Gregory, Cooper, and the constable Garrick were returning to the city as dawn broke over the horizon. None of them had slept; the same was true for most of the people in the city.

They drove their wagon straight towards the city entrance. The guards manning the gate saw them approach, waving to Garrick and pulling open the wide door that served as a gate. None of the people they had picked up showed any signs of illness, but they brought them back to the city for healing all the same.

They passed through the gate, finding a city in chaos, but it wasn't as bad as Gregory expected. The golden light of dawn made the faces of the buildings glow brightly but cast long shadows. In those shadows, contables were directing a tired, frightened mass of people. Some were treated for injury, some being questioned, but most of the people were being directed into lines for ritual healing.

The occasional flash of ritual magic beat back the long shadows, but they returned relentlessly.

When their wagon came close, constables directed them straight towards one of the lines for ritual healing. They said the goal was to get everyone in the city onto the other side and then to sweep and clear the rest of the city. Gregory and Cooper jumped off the cart.

"You get to safety, Garrick. we're going to see if anyone needs any more help on this side, and maybe find Olivander."

"You two have my thanks once again. Stay safe out there," the constable gave them a salute, then the wagon entered the ritual healing line.

"Is that Constable General McKenzie?"

Gregory turned to see where Cooper was looking, and sure enough the Constable General was walking and talking, giving orders and taking reports.

"Should we talk to him? I don't know if we're important enough without Olivander around."

"He's a nice man."

Gregory couldn't argue with that. He shrugged and they jogged over to the tent McKenzie had just entered.

"Hold," a guard said. "The Constable General is very busy. Are you just looking for work? What rank are you?"

"Iron," Gregory lied. They weren't officially Iron, but close enough. "Both of us are. Yeah, I guess we're just looking for a way to help."

"Very well. We need some more bodies for containment on the north side. Head straight up Broad Street until you hit the barricades. Tell them Ivan sent you to help."

Gregory thanked the guard and they headed up the aptly named broad street.

There was evidence of fighting all over the city. Some people had boarded up windows and doors of shops to prevent looting, but the work wasn't very consistently finished. Though he had already seen the signs of battle, and even fought one of the mindrotted himself, seeing the half boarded up shops and hastily locked down homes made Gregory fully appreciate the scale of the crisis that had gripped the city.

Eventually, they came to a barricade with several guards standing around, occasionally peeking at the other side.

"Ho there!" a guard called.

"Hi, we're here to help. Ivan sent us."

"Did he? Good, we could use a few more men at the top of the cordon. Come look at this," he directed them to a table set up nearby. There was a map flattened on it, with a lot of writing and arrows.

"We're here, and we've set up a perimeter around this hot zone — that's what we're calling spots with active infected. Anyway, we need to shore up the barricade up here. We're not here to clear them out. Stronger folks will come around to carry out that grisly work, eventually. We're focused on containment. Grab some supplies and head over. The other men will tell you what to do. Return to the group if one of the mindrotted engages with you or attacks the barricade, got it?"

"Help contain, don't engage. Got it."

"Off you go then."

A few blocks away they found the edge of the barricade. It was made of random crates, wooden pallets, carts, and anything else they could drag into place. It butted up against the city walls, and the wood that Gregory was carrying served to reinforce a section of the improvised barricade. They handed off the supplies to some guards who quickly put it to good use, shoring up a section of the improvised wall.

Then they just watched and waited. Occasionally they would see one of the mindless infected wander by.

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Gregory remembered the goblins they had fought. Maybe it was just some kind of unconscious bias, but he hadn't seen them as people, just monsters. It was easier for him to relate to the turned humans. Some of the people were just wearing regular clothes, walking around as if they were just out for a pleasant morning stroll. It twisted his stomach.

It became even more upsetting when the higher rank adventurers arrived.

Gregory and Cooper went out with them as support, since Cooper could track down the infected, and Gregory was a healer, if not a very good one.

The first fight with one of the infected could barely be called that. They had slaughtered it and burned the body. No one said a word for the fallen. He tried to remember their faces, but after four or five, all he could see were their lifeless eyes, glazed with death.

