down. Smoke rose where music once played. Church bells rang not for prayer but for warning.
The crowd marched to the castle armed with fire, their anger, and their desperation. They met the steel of the Befest guards and the wrath of Kael’s storm. Snow turned to ash, rain and blood painted the cobblestones red.
Kael burned wagon after wagon of corpses, plagued or killed by despair, beyond the city walls until he stopped counting. At night his dreams were washed in a white, merciless light.
The Breathof Death caused uncontrollable coughs until the diseased bled. Lungs grew hot and tight, as though the very air turned to thorns. At first, it was only a dry rasp, the kind one blamed on dust or cold weather. Then came the fever, slow, creeping, followed by breath that shortened with every hour, as if the body forgot how to draw air.
Those who fell ill spoke of a heaviness settling in their chest, a weight that no healer could lift. Their ribs ached with each breath, muscles trembling from the effort of simply staying alive. Some tried to hide the early signs, hoping they would pass. They never did.
The cough deepened, turned wet, turned red.
Blood stained cloth, fingers, pillowcases. It spattered the cobblestones and pooled in the cracks. Once the blood came, there was no turning back. A person might hold on for a day, perhaps two, but the end always arrived the same way, gasping, choking, lungs drowning in their own ruin.
And when breath failed entirely, when the body could no longer fight for that last stolen gulp of air, the doomed understood.
The end was near.
Neither magic nor the divine could stop the disease. No spell could cure it. No priest could lift its curse. The magi tried to dissect it, to trace its origin through breath and blood. The clerics tried to banish the plague with prayers older than the kingdom itself. All in vain. No one knew where it had come from, and as doubt spread like ash on the wind, every effort to understand it faltered. The kingdom’s learning turned inward. Doors closed. Silence grew.
Humans were affected all the same. Elves were naturally resistant. And before anyone could begin whispering about their involvement, they withdrew from the world. The high elves retreated behind the borders of their distant kingdom, sealing their gates with ancient wards. The wood elves, scattered in small tribes across forests and mountains, shuttered themselves within their groves and hidden villages, vanishing from human sight.
In Bretannia, an earl began to whisper treason. His words travelled faster than any courier, borne by merchants and frightened families. He claimed that the king himself had brewed the Breath of Death to cull the state. He said the magisters had seeded it with dark magic, that the ration tokens were poison meant for the commons. Broadsheets printed in secret carried his accusations. Minstrels sangthem in taverns. Chalk signs appeared on bridges and doors accusing the Court. Black lilies painted over white ones.
Distrust swelled across the land and raged in the streets. Nobles travelling on stamped papers were stopped in the countryside, their carriages pelted with stones, their guards questioned by rogue Bretannian militias. Healers were harassed and called spreaders of the king’s disease. Priests were dragged from hospices and forced to swear oaths before mobs. In a single season, the Court’s hard-won trust withered and continued to dim.
The Court tried to hold the realm together. Public addresses were arranged. Selena shaped speech after speech until her voice cracked. Isolde wrote death writs until her ink ran dry. Thalen demanded harsher measures, urging the crushing of rumor-mongers by force. Jorren scrambled to reopen caravan routes no merchant dared travel while the Treasury itself fought to keep coin flowing to the sick houses and guard posts. The chambers filled with shouting, fingers pointed like cannons. Kael’s voice alone could still them, reminding them that unity, not blame, must prevail if anything was to be saved.
Yet Kael heard the lies and felt the city turning against him, but he could not strike at shadows. Each rumor shortened his leash and deepened the fear of his power. Outside the gates, he burned the dead. When riots surged, he loosed the storm, white light spilling into streets already red. To those who doubted the Court, Kael became an instrument of terror, a figure as feared as the sickness itself, feeding the chasm between hope and despair.
And among the burned bodies were court members as well as common folk. Nobles succumbed like peasants. The castle sealed its gates, but the plague was insidious. No stone wall could keep it from wringing its claws inside. The magi at the academy cast ward after ward, yet a single infected soul could shatter their work like eggshells.
Kael watched the people closest to him fall to loss. By the end of spring, Bramwell had lost his wife. Chancellor Godfrey Smith drew his last breath. Selena’s hands never stopped shaking after endlesshospice rounds. Other names faded from the rolls, each one another empty seat at council. Mourning settled over the Court like an unbroken shadow, plunging its members into a somber resolve as they struggled each day to keep the kingdom from falling apart.
Even after the first wave ebbed, the habits of fear remained. Markets reopened, but stalls stood empty where whole families had once stood. People still left herb sachets hanging from their belts, still kept their distance in queues without thinking why. Hope returned in slow, faltering steps, and Kael, standing on the ramparts, wondered if the realm would ever breathe the same again.
He stood beside him through it all, a grim déjà vu tightening around his throat. Through petitions delivered by trembling hands, through nights when the palace bells tolled without pause, through mornings when the snow outside the walls shone red beneath the rising sun. Everything felt like the first wave returning to claim what it had missed. The king would speak with a voice grown hoarse, and Kael would stand at his right, silent and unyielding, a storm bound in human shape once more.
But even storms have limits.
How much ash could he cast upon the world before he, too, became ash?
Chapter 5
Evie
