by Nyssa Renay
As we started to leave, there came one of the most horrifying sounds I’d ever heard. A flaming canister burst through the advancing gray cloud with a high-pitched shriek and crashed into the crowd behind us. A deafening metallic explosion that smelled like fire and dirt mixed with the screams of hundreds of Telshakrans who were quickly incinerated by the blast, and hundreds more who were flung from the ground where it landed.
“Ein have mercy!” my mother shrieked. She and my father turned to see a huge flaming crater in the center of the viewing fields that quickly filled with billowing gray smoke. The terrible wave of dusty gas pushed its way from the center of the blast and spread across the field until everyone in the crowd was coughing from the layer of soot coating their mouths.
It was chaos as people ran in all directions. My father picked up my sister and grabbed my mother’s free hand, and they ran as quickly as the massive flow of people allowed. All around me, the eyes of other children met mine. We coughed, trying to clear our lungs of the horrible gas and soot. I felt like my chest was on fire.
“Come this way!” My father pulled my mother’s hand as they broke through a side section of the crowd. All the streets were packed with terrified families and coughing children in tow, and my father knew a quicker way to get back home. We wove our way down the alleyways and side streets of Quelstren until somehow, we found ourselves at the front door of our house.
“Everybody upstairs!” my father commanded, shutting and locking the door behind us. My mother quickly drew the curtains in the front hall. When he turned on the light in the upstairs hallway, I could see our faces were covered in a thick black dust. “Baths, showers, whatever you have to do to get this stuff off you. Go do it now!” he barked.
Ten minutes later, all of us were washed and dressed in clean clothing.
“What’s going on?” my mother asked nervously.
“I have no idea,” my father replied, still shaken from the night’s events. He walked down the stairs toward the front door and cautiously peeked out through the curtain in the front hallway.
Outside, people were still crying and coughing and running in terror. The gray cloud had spread and hung right outside our house like fog. Across the horizon, more long trails of flame fell from the sky. My father shut the curtain again and touched his hands to his mouth, stroking his chin in thought.
“What do we do?” my mother asked.
“Well, for starters, let’s turn on the video screen. The Church should be broadcasting emergency instructions or something,” my father said reassuringly while he rushed us all into the living room.
But as my father turned on our meager little screen, all we could see were a few steady lines of solid color accompanied by a terrible buzzing sound that droned on in the background as the screen flashed PLEASE STAND BY.
“They must be trying to make sense of all this themselves,” my mother assumed. “Whatever it was must have taken them by surprise, too.”
“But they should be telling us something, Irenea. We should be given some kind of information,” my father growled.
At that moment, Linna’s breath became wheezy and she began to cough violently, despite having washed the soot from her body. My parents froze and looked at each other helplessly, realizing the walls of their home no longer protected their family from this unknown danger.
“Momma, I don’t feel good.” Linna struggled to keep herself from coughing as my mother rushed over to rub her back.
My mother put a hand to Linna’s forehead and knit her brows as she felt the feverish heat. My mother’s panic and anxiety intensified. “Come on, honey. Let’s…let’s just get you up to bed and rest,” my mother said nervously as she guided Linna across the living room and then up the stairs without saying anything to my father as he stared at the video screen and the flashing words.
I could hear Linna crying as my mother helped her into bed. “It’s so hot in here!” she wailed.
“Oh, Linna, please…please just lay still. You need to rest!” my mother pleaded.
“It’s too hot! Please, Momma, help me! It’s too hot in here!” she cried out through her coughing fit. She wheezed, trying to expel something thick and coarse.
My mother’s voice began to quiver. “Ein have mercy. Linna, I need you to sit still for a moment, okay? I’ll be right back, I swear.” My mother was near tears when she quickly ran back downstairs to where my father and I were sitting. “Something’s really wrong, Vim. She’s burning up.”
At that moment, I felt flushed and dizzy. There was a hoarse tickling in my throat that I tried to hold back, but the urge was too strong. I began to wheeze and cough like my sister.
“Oh, shit!” my father exclaimed as he jumped from his chair, snatching me up and handing me to my mother. “Take him upstairs and get him into bed!”
“But there’s no way they can sleep with this coughing! Listen to them!” she shouted and patted my back. Even through the sounds of my own painful coughing, I could still hear the distressed noises coming from my sister upstairs.
“Just get Vigil into bed and I’ll figure something out, okay? Go!”
My mother rushed me upstairs and quickly tucked me into bed before going to check on my sister. As soon as my mother left the room, I kicked the blankets off and began to cry hysterically. I was burning up, too. My face was flushed, my arms and legs ached, and I was drenched in sweat. All I could feel was the terrible pressure in my chest and the rumble of each cough. I was in agony. I felt a thick fluid moving around in my chest as my muscles contracted in a painful squeeze and wrenched my back with each involuntary spasm. My throat felt swollen and hard, as if a huge pill was stuck. My brain ached with the pressure from each terrible cough, and my eyes were thick and swollen by the time my mother came back into my room carrying a bottle under her arm.
