Adelaide had seen death before. She had battled against it, warded it off, and watched as others had succumbed to it. Death, pain, healing, life, was all a part of being a warden.

She had felt the cooling of a patient’s skin, smelled its bitterness thick in stagnant air. Through years of study and practice, she had witnessed life slip away again and again. It was not a welcoming feeling, but one her body had become accustomed to. 

But it had never felt like this. 

Life in Vorrengarde had never been easy, but its people were fortunate. She was fortunate. The Veilwardens ensured it. Healers, scholars, and alchemists, they were an ancient order sworn to protect the fragile boundary between life and death, sickness and sorcery, affliction and curse. Adelaide had spent her life among them, trained in the science of healing and the delicate art of warding off illnesses. She felt pride in being a warden, in playing such a critical role and in the power that she wielded due to her title. 

And yet, what they faced now was beyond their knowledge, beyond anything any of them had ever faced. 

“There’s nothing more we can do,” she murmured. Her voice remained steady out of habit, but the words felt hollow. Today alone, she had watched more patients die than she had in the past six months combined. They couldn't continue at this rate.

The nurse beside her hesitated before pulling a sheet over the man’s pale, mottled skin. Others turned away, already moving to the next crisis. Because there was always a next. They had not stopped coming for days now, quickly overwhelming the infirmary.  

Adelaide stepped back into the hallway and exhaled. 

The infirmary was chaos, mirroring the streets beyond the thick oak double doors at the end of the hall. Currently guarded by two large, armored wardens, she feared what was happening out there. They caught glimpses as the doors opened to allow in a new patient, but knew that the guarded gates around the infirmary still held back much of the chaos. What was her city like right now? If these hallways were filled with the dead, what were the streets like? 

The air inside was thick with sweat and the acrid bite of fever. Sickness and death wafted from all corners of the building, a smell unlike any other. Patients lined the corridors, writhing on makeshift pallets. The ones who could still scream did. The ones who couldn’t were worse, their bodies locked in unnatural rigor, mouths frozen in silent, gaping wails. 

It had begun with a single case. A farm worker, found collapsed in the fields. Then the others came. More each day. Faster each time. Now the infirmary overflowed, bodies stacked in corners, covered in bloodstained sheets. Too quick for the crematory, now down several workers themselves, to handle.  

The Veilwardens had fought disease before. It was their duty, their honor to do so. But this… this was something else. 

The symptoms followed no logic or pattern. Fevers spiked past the limits of survival. Organs shut down in minutes. While deadly, these symptoms were not unfamiliar. But the rash...the rash was the worst. It was nothing even the eldest Veilwarden had seen before, and it frightened even those who had served on the front lines of the Great War. The rash appeared to move beneath the skin, shifting like ink in water, as if something inside the patients were trying to surface. Or escape. 

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This wasn’t a plague. 

Adelaide swallowed. The thought felt dangerous. It was a possession of the flesh. 

While the symptoms appeared in random order, the cause of the rapid spread of the illness was painfully obvious. All patients presented with bites. Varying degrees and locations – some small bites on their arms or legs, others mauled, with chunks of flesh and muscles missing or hanging loose. But all had bites.  

They had resorted to restraining all of the patients who entered the infirmary, no matter the symptoms they presented with or if they were able to locate a bite or not. The desire to bite and consume flesh was ferocious, and only through ending this access could they slow the spread of this...possession. 

A physician should never fear the sick. But for the first time, Adelaide did. 

A figure stepped into her path, shoving a slate tablet into her hands. 

“We need full quarantine,” said Dr. Priya Patel, her voice rough from exhaustion. She snapped her gloves tighter, already turning to the next patient. 

Adelaide barely heard her. Her gaze locked onto the tablet’s surface. She waved a finger an inch above the small glyph on the side of the tablet and text appeared instantly. Scanning the latest death reports, she felt numb at the hopelessness revealed within. Reports from not only other areas of her city, the capital city of Duskmere, but also from other cities stretching far across Vorrengarde all echoed the same 

No pattern. No progression. Only a descent. 

Priya was right. They weren’t fighting an illness. They were losing to it. 

Adelaide swallowed hard and turned. “Get the apothecaries on—” 

A scream. A crash. 

Her head snapped toward the sound. A nurse staggered backward, slamming into a supply cart, sending vials and instruments clattering across the stone floor. 

Adelaide’s breath caught. 

The body on the bed, the one belonging to the man she had just witnessed lose a gruesome battle with death not moments ago, was moving. His body had risen from the bed, his muscles taught. She watched, frozen as her brained tried to process the impossible, as he slowly made his way to within a few feet of her. Each movement he made looked incredibly painful, his muscles each twitching and contracting unnaturally, as if there were more than one being inside fighting for control of them. 

As he stepped closer, he saw that his pupils had eclipsed his irises, the whites of his eyes veined with black. The rash had spread to his lips, cracking them into a ruined, jagged grin. His fingers twitched, too fast, too unnatural, almost like a marionette testing its strings. 

Then he lunged. 

Adelaide prided herself in being nimble, quick. It helped not only in her practices, her fingers dexterous and able to perform the finest of movements, both to cast the most complex spells but also to complete the most life-altering of surgeries. But the man was too fast, simply a blur in her vision.  

The impact of his body against hers sent Adelaide crashing backward, skull cracking against cold tile. Pain burst behind her eyes. Her vision flickered, dared to go black for a second before landing instead on a cloudy, hazy view. Her body felt heavy, as if she were surrounded by water and fighting her way to the surface. She fought against it, gasping for breath, urging herself to stay awake. 

Then, she felt the sharp sting of teeth. His teeth. 

They tore into her forearm. 

Her blood burned, searing against her skin. Ripping flesh free, tearing, then heard the nauseating sound of chewing.  

The burn of the gaping wound on her arm, the pounding in her head, the pooling of blood beneath her combined with a sudden, sickening pull as something inside her twisted, something deeper than pain. 

Her vision blurred again and this time she knew she would not win the fight. 

This time, as she felt herself sink again, she felt as if hands were crawling amongst her body, dragging beneath the surface of something vast and unknowable. 

Then, just darkness.

Complete and utter darkness, void of all sensations. 

And in it, a voice. 

Whispering. Crawling. 

Calling her name.