The Midnight Hour.
A skeleton watch remained atop the curtain walls and inside the towers, their eyes scanning the dark while their comrades revelled below. Though they envied those at the feast, the arrival of warm rations at their posts offered some comfort. Everything seemed quiet and secure.
Below, the bonfires in the town square had begun to settle into a glowing bed of embers. The majority of the garrison and the townsfolk were now slumped in a wine-soaked stupor, their strength spent. The vibrant music had long since faded into a low murmur of slurred conversations.
Suddenly, the silence was shattered by a heavy, metallic clang.
A soldier, his flagon slipping from a nerveless grip, watched as the vessel hit the uneven ground. The sound rang out with unnatural clarity. The man collapsed to his knees, his hands clutching his stomach in a spasm of agony. His face, lit by the dying firelight, had turned a sickly shade of bruised violet—a cyanotic mask of pain.
The initial response was a wave of mockery, a thousand voices seasoned by the camaraderie of the bottle.
"You soft-bellied fool!" someone bellowed.
"Where's that big talk about drinking until dawn now!?" The laughter was a collective, thunderous roar.
But the mirth was cut short by a second, heavy thud. A shield-maiden collapsed, her fingers clawing at her midriff in a spasm of agony. Her skin turned the same livid, bruised purple, and a frantic sweat broke across her brow. These symptoms were far beyond a simple drunk; it was a visceral corruption of the body.
As the revellers moved to help, the contagion accelerated. Another warrior went down mid-stride, his frame hitting the cold stones with a heavy, final thud.
In that heartbeat, the realization rippled through the fortress: the agony was everywhere.
A hundred thousand souls—sentries, demon hunters, and townsfolk alike—were gripped by a subterranean torment.
Some felt a searing furnace in their throats; others felt as if jagged blades were flaying the very muscle of their hearts. To many, it felt like a thousand parasites were burrowing beneath their skin, hungry for the marrow.
Then came the blood. Crimson seeped from eyes, nostrils, mouths, and ears—weeping even from the pores of their skin.
Across every quadrant of the Ragguard Fortress, the joy of the feast was turned into a slaughterhouse of shrieks. While a scattered few remained untouched, standing in a wide-eyed stupor amidst the carnage, they were a tiny fraction against a sea of the dying.
Seraph bolted to his feet with predatory speed. Instinct screamed through his veins. He stood as one of the solitary few spared from the pain, his gaze scanning the square with glacial intensity. He was one of the few who showed no signs of the poisoning that was wasting everyone else.
The men of the Ragguard sentries were forged of iron and mageia—veterans whose bodies should have easily shrugged off something as simple as tainted meat. But in just a few heartbeats, the agony spiked past the limits of mortal endurance.
The heavy thud of bodies hitting the unforgiving stones accelerated, a grim domino effect sweeping through the fortress. The echoes of laughter were strangled, replaced by a low, haunting wail that saturated the night air.
A young woman lay curled on the frost-slicked stones, her eyes clamped shut as she let out a fractured plea. "It burns... god, it burns... someone, help me..." Her voice was a thin wisp, fading into the gale.
Beside her, a veteran warrior tried to force his trembling frame into a defiant stance. But a Viscous stream of blood and sweat leaked from his nose and mouth. He wiped his face, staring at the stain on his hand with a raw, visceral horror.
"POISON!!!" he bellowed, his voice cutting through the cacophony like thunder. "We've been betrayed! The ale!—The ale's been poisoned!!!"
The shout acted like a death shroud, momentarily silencing the groans of the dying. Faces turned ashen as terror spread faster than any contagion. A hundred thousand souls were gripped by a sudden, frantic panic.
The fortress dissolved into absolute pandemonium.
Some began to crawl blindly across the stones, seeking an escape from a city that had become a trap. Others, seized by paranoia, unsheathed their blades, their clouded eyes seeing every comrade as a potential assassin.
The clatter of falling steel and shattering flagons provided a jagged soundtrack to the collapse of the garrison.
The crisis had hit a catastrophic momentum, leaving the fortress broken and gasping in the dark.
The gnawing of the toxin intensified with every heartbeat—a cruel, escalating war against the spirit.
Even Leonis, a man of iron-clad strength, was reduced to a state of agonized trembling. He was forced to plunge his broadsword into the stone just to stay upright, his body soaked in a bloody sweat that pooled on the weathered slabs. The visible tremors in his seasoned muscles showed he'd hit his breaking point; even a veteran of his standing wasn't immune to this violation of the flesh.
"MEDICS! HEALERS! We've got a mass-casualty event! To the square!" Leonis bellowed, his voice a fractured thunder echoing across the fortress.
But the irony of the night was absolute. Many of the healers themselves lay face-down on the frost, victims of the same tainted ale. While a few hundred medics who had stayed sober scrambled into the fray, their speed was just a drop in a sea of a hundred thousand dying souls. The sanctuary they offered was a mathematical impossibility; the scale of the slaughter had already outpaced the physician's Art.
Seraph surged forward to steady the General. With unceremonious haste, he jammed a phial of clouded-emerald antidote between Leonis's teeth, his lack of courtesy nearly making the commander choke.
The moment the bitter, herbal liquid scalded Leonis's palate, his swatting turned into desperate clutching. He seized the vessel, draining the contents with frantic necessity.
The young man didn't linger. He vaulted to where Rosalyn lay curled in a foetal spasm of torment. With a deft flick, he unsealed a fresh potion and administered it with clinical, forced precision.
The girl was too far gone to resist his iron mandate. She could only part her lashes with a harrowing effort, her eyes brimming with the tears of the damned. Her consciousness was a blurred grey, her mind teetering on the edge of total collapse under the lash of the demon curse.
As the girl made out the blurred silhouette of the young man before her, a single tear traced a path from the corner of her eye. She offered no resistance to Seraph's forceful intervention; though the antidote was as bitter as the toxin itself, she swallowed every drop with absolute trust.
The liquid went down her throat, accompanied by a clouded-emerald glow that flared in her veins. The medicine began the grueling work of dragging her back from the brink.
"Rest easy... While I draw breath, the grave won't get its claws into you," Seraph murmured, his voice a warm anchor in the frost. "The Goddess isn't done with your pestering just yet."
In the biting chill, the demon curse didn't just aim to take their lives; it sought to shatter the very soul of the fortress. Terror saturated the minds of the poisoned, for they knew neither the hand that struck them nor the nature of the malice curdling their blood.
"Master..." Rosalyn whispered, her voice a dry rasp.
A faint bloom of colour returned to her cheeks. Though her strength was still a broken reed, her spirit was clawing its way back. The minor potion Seraph carried was only a basic alchemical weave; it couldn't fully purge the corruption or nullify every side-effect. She would still need days of rest to fully recover.