“Vigil, sweetheart, I need you to sit up for a minute.” Her voice was stressed, but she tried to sound calm and comforting. I felt her cool hand behind my neck as she pulled me up and propped me against my pillows. “Drink this, sweetie. Please. It’ll help.”
She held an oversized spoon to my lips. I opened my mouth and drank all the liquid, which instantly set my throat on fire worse than it already was. I coughed. I choked. I wheezed. I could feel the liquid streaming down my irritated throat, burning and stinging each cell in its path.
After a second spoonful, a fuzzy feeling flooded my head and my body began to relax. My coughing lessened, and I slowly fell into a light sleep. But just before I drifted off, I caught sight of the words on the side of the bottle in my mother’s hand—Telshakran Whiskey.
-7-
Nine days had passed without any word from the Church. There were no explanations given; no solutions offered; no assistance of any kind from those the Telshakran people trusted most. Everyone was petrified of even stepping a foot outside their homes for fear of contagion or the possibility of another attack.
The sickness came to be known as the blood croup. Those infected with it developed a high fever and experienced moderate to heavy coughing at first, but after a few days, the disease rapidly progressed, consuming its host at an alarming rate. As the fever reached its peak, the virus caused bouts of dehydration and hallucinations and the persistent coughing became so relentless that those stricken began coughing up trace amounts of blood. Then, day by day, the body was rapidly destroyed from within. The afflicted coughed up more and more blood as the body worked to rid itself of every last drop of contaminated blood. At last, the individual’s skin withered and shriveled into a taut leathery form, as he or she breathed their final breath.
Atop the Divine Mountain in the Rectory, King Lexani was deliberating with his highest ordained priest and top medical practitioner, Father Brach, to find a remedy to the horrendous affliction that had overcome his planet.
“What the hell is it taking you so long to find a cure?” King Lexani bellowed as he sat at the head of a long, highly polished conference
table.
“Your Majesty, I’ve never seen anything like this in all my years of medicine. None of us have,” Brach answered somberly from the other end of the table as he examined the stack of papers in front of him, somehow hoping to find different results from the tests and research that had been conducted over the past two weeks. “I’m sorry, but it’s completely beyond our capabilities…not even the shepherds can cure the disease.”
“There has to be something! The gods wouldn’t leave us with nothing to save ourselves in such a dark hour!” King Lexani was furious to think the Children of Ein had been so careless not to provide something as simple as a plant, some kind of bacteria, or even a sacred ritual to remedy a disease like the blood croup.
“Your Majesty, we’ve considered all possible treatments and have even sent teams of shepherds to the farthest reaches of our realm in the hopes of finding herbs or medicines elsewhere. It was a desperate effort, but revealed nothing helpful. Again, I’m sorry, but I’m afraid there’s no cure. There’s nothing more we can do for them now.” Brach hung his head, crestfallen at hearing his own words.
“How many lives have been lost so far, Father Brach?” Lexani asked, uncertain he truly wanted to hear the answer.
“Just over twenty thousand to date, Your Majesty.”
“Well, then, I see no other choice. I’ll have to call the Council of Ten to assembly,” the exhausted king grumbled, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.
“I agree, Sire.” He nodded, ashamed of his failure to help.
Lexani held his hands to the bridge of his nose and rubbed his eyes, trying to relieve the tension building in his head. “Father Brach, is there anything further I should know before I send out my request for an assembly of the Council?”
“Yes…yes, Sire,” he reluctantly replied. “I-I…uh…”
“Out with it!” Lexani commanded.
Brach coughed nervously, clearing his throat before stating, “We’ve taken tallies from every continent on Telshakra. And uh…it’s still early…and we haven’t yet received truly definitive numbers…but…there is one distinct pattern emerging with the victims of the blood croup.”
“Which is?” The king eyed him impatiently.
Father Brach looked down at the stack of papers, trying to build up the courage to reveal this new devastation pattern.
“Get on with it!” Lexani snarled.
“The blood croup seems to only affect…children…Sire.”
“Are you sure?” The king’s expression became one of grave concern, causing Brach to shift uneasily in his chair.
“From what we’ve seen thus far, all the victims of the blood croup have been age ten or younger. There are no documented cases since the beginning of this crisis to discount the statistics.”
There was silence in the room for what felt like an eternity to Father Brach. Although these findings horrified him as well, he had even more heartbreaking news to deliver. He nervously addressed the monarch with as much of an official tone as he could muster. “Your Majesty, I’m so sorry, but in light of this new evidence, I strongly recommend we terminate the queen’s fertility treatments until we can contain this problem. We don’t yet know how the disease might affect the unborn, and my advice is that we halt your attempts at conceiving an heir until this crisis passes.”
The king nodded, reluctantly agreeing, but silently cursing, knowing he’d have to be the one to break the news to his wife. This was a crushing blow to his own hopes and dreams and for what lie ahead for the future of the monarchy. He knew how badly the queen wanted a child, and this new catastrophe on Telshakra gave him the uneasy feeling that he might be the end of a long and powerful bloodline.
