??? POV——
I had a devil of a time finding the place. Officially, it didn't exist and therefore wasn't on any map. We became lost several times and had to ask directions from locals who kept thinking I meant another town. I was in an impatient mood by the time I reached the small collection of hilltop homes. I remember thinking, 'This had better be damned serious'. Once I saw their faces, I regretted my wish.
There were seven of them, all on cots, all barely conscious. The villagers had moved them into their new communal meeting hall. The walls and floor were bare cement. The air was cold and damp.
'Of course they're sick', I thought.
I asked the villagers who had been taking care of these people. They said no one, it wasn't "safe." I noticed that the door had been locked from the outside. The villagers were clearly terrified. They cringed and whispered; some kept their distance and prayed.
Their behavior made me angry, not at them, you understand, not as individuals, but what they represented about our country. After centuries of foreign oppression, exploitation, and humiliation, we were finally reclaiming our rightful place as humanity's middle kingdom. We were the world's richest and most dynamic superpower, masters of everything from politics to war.
'It was the dawn of what the world was finally acknowledging as "The Greek Age" and yet so many of us still lived like these ignorant peasants, as stagnant and superstitious as the earliest Spartan savages.' I thought.
I was still lost in my grand, cultural criticism when I knelt to examine the first patient. She was running a high fever, forty degrees centigrade, and she was shivering violently. Barely coherent, she whimpered slightly when I tried to move her limbs. There was a wound in her right forearm, a bite mark. As I examined it more closely, I realized that it wasn't from an animal. The bite radius and teeth marks had to have come from a small, or possibly young, human being.
Although I hypothesized this to be the source of the infection, the actual injury was surprisingly clean. I asked the villagers, again, who had been taking care of these people. Again, they told me no one. I knew this could not be true. If no one had cleaned this woman's wound, why wasn't it throbbing with infection?
I examined the six other ill. All showed similar symptoms, all had similar wounds on various parts of their bodies. I asked one man, the most lucid of the group, who or what had inflicted these injuries. He told me it had happened when they had tried to subdue "him."
——
They constantly went on and on the plague god, even some of the men I brought with me started to try and back off of the contract.
With me I brought my mercenaries, hired straight from Athens. 5000 men traveling across the country with me in search of 'The City of Eternal Sleep.' A city said to have angered the gods that they sent on of Hades children to completely destroy it and its people.
I say rubbish, with the name 'Eternal Sleep' you would think it was Morpheus who cursed the city, but No, its the relatively hated god of plague, Maegor. AGAIN, RUBBISH!
Anyway, I kept my men from interacting from the locals, as I said they were clearly ill. After a couple of days rest, we- I continued on, due to the help of one local, we were on our way to the land of make believe, non of the gods were real, why is it that only I can realize this?
——
After 2 weeks on foot, we arrived. My scouts had found and captured a 12 year old boy from the place we were looking for. When subduing the boy it took 7 full grown men to capture him, they had complained that he had scratched them to hell,
'One of them had even got bitten!' I thought about how utterly useless everyone around me was.
At first the mercenaries tried to hold me back. They warned me not to touch him, that he was "cursed." I shrugged them off and reached for the bound boy. The boy's skin was as cold and gray as If dead. I could find neither his heartbeat nor his pulse. His eyes were wild, wide and sunken back in their sockets. They remained locked on me like a predatory beast. Throughout the examination he was inexplicably hostile, reaching for me with his bound hands and snapping at me through his gag.
His movements were so violent I had to call for two of the largest mercs to help me hold him down. Initially they wouldn't budge, cowering in the doorway like baby rabbits.
"Are you serious? GET YOUR WORTHLESS ASSES OVER HERE, I DIDNT PAY FOR COWARDS!!!!!!"
A couple of hours into my examination One of my "soldiers," the one responsible for his arms, gave up trying to hold them and thought it might safer if he just braced them against the floor with his knees. But the boy jerked again and I heard his left arm snap. Jagged ends of bones stabbed through his gray flesh. Although the boy didn't cry out, didn't even seem to notice, it was enough for both soldiers to leap back and run from the room.
The boy began to twist in my direction, his arm ripped completely free. Flesh and muscle tore from one another until there was nothing except the stump. His now free right arm, still tied to the severed left hand, dragged his body across the floor.
I had ruched out of their as fast as I could.
'I….the greatest healer in Greece, frightening by a boy?' I couldn't believe it.
Since the healing camps was a little on the outside of the main camps, It took a while to run up the hill the main camps were, I had only took 10 men with me so packed on took a while, 4 hours in total, from the start of the examination to our trekking of this-
'DAMNED HILL, WHY DID I POST UPON A HILL AND THEN WALK DOWN THE DAMNED THING!!!!'
The smell was first. The smoke is too recognizable, we knew something was wrong.
——
Once we got over the hill, we saw it....PURE CHAOS!
"WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING HERE??!!"
"AH Lord Aches! T-the men, They started going crazy! A couple of hours after you left it started."
"W-wah, h-how??"
"It all started when-"