The guild report was filed, stamped, and forgotten.
A junior clerk skimmed the brief lines once, frowned at the casualty count, then shrugged.
"Low-ranking monsters. Inexperienced party. Environmental disadvantage."
He dipped his quill again and moved on to the next parchment.
No emergency council.
No investigation.
No divine inquiry.
Just another failed quest among thousands.
The world turned without pause.
Lucien did not know this.
But if he had, it would only have confirmed what he already felt: the world had never cared.
The village smelled different now.
Not the clean scent of fresh wood and turned earth.
Iron. Damp soil. Underlying it all, the sweet-rot stink of fever-sweat and festering wounds.
The wounded lay packed into hastily expanded huts, breathing shallow and uneven, skin burning hot even in the cool forest air.
Lucien knelt beside a young goblin whose thigh had been slashed open by an adventurer's blade.
The cut was clean—straight, no jagged tears.
That was the problem.
He remembered fragments from Yard's life: rough voices on a job site, a foreman barking at a new worker with a scraped knuckle. Wash it out good. Dirt sits, you lose the hand.
Lucien boiled water over the fire until steam clouded the hut.
He washed the wound carefully.
He bound it with strips torn from relatively clean cloaks.
The goblin thrashed and screamed until exhaustion took him.
Lucien did not stop.
Hours bled into days.
At first, it seemed to work.
Bleeding slowed.
Fever dipped.
A fragile hope flickered in tired eyes.
Then the swelling started.
Skin around the cut darkened, stretched tight, then softened into something wrong.
The smell came next—sweet, cloying, unmistakable.
Lucien knew that smell from Yard's memories: standing behind yellow tape, watching paramedics wheel a covered stretcher past a silent crew.
Too late.
The goblin died before dawn.
Then another.
And another.
Lucien stood in the healer's hut, hands trembling, staring at bodies he had treated correctly—or so he had believed.
"This shouldn't—" His voice cracked.
But it was.
The constant stream of refugees only fed the invisible killer.
More wounded staggered in each night.
Kobolds with limbs crushed beneath collapsed burrow roofs.
Beastkin impaled by splintered beams.
Scaled outcasts with deep gashes from failed magical wards that backfired.
Lucien cleaned every wound.
Boiled water until his arms shook.
Scrubbed cloth until fibers tore.
Isolated the worst cases in a separate shelter.
It wasn't enough.
Death moved from bed to bed, silent and patient.
From tool to hand.
Hand to wound.
Wound to blood.
Lucien didn't know the word *bacteria*.
He only knew something hunted them that no spear could reach.
By the end of the first week, thirty were gone.
By the end of the second, fifty.
The village grew quiet.
Too quiet.
One night, Lucien sat alone outside the healer's hut, staring at a small fire where bloodied bandages burned to ash.
Another memory surfaced—Yard leaning against a truck, listening to an old mason talk about ancient bridges that still stood after centuries.
"They mixed volcanic ash into the wet stone," the mason had said. "Gets harder over time. No spell—just the right recipe."
Roman concrete.
A reaction, not a miracle.
Lucien's gaze drifted to the pile of wood ash beside the fire.
"Stone… ash… water…"
He experimented in secret.
First batch crumbled like dry dirt.
Second cracked under light pressure.
Third held—rough, ugly, but solid.
Progress.
But progress did not stop the rot in living flesh.
Another kobold died that night, screaming as fever cooked his mind.
Lucien slammed his fist into the nearest wall hard enough to split skin.
"I can keep buildings standing," he rasped, voice raw. "But not people."
The count came at the end of the second week.
Out of one hundred thirty souls:
Only seventy remained.
35 goblins.
15 kobolds.
10 beastkin.
10 others—scaled, horned, winged, nameless to human tongues.
Sixty dead.
Not to claws or spells.
To ignorance.
Whispers began in the shadows.
Not open blame.
Worse.
Doubt.
"Maybe…" a beastkin murmured while wrapping another body for burial, "maybe magic is absolute."
Lucien heard it.
He did not argue.
What argument did he have?
He had promised them stability.
He had given them walls that stood.
But life slipped through his fingers like smoke.
The next morning he gathered the survivors in the central clearing.
No speeches.
No promises.
Only truth.
"I don't know enough," he said, voice flat.
Some looked away.
Some nodded slowly.
"I know wounds must be cleaned," he continued. "I know water must be boiled. But I don't know *why* they still rot. I don't know what spreads the sickness. I don't know how to stop it completely."
Silence stretched, heavy as wet wool.
Then a small goblin—the one he had chosen as recorder—stepped forward.
Her hands were stained with charcoal from marking bark tallies.
"We still want to learn," she said quietly. "Even when it hurts. Even when it fails."
One by one, others nodded.
Reluctant.
Afraid.
Desperate.
Lucien closed his eyes for a long moment.
Then opened them and nodded once.
They began again.
Not with miracles.
With stubborn observation.
They separated the sick from the merely wounded.
Tracked which cuts blackened fastest.
Noted smells, colors, patterns of heat.
Burned every bloodied cloth.
Washed hands before and after every touch.
Still, people died.
Each death settled on Lucien's chest like another stone.
That night he sat alone, firelight flickering across his blood-crusted hands.
"These hands…" he whispered.
Yard's knowledge guiding Lucien's smaller fingers.
They could raise empires of stone and steel.
But not save everyone.
Not yet.
He looked out at the village—smaller now, quieter, scarred but breathing.
"Magic isn't absolute," he said to the dark.
The words tasted hollow.
For the first time since the fire that took his parents, doubt crept in—cold and patient.
Deep inside his mind, the voice stirred.
It did not mock.
It did not comfort.
It simply waited.
Watching.
Ready for whatever came next.