The return to Oakhaven was a brutal slog against the failing light and the relentless wind. As Theron and I finally crested the last rise, the sight of the village—a pitiful cluster of low, hunched shacks—did nothing to ease the chill. The air was thick, carrying a faint, sickeningly sweet scent that was entirely new.
Theron dropped his wood bundle. "Smoke's thin," he muttered, his breath clouding. "Too quiet."
The small fire in our hut was little more than embers. Before I could deal with my hunger, a sharp, ragged cough echoed from the neighboring shack—the home of Maud, the Herbalist.
Theron pushed aside the hide covering Maud's doorway. Maud lay on her straw pallet, her face unnaturally flushed, eyes burning with fever. Her husband, Oswin, lay next to her, shivering violently.
"It came quick," Maud rasped. "The shivering. Then the heat... I can't keep the tea down."
I knelt beside Oswin. His fever was raging. I recognized it as a fast-moving, severe infection, but the symptoms defied my memory. His body was already covered in dark, painful discolorations on his skin, and deep, hard swellings had risen in his joints and neck. This wasn't the flu...
The stench... it was the same suffocating, sickly sweet rot Elian had smelled the day Ceol fell ill. And then the memories of the rot began to unspool with dizzying speed.
The first whisper of the rot was not a cough but a silence. It fell upon the village of Oakhaven not like a sudden storm, but like a gradual, creeping frost in the start of winter.
It started with Ceol, the cooper. Three days past, he'd been shouting over ale in the longhouse, his face ruddy and loud. Now he lay on his sleeping mat, his skin the unnerving colour of damp slate. A fever burned in him, a heat so fierce it seemed to steam from his eyes. His wife, Elara, spoke of a hard, angry lump—a bubo—that had swelled in his armpit, black and shiny as a beetle's shell. Young Elian, barely eighteen, had seen the fear in Elara's eyes, a look that mirrored the chill that had begun to settle deep in his own bones.
Old Meara, the village elder, had pressed a poultice of crushed poppy and sour dock on it, murmuring prayers to the old gods and the new Christ alike. It did no good. By the next dawn, Ceol had stopped struggling, his breath rattling away to nothing, leaving a hollow space in the community that grew wider with every passing hour. Elian had watched from the shadows of his own doorway as a faint, inky mist, like smoke from a dying fire, began to rise from Ceol's hut, clinging to the thatch before dissipating into the morning air.
Fear, a colder, sharper thing than any winter, then took hold.
A day later, it was two of the children. They did not have the lump, only the sudden, overwhelming sickness, a coughing that brought up dark, bloody froth that sprayed the earthen floor. Their small bodies turned cold with terrifying speed. When their father tried to lift the elder boy, he saw the livid, bruise-like spots appearing on the child's chest and thighs, a terrible, final blossoming beneath the skin. Again, Elian saw it—the same dark tendrils of mist, thicker this time, curling upwards from the children's home, a silent testament to the illness's unforgiving grasp.
The sun beat down on the thatch roofs, and the scent of death began to mingle with the scent of woodsmoke and sheep's wool. People stopped meeting at the well. They spoke in low, clipped tones, their eyes darting, measuring the distance between their own healthy body and a neighbour's shuddering form. The familiar rhythm of the village—the clang of the smith's hammer, the children's shouts, the lowing of the cattle—was replaced by a dreadful, strained quiet, broken only by the thin, keening cry of a newly bereaved mother.
Old Meara had finally stood in the centre of the green, her face a mask of ash and terror, and simply pointed east. "It is the scourge," she whispered, her voice barely carrying. "We are forsaken. Let him who is whole flee."
And so the great unravelling began. Kin turned from kin, a dying man was left alone on the threshold of his own home, and the village, which had stood strong through Saxon raids and bitter famines, began to consume itself from within. Elian watched them go, one by one, families packing what they could, their faces etched with desperation. He saw them disappear down the path towards the distant hills, their backs growing smaller and smaller. He had meant to follow, but a strange paralysis had held him, a morbid fascination with the spreading gloom.
Now, as the last faint sounds of retreating footsteps faded, a profound silence descended. Elian stood alone amidst the empty huts, the hearths cold, the cooking fires long dead. The only movement was the occasional whisper of wind through the thatch, and, yes, the black mist. It was rising from almost every dwelling now, a silent, pervasive presence, twisting and swirling like the breath of some unseen, monstrous entity. The entire village, shrouded in this inky pallor, felt like a graveyard waiting to exhale.