Sharpe

The task Councilor Rexanthe had laid out before Enara seemed simple on the surface. Interview a survivor, one who seemed to have key details about the cult behind the attack on the clinic. Back when the explosion occurred, Enara had heard them speaking of the cult. So in all likelihood they had information and were willing to give it. Simple.

And yet her heart raced as fast as it had at the clinic, when the flames had licked at her clothing and a woman wielded a whip and wounded her and Kalem while trying to kill them and leave their bodies to the wreckage.

Maybe it was Felix’s presence. Maybe it was the weight of what would happen if she failed. Maybe she just knew how bad she was at speaking to others. It was probably all three and a hundred other reasons. No matter the source of her anxiety, she would push through.

The councilor had instructed her on where to go, and sent his seal before she arrived. Between that and Felix’s sergekeeper uniform, it had been quite easy to enter the hospital. She chewed on the inside of her cheek as a fellow doctor lead her towards the patient’s room. It was strange being here officially but not as a doctor.

Hopefully once this died down she could go back to just being a doctor for however many years she had left.

But until then, she was a civilian investigator. Just one with medical knowledge, which would hopefully prove useful at some point.

Their guide stopped outside a door, and Enara turned back to Felix. He’d trailed behind her all day, thought it was hard to read him he didn’t seem like he’d cause any trouble. Mostly she wanted him to help her seem more official and to keep an eye out. If this witness had the information they were seeking, the cult might want to silence them before any secrets were spilled.

“Listen, let me try to lead, okay? Jump in if I forget to ask something obvious, and other than that just keep an eye on the door.”

Felix rolled his eyes but nodded. For a second she felt a pang of loss, she and Virgil had been so close, but Felix felt like a stranger more often than not. Maybe if she’d tried harder, they could be closer. But then again, if they got close and she died in a few years, she’d just subject him to experience the same pain she felt now.

“Okay, let’s do this.” She said it more to herself than Felix. Enara took a deep breath, knocked, and called out as she opened the door. “Hello, I’m Enara, I’m here to have a chat if that’s alright?”

No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.

It begins without warning.

No storm breaks over Embrathis. No siren sounds. No visible hand reaches down from the heavens to mark what is coming. The city simply continues, for one more ordinary breath, as it always has.

A young wife in the market pauses at a stall with a basket half-filled in her arm. A laborer wipes sweat from his brow in the farmlands. A clerk in the governance district lifts her eyes from a ledger. A fisherman on Sunsnare Bay laughs at something just said. A seamstress knots thread between careful fingers. A student leans over a book. A baker reaches into an oven. A man kneels at a shrine. A woman wakes in her bed.

And then it happens.

All at once.

The first symptom is always the same: breath catches strangely, as though the lungs have forgotten how to work. Hands fly instinctively to throats, to chests, to mouths that open against a panic no one around them yet understands. Faces blanch. Knees buckle. The pain comes hard and fast after that, sharp and crushing in the chest, merciless enough to steal speech before cries for help can fully form.

Then the asphyxiation begins.

Not gradual. Not uncertain. Immediate. Violent. Terribly familiar.

Across homes, roads, shops, fields, alleyways, offices, workshops, temple steps, taverns, classrooms, and market stalls, bodies collapse in perfect cruel unison. Hearts fail beneath the strain. Breath never returns. Husbands fall beside wives. Children crumple beside parents. Neighbors die within sight of one another, with no wound to explain it and no healer fast enough to stop it. Some reach for loved ones before they go. Some die alone. Some never even rise from their chairs.

All across Embrathis, the city is struck by the same horror that once defined Determination Day.

Another death event has occurred.

By the time the scale of it begins to set in, it is already too late. The dead lie where they fell, in tens of thousands, and the living are left to stare in disbelief at the stillness that follows. Streets choke with grief. Homes become tombs. The sound that rises after is not panic first, but mourning: a fractured, citywide chorus of wailing, prayer, disbelief, and names spoken to bodies that will never answer.

No district is untouched.

No class is spared.

No family bound to an organic mage on the treatment escapes the possibility that someone they loved has just died where they stood.

Seventy thousand more are gone.

And Embrathis knows now, with dreadful certainty, that Determination Day was never the end of it.