An hour later, when they had cleared out their section, Cooper and Gregory were recruited for more of the same work throughout the city, thanks to Cooper's superior sniffer.

Another hour into the search, Cooper paused in front of a building.

"There's someone in here, not infected."

The procedure they had put into place was that the group would press on, and Gregory and one guard would enter any place with people but no infected. Gregory would heal anyone who needed it, and the guard would reassure them and get them moving towards a safe zone.

They entered the home and called out, but no one responded. They split up to search. The person might be hiding.

The home reminded him of his own. Pictures and portraits hung on the walls and the house was filled with an accumulation of stuff that came from living a reasonably prosperous life. He took it in, but tried to push thoughts of his family, and how they were doing, from his mind.

Gregory entered a kitchen with a dining area. There was a half wall separating the space, and he could see the feet of someone lying on the ground behind the wall.

"Hello?"

When there was no response, he cautiously approached. He rounded the half wall, finding a woman dead from a deep neck wound without an obvious cause.

Laying across the woman's chest, a little girl was sleeping. She tossed and turned making small panicked noises as she no doubt had nightmares about what she had seen that night.

Gregory felt hot tears in his eyes as his throat closed up. A deep ache in his heart, one he had almost forgotten about, tore open with fresh grief. He didn't know this woman, or this little girl, but he knew the pain she would go through — was going through.

Gently, he scooped up the girl in his arms. She had to have been no more than six or seven. Without waking, she wrapped her arms around his neck and allowed him to carry her away.

Unsure of what to do with the little girl, he parted ways with the search team and brought her back to the Rhodes' manor. He couldn't handle any more sights like that anyway. The little girl slept the whole walk back.

Leviana wasn't around when he entered the home, but he found Gloria in the great hall.

"Gregory, who's this?" she whispered, not wanting to wake the child.

Gregory felt a slight surprise that she remembered his name, but it was quickly drowned by the pain in his chest.

"I don't know," was all he could say in reply. His voice was rougher than expected.

"Let me have a look at her," Gloria said, and Gregory handed her over.

"She has some light scratches, no serious injuries. She just seems to be exhausted."

"She's going to want to know what happened when she wakes up…"

"Let me put her to bed somewhere, then we can talk."

Gloria found a room for the little girl. Quietly, she drew out a cleansing ritual just in case the girl was infected. After the spell was done, she gathered Gregory and steered him back to a sitting room down the hall.

He sat staring at the floor, numb and exhausted.

Gloria sat next to him and gave his upper back a comforting pat.

"Why don't you tell me what happened?"

Gregory recounted the short story of being sent on search and rescue, and finding the girl sleeping.

"How am I supposed to explain that to someone?" he asked. "A disease made someone kill your mom? Really?"

He had a sudden, horrible realization.

"Oh gods, who killed her?"

He stood up and pulled his own hair. Adventuring was supposed to be fun. He was supposed to save people and make them happy and safe. It wasn't supposed to be like this.

"Gregory. You don't have to do it alone. You don't have to do it at all. She might be a little too young to know the truth."

"You want me to lie to her?"

"I want you to avoid causing more trauma than you need to. Listen, we don't know what she saw, and we don't know what she thinks. She might have seen everything, but she may very well actively push that down. I'm no mental health expert, but I think that just sitting her down and trying to talk to her about all that right now is a very bad idea."

"So, what should I do?"

"I don't know. I've never experienced anything like this. When she wakes up, we can introduce ourselves, and maybe find out something about her. Maybe she has more family in the city who can take her in."

Gregory sat back down, burying his head in his hands. "You're right. Thanks, Gloria."

"You should get some sleep, Gregory. I think you've done enough to help the city for now, and you look like you could use the rest. I'll keep an eye on the girl."

He agreed, thanking her, and she directed him to some guest rooms that Leviana had opened up for anyone who needed them.

He slept. Nightmares of his own manifested. Failure to save a little girl. Failure to protect his sister. Unable to protect his family as they were swallowed by a rotten darkness.