Ragnarr: Day Post Execution

This morning, a man was killed, because I agreed to it.

It's been a while. Since I was fighting plague in Rockstone. A hell of a way to go home, that.

I can't help but think that this has a lot in common with that plague. Only with the whole bloody world.

Then there were folks dying, too many. So many that the clerics of the plague lord came out of wherever they were hiding to help us, swearing that it wasn't their doing. I imagine they feared they'd be held to blame for it, strung up and beaten when all was said and done. Still, they helped.

Them and every other cleric who could get there fast enough. While I was still with Lucas. Still young and barely out of the caves, glad of the sunshine, and with no bloody clue what it meant when I begged him to let me go with him, to fight the plague.

The last time I saw my mother, too. After a long walk through the city, seeing the dead lying in gutters, the stink of rotting held in by the tunnels, and all she can say is "You look so glum, lad. Your's might be the last face these people see. Cheer up."

I did what I could, but it wasn't much. Tried to look happy for those poor bastards.

But it was already too late. Too many dead and too tight of space. Those tunnels sealed the plague in, let it spread too fast. I couldn't even heal yet, and even those who could couldn't cure folks as fast as it spread.

Until that bastard showed up. A priest of some evil god or other. Demanded that every family be locked in their homes with a few weeks food. No one was to be allowed out until they'd all been cured.

Only it took two months. The guard was cured first, so they could enforce the quarantine, and they did their jobs. I don't know how many died that way, and how many just sat in their homes and starved.

And my own mother, last on the list. I couldn't get her moved. It was felt that it would have been unfair.

Two months of carrying bodies to be burned. Two months where I got the plague more times than I care to think about. Spent more time being healed of the plague than anyone, I suppose.

Until we came to my mother's house. The last bloody section of the whole damn city.

And there's my mother, sitting in the dark house, the bodies of my brothers around her, and all she can say is "Why do you look so sad?"

And this, this is just bloody like that.

Except that it's the whole damn world that's got the plague. But I can't help but thinking that the only way we're going to beat these damn things is to lock up every single bastard we come across, and find a way for them to prove that they're brains not under control.

Short of that, I just don't know.