Despite hearing such dire news from Father Brach, the king still had a more pressing issue on his mind; one that didn’t have to do with any children that Queen Minkara might bear for him, but with the special breed of children that existed within the control of the Church. Should their numbers get any lower, Lexani feared for the safety of his world, his people, and all of creation. He was almost afraid to ask the question, but he knew he had to.
“A disease that kills children is terrible enough as it is, but I wonder, are all children affected?” King Lexani asked apprehensively.
“What do you mean, Sire?”
“Can you tell me, Father Brach, if this disease has affected the young potentials at the Shepherd Academy?”
Brach exhaled a small sigh of relief at the question. It was the one piece of good news he could deliver to the king.
“Their exposure to the disease was limited. My staff and I did visit the academy, and we found nothing to cause us alarm. While I did see a few terminal cases there, most potentials who became afflicted with the blood croup only presented early symptoms of the disease and experienced a slight cough that did not progress. For the most part, those children seem able to fight it off.”
“Incredible,” King Lexani muttered in amazement. “The resilience of the shepherds knows no bounds. Ein be praised for their fortitude.”
“Yes, Sire.” Brach smiled nervously as a question popped back into his mind. He’d been longing to ask it since first discovering his findings in the young potentials at the academy, but he knew such a suggestion would be extremely controversial to King Lexani.
“Is there more you’d like to say to me, Father Brach?”
“My apologies if this is too bold, Your Majesty, but I’d like to send a team of priests back to the Shepherd Academy for further investigation.”
“Investigation?”
“Yes, Sire. I’d like to study those potentials who were infected. Perhaps…perhaps we can find a cure within them. It’s not entirely unreasonable to think there might be an antibody within their genetics that could provide the building blocks for a possible vaccination…or even a complete cure for the blood croup.” He didn’t make eye contact with the king as he spoke, fearful of the king’s reaction to the question.
“What would this study consist of?”
“I…well, thank you, Sire, for hearing me out on this. What I propose to do is send a team of five technical nurses, five research analysts, and two morticians—”
“Morticians?”
“Yes, Your Majesty. Once there, we’ll draw blood from those who have been infected, take skin and hair samples, and exhume the few who have passed already, and—”
“Wait!” The king’s eyes widened. “You want to exhume the dead? That’s blasphemous!”
“Exhumation isn’t mandatory, by any means,” Brach recanted, quickly trying to steer the conversation away from the king’s obvious misunderstanding. “Our research would be best served on a child who has died within twenty-four hours, and as one of the potentials died about fifteen hours ago, we can examine him before he’s buried. But we need to move very quickly to utilize that window of opportunity.”
“For what purpose?”
“Well…” Father Brach began to tremble. “We believe there is knowledge to be gained from studying the body postmortem. We can compare the findings from the dead with those of the survivors to isolate a possible cure. And with a thorough autopsy, we can determine the rate of decomposition of the muscle tissue and brain matter to know how his body was affected as the disease progressed right up until his death.”
“You want to dissect him, too?” King Lexani rose from his chair and leaned over the table, glaring down at Father Brach. “The potential shepherds…those who were chosen by Ein to become our most sacred guardians…the trusted security of the realm of Ein, and you want cut them open like they are nothing more than lab rats? The Children of Ein would be furious! It’s bad enough I’m going to have to deal with those pompous pricks on the council, but if I piss off the gods, I might as well slice my own throat right now!”
“Please, Sire. I’m merely suggesting the deceased potentials might hold valuable data that we need to further our research and help us develop a cure. This is only in the i
nterest of saving the lives of all children!”
“Neither the Church nor I shall stand for those types of experiments, Father Brach! Consider this an official denial of your request! There will be no exhuming or dissection of any children under my rule!”
“But, what if—”
“We’re finished here!” the king said firmly.
“I’m sorry, Sire,” Brach replied as he quickly gathered his papers and headed for the door, letting all hope of a cure die with his failure, and ashamed and furious at himself for having asked.
The door slammed shut, and King Lexani was now alone with his thoughts. Well, that’s that, he thought as he placed his head in his hands, trying to calm a rapidly developing headache. There’s no another choice. I’ll have to call the Council of Ten.
King Lexani spent the evening alone at his desk. He gripped the elderbone pen tightly as he angrily pressed it against the gilded parchment paper, forcing himself to swallow his pride and write a request that he never thought he’d make—to beg the Council of Ten for their help.
The only form of communication the council found acceptable for any request was a handwritten letter, signed and sealed by the king himself. Lexani found this process to be maddening, as he couldn’t just send one missive to the group. He was required to hand write and send a separate, personalized request to each of the ten representatives who held audiences with the Children of Ein. The king knew the members of the council were incredibly arrogant, so he figured that two days’ time was reasonable, for fear of offending them by demanding they arrive any sooner.
-8-
The next morning in the Garden of Ataraxia atop the Divine Mountain, King Lexani anxiously rubbed his thumb across the royal seal of Telshakra on the top letter of the stack he held. The king slowly paced back and forth before ten of the best horsemen in his Royal Guard as a soft wind fluttered the brilliant blue plumage atop their blackbrass helmets. The horsemen stood proudly and silently in tight formation, waiting for the king’s orders.