Chapter 1: The First Wave – Archbishop Danival Webber’s Stand

Archbishop Danival Webber ran across the church courtyard as hard as he could, his lungs struggling for breath.  With every exasperated exhalation, a cloud of mist formed in front of his face, momentarily blinding the path before him.  The sounds of the wounded and the dying followed him as steel rang against something that was not quite steel, but just as hard.  All around him he could hear the chanting of clerics and paladins of the Church of Karameikos casting their spells, preparing to make a final stand in the church yard if just to keep the creature (creatures?) at bay for one additional minute.

“Pater!” one of the younger brothers of the Church called to him from across the way.  “Quickly, through here!”  The young priest held the large double doors open as the Archbishop blundered past them.  Four men closed the doors just as the Archbishop passed beneath.  Poles and heavy wooden planks were brought to barricade the entrance.

Webber took a moment to lean against a stone wall and catch his breath.  One of the armored knights stepped towards him.  “We believe we can hold this position for a few minutes, Lord Archbishop.”

The archbishop nodded as he passed a hand across a sweat covered brow.  “Thank you,” he said, wondering quickly what the knight’s name was, “Sir Roberts.”  If Webber had guessed the man’s name wrongly, it did not show on the knight’s face.  Webber stepped away from the wall and began to move, not bothering with wasting another moment.

He had to reach Father Pathill and contact the Patriarch.  The very Hells would have them this day.

***

…Hours earlier…

Prince Valen Karameikos sat astride his horse as a dry wind picked up.  He hugged his cloak closer about himself to protect himself – more against the gritty sands as they kicked from the ground than the wind itself.  The horse beneath him neighed and whinnied, clearly uncomfortable.  “Easy boy,” he soothed the horse.  “Easy.”

The man to his side coughed.  Valen glanced at his companion – a ruddy skinned, dark haired man of Darokini descent, dressed in an elegant uniform vest adorned with gildings and medals.  The man held a long rifle in his steady hands and had a pair of pistols hanging from holsters at his sides.  “Blasted weather,” the man said after a moment, “it’s a wonder the men are deathly sick.”

“One wouldn’t think to associate a desert with such cold.”  Valen agreed.  “How are the priests faring?”

The Darokini shrugged.  “Still useless.  More than half of them have caught the chills as well.”

“That’s an odd thing.  And the elf, Sigil?”

This elicited a bark of contempt from the Darokini general.  “Still speaking in little more than useless riddles.  He’s as clueless as the rest of us.  He’s been poring through the citadel’s library for the past three days, certain there must be something hidden there.”

Valen shrugged.  He reached into the saddlebag by his side and pulled out a small box filled with tobacco and rolling papers.  Deftly, though with a little difficulty fighting against the wind, he rolled himself a cigar.  The prince offered the box to the Darokini, who studied it with mild discontent before picking the box up and rolling out his own cigar.  “We’ve seen stranger things.”

The two men sat atop their horses and smoked.  When the temperature dropped below what either man could stomach, they turned their horses and headed back towards gates of Bao’Garan.

***

The doors to the rectory opened and the archbishop strode through with bounding steps.  The guards quickly turned towards the doors, weapons readied, but lowered them when they saw who it was.  “Pathill!  Report!”  He barked.

The priest looked up, his face cast in a worried frown.  “Lord Archbishop, the Patriarch is somewhere where he cannot be contacted.  I have my assistant attempting to reach Archbishop Dorianne.  It will be a few minutes yet.”

The archbishop nodded, the last of his hopes fleeting away.  What little remained seemed as a lone candle struggling hopelessly against a hurricane in the dead of night.  Soon, all would fall to darkness and shadow.  He walked towards a nearby chair and settled there, all of his earthly resources bent towards fighting the need to weep in frustration.

Outside, they could hear the double doors of the east wing of the abbey crashing and banging as the monsters struggled to gain entrance.  There was still an occasional scream from an all-too-human throat that pierced the silence in between each blow to the grain as the wounded lay dying outside in the hellish day.

“We are lost,” Archbishop Webber concluded.  “All is lost to us.  Mother Djaea protect your children,” he called out to the Immortals in supplication.  “Save our souls from the creatures that would come to take them away.”

There was a final lurching, sickening sound as the wooden doors down the hallway gave and guards screamed.  An inhuman screech filled the church as the creatures gained access to the last sanctuary within the abbey.  “All is lost,” Webber repeated as his will lost the fight with fear and tears began to stream across his face.

***

“Milord,” the sergeant, Vernos, said as Valen dismounted his horse.  “Captain Thurghill is on his last legs, I believe, milord.  He has asked to die by the side of his Prince.”

Valen nodded as he sighed.  Captain Thurghill was a good man – a loyal son of Karameikos who had joined during the Black War and served with distinction for over twenty years.  It was always sad to see such a dedicated man go.  “Take me to him, quickly.”

Valen and the sergeant stepped through the streets of the small town outside the citadel, followed distantly by the Darokini general.  The men passed the huddled camps of those soldiers who had not yet fallen sick to what the men were now referring to as the “Desert Chills.”  The denizens of the town – humans and halflings, most, but with more than a few of the snake-like yuan’ti – stayed wide away from the camp.  Those that dared approach came because they, too, had caught the desert chills and were seeking whatever assistance the few priests that came along with the Brun Defense Compact forces could do to help them.  Yet, there was nothing that could be done for them, and so they stayed away, praying to their own heathen patrons for equally useless assistance.

