By late afternoon, the travelers reach Lord Vale’s hilltop manor. Its iron gate hangs open, its walls smoke-stained, and villagers crowd the courtyard beneath torn banners.
Elianor Vale
My home still stands, but the plague reached the servants’ quarters. We must find the living before we reckon with anything else.
Inside the gatehouse, a middle-aged woman with a broad build, gray-streaked black hair, and a green wool dress tends three villagers on straw pallets. Violet discoloration creeps along one man's neck.
the gatehouse healer
They are fevered, not dead. Yet. I have kept the corruption from their hearts, but I cannot drive it out.
Celia’s undead sensing reaches across the room. Warm pulses answer from the patients, tangled with thin dead threads that have not yet claimed their lives.
Maurice Headsman
Then this is the work your god named. Tomas and I will clear a room, gather water, and keep frightened hands away from them.
Elianor Vale
I will bring every survivor here, Celia. No one in my father’s lands will be abandoned while breath remains.
“I examine the patients for a shared corruption pattern”
SUCCESS (Superb Medicine, rolled -1)
Celia moves from pallet to pallet, studying the violet threads at each throat, wrist, and breastbone while the gatehouse healer holds the lamps close.
The corruption follows no wound or bite. In all three villagers, it enters through the breath, settles first in the lungs, then sends thin dead branches toward the heart.
Celia Graves
The curse is shared, but it has not rooted in the heart.
Celia’s sensing finds the same pattern beneath each fever: living flesh resisting a single residue carried from the manor’s lower airways, not a spreading plague-root.
the gatehouse healer
The servants’ quarters, then. They all worked below the east wing, and the fever began after the old cellar doors opened.
Maurice Headsman
A common source gives us a place to search. Keep them breathing, healer. We will see that cellar sealed.
The pattern is clear: one concentrated exposure, still caught before death. The patients remain curable, and the manor’s lower chambers hold the remaining danger.
By dusk, the three villagers breathed cleanly again, and the cellar doors stood sealed beneath fresh iron and salt.
the gatehouse healer
They will live. All three of them.
Maurice Headsman
Then we build over the ashes, and remember what must never be opened.
Elianor Vale
The manor has taken enough. Let the living reclaim it.
Celia Graves
The curse ended here, with breath returned and hearts still beating.
Celia stood with Maurice and Elianor among the smoke-stained stones while the villagers carried timber into the courtyard.
The manor’s corruption was sealed beneath the hill, and the surviving villagers were cured before death could claim them. In the days that followed, broken walls rose again, hearths were relit, and the hilltop ceased to be a place of dread. Celia Graves left the survivors to their rebuilding, carrying with her the quiet certainty that this time, the living had won.