Death did not stop after the count.
It only slowed.
And in that slowing, Lucien found the first fragile thread of mercy.
He noticed it in the quiet mornings. The healer's hut no longer lost someone with every dawn. Fewer bodies carried out under woven mats. Fewer raw screams echoing through the trees. Fewer nights spent scrubbing blood from the dirt floor only to watch it pool again by sunrise.
Not victory.
But not surrender either.
Lucien stood over a wounded kobold whose flank had been gashed days earlier.
The cut had been washed.
The bindings boiled.
The water changed twice.
Still, red streaks had begun to climb toward the heart.
But slower than before.
"Why do you live longer?" Lucien whispered to the sleeping form.
The kobold, of course, gave no answer.
So Lucien watched.
Not who died anymore.
But how.
Some wounds blackened within a day.
Some held out for a week.
A few never festered at all.
The difference wasn't in the patient's strength.
It was in the order of hands.
A memory surfaced—Yard outside a crowded emergency room, listening to a paramedic mutter after a lost worker.
"Too many hands on him. Every touch added more dirt."
Lucien froze in the dim hut.
Hands.
He looked down at his own—cracked, stained, trembling slightly from exhaustion.
Then at the healers' hands passing tools, cloth, water.
At the bindings reused until they frayed.
"We are carrying death ourselves," he said quietly.
No one argued.
They changed everything.
Not by revelation.
By fear.
Hands scrubbed raw with boiled water and crushed herbs before touching a wound.
Scrubbed again between patients.
Scrubbed after.
Every bloodied cloth fed to the fire the moment it was used.
Boiled water poured out after a single dressing—never reused.
The healers grumbled.
"It wastes time."
Lucien met their eyes.
"So does burying children."
They built separate shelters.
The fevered isolated from the merely cut.
The rotting from the clean.
Not because it felt sacred.
Because the numbers showed it worked.
Deaths slowed again.
Still came.
But delayed.
And delay bought time.
Lucien pushed deeper.
Another memory—Yard wincing as a foreman poured cheap vodka over a deep cut on site. The burn. The hiss. The way the man cursed but kept working the next week.
Alcohol.
They had no still.
But they had overripe fruit.
Forgotten grain.
Time.
Lucien ordered fermentation in sealed clay pots.
When the liquid finally came—sharp, eye-watering, burning on the tongue—he tested it first on his own skin.
It stung like fire.
Good.
They poured it over open wounds.
Screams rose through the village, raw and desperate.
Some begged him to stop.
Some called it torture.
Lucien said nothing.
He only watched.
The wounds flushed with the liquid festered less.
Some closed.
Some scarred ugly but whole.
Others still failed.
But the pattern held.
Fire killed something invisible.
Heat.
Not prayer.
Not mana.
Something smaller than sight.
Lucien's chest tightened with the weight of it.
"There is an enemy we cannot see," he told the gathered healers one evening. "But it dies to flame and burning liquid."
Not everyone believed.
A broad-scaled refugee spat into the dirt.
"We suffer while the gods watch in silence," he growled. "Your ways only prolong the pain."
A few nodded.
"Magic could have saved them in a heartbeat," another whispered.
Lucien did not deny it.
Magic could heal.
Magic could purge infection with a touch.
Magic could even pull the dead back—if the caster was strong enough and the gods willing.
But magic was borrowed.
And borrowed power always came with chains.
Lucien looked toward the fresh graves—sixty mounds now, some so small they broke the heart to see.
"I will not trade understanding for miracles," he said.
Some turned away.
Some stayed.
Hope cracked down the middle.
That night Lucien sat alone beside the new kiln, watching flames dance behind the clay door.
Yard's memories drifted in again—not weapons this time, not skyscrapers.
Clean metal trays in bright rooms.
Tools laid out in perfect order.
Everything that touched flesh first touched fire or chemical burn.
Sterile.
Prepared.
Lucien stared into the flames until his eyes watered.
"What survives the fire?" he asked the quiet dark.
Stone did.
Metal did.
Certain mixtures of ash and lime.
Ideas did.
Flesh… sometimes.
Not always.
And perhaps that was the hardest truth yet.
The next morning, a goblin child woke without the burning fever that had gripped her for days.
Small.
Unremarkable to anyone else.
But real.
The healer—a quiet female who had lost her mate to the rot—froze in the doorway.
"Lucien," she called, voice cracking. "Come see."
He knelt beside the pallet.
The child's skin was warm, not scorching.
Her breathing steady.
The gash on her arm—angry red, but clean. No black edges. No sweet stench.
Not fully healed.
But holding.
Winning.
Lucien closed his eyes.
Not in relief.
In resolve.
"This is not enough," he said quietly.
"But it is a beginning."
He stood.
"Record everything," he ordered the village that had gathered outside. "Every step that failed. Every step that worked. Every smell, every color, every change."
They listened now.
Not all with faith.
But all with attention.
The world beyond the trees still did not know they existed.
The gods remained silent.
Somewhere far away, another guild report gathered dust.
Lucien no longer cared about any of it.
He had found something magic could never give freely.
A truth that belonged to no god.
A truth earned through fire, failure, and refusal to look away.
And truths, he now understood, were the only things that reliably survived the flames.