The men reached the building that had been commandeered for housing the ill.  At first they had set up cots and beds along the walls to keep them all in one easy-to-reach place.  But as the number of ill rose, the number of beds available dwindled.  They resorted to make-shift mattresses made of hay and linen on the floors, and when those dried up they simply laid them on the floor with a blanket and an apology.  The number of sick was disturbing.

Strangely, the illness did not appear to be catching by simply being in the same room as a sick individual.  Whatever the means of contagion were, they were not simple exposure.  The spread of the disease was, all in all, altogether random – two men could have the same experiences and the next day one would be sick while the other was well.  This, and the fact that the disease was resistant – nay, altogether immune – to magical intervention was cause for alarm among many.

Valen and the sergeant stepped towards one of the beds.  The captain had been one of the first to be infected a few weeks ago.  A deathly pallor had come upon him now, his skin covered in a sheen of sweat despite the cold weather.  His eyes appeared hard and glazed over.  His breathing was heavily labored and tortured.

“Captain,” Valen said softly as he grabbed the man’s hand.  “It is I.”

“Prince Valen,” he said, his voice ragged but managing to find a moment of pride amidst the phlegmy breaths.  “My prince, I have failed you.”

“No, Captain,” Valen soothed.  “It is I who have not managed to find a cure for your ailments.”

“Nonsense,” the captain stubbornly continued.  “I should have fought harder.  Died in battle, by your side, milord.  For that I beg forgiveness.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” Valen reassured him.  “You die with honor today, Captain Thurghill.  It was the honor of Karameikos to have such a man serve under its banner.  And it was my honor to serve with such an exemplary man.”

Captain Thurghill made no more sounds.  Sometime in Valen’s little speech – short as it had been – the Captain had passed on to the other world.  Valen stood and closed the man’s eyelids.  “Send for a priest,” he told the sergeant.  “If we don’t have the resources to raise him, ready the pyres.  No need to risk contagion.”

The Prince and his friend the General stepped out of the sick house in silence.  Valen reached for his box to roll another cigar.

“Damn shame,” the Darokini said.  “Damn shame.”

***

No one noticed what happened to Captain Thurghill’s corpse after Valen left.  The truth of the matter is, no one had the time nor the inclination to pay much attention to a corpse when there were another four dozen men and women sick and dying and a half dozen priests powerless to help them.  No one noticed when the sick in Darokin City started dying either, nor the ones in Mirros, Glantri City, Thyatis, the Five Shires.  All across Brun, the sick began to die, more or less at the same time.  The names of the diseases differed – the desert chills in Bao’Garan, winter greens in Darokin City, the second plague in Thyatis.  None knew what to call it, for the disease was not one of this world.

With another four hundred years of scientific research – give or take a few decades – they would have noticed that what they were calling a disease was not truly a disease at all.  Diseases are bacteria and viruses that spread inside one’s body.  Of course, in another four hundred years the world would have moved on to such an atheistic state that philosophers would question the meaning of magic and the soul itself, the truth of the Immortals abandoned for the logic of science and hard fact.

So they would not have had a name for the malady that was presently spreading like wildfire across the face of Brun.  A malady which struck not only the body, but the very soul itself.  A malady that took each cell within the biological framework and transformed it into a tumor, and that tumor into something else.  Something fused with the soul – except that soul itself had grown a tumor.  It was a cancer of the mind, body and soul.

What was left behind was not human, nor inhuman.  It was something else entirely.

It was aberration.

No one noticed the final stages of the change as it came over Captain Thurghill’s corpse.  In fact, the next time anyone looked at Thurghill, the captain had been replaced by a creature that was only vaguely humanoid.  It stood on two legs and had two arms and a head – that much was clear.  But where eyes, ears, nose, and mouth should have been there was a mass of congealed flesh.  The flesh itself had lost all color of life and taken on a glossy dark green complexion, as if preserved in advanced stages of decay.  The arms no longer ended in hands, but instead each finger was elongating to the point of being wiry tentacles of a rubbery material.  The skin over the bones seemed to fit like an ill suit, as well, pulling and stretching in odd anatomical angles.

Not surprisingly, the first sound Valen heard soon after taking the first long drag from his cigar was a terrified scream from within the sick house.  The scream ended prematurely in a wet, gurgling mess, as a tentacled hand penetrated the frightened priest’s chest and punctured both lungs and heart.

The camp of Bao’garan erupted into battle moments later.

***

Sir Retameron von Kraskov grew tired and impatient rather quickly with the Archbishop’s uncontrolled wails.  Panick had settled over the faces of the younger priests and guards.  He cleared his throat and projected his voice over the pathetic Archbishop’s wails.  “Listen up, people.  There’s something out there that means to take us to our graves.  Well, I ain’t havin’ it, and if that son of a bitch wants to take me down he’ll have to do it with me kicking and biting.

“Think on this: What would our Immortal forebears do given our situation?  Would they sit and cry like helpless babes, throwing themselves to the wolves?  Would they blubber and prattle on about hopelessness?  Or would they grimly take their swords and shields and stand against the growing shadow?

“A day may yet come when the power of the Immortals fails us.  But this is not that day!  Today we take our stand and face the growing darkness.  We shall make our stand and light the way to our fallen bretheren.  And should the grip of Thanatos come for us at the hands of these creatures, then we shall follow the Reaper and answer his call.  For we shall stand this night before our Immortal masters, and they shall bow before us, we mighty, who stood our ground this day to defend the holy sanctity of this, our temple!”

The response was a welcome rousing cheer.  Even the archbishops wails had died down.  Good, Retameron thought.  He strode to the door as the sounds of battle raged outside.  He lifted his sword clear of its scabbard and turned to face the men behind him.  “Let’s get to work.”