The deed was done. The tiny droplet of pearlescent liquid, a terrifying cocktail of hope and mortal peril, disappeared from the glass syringe into the Dauphin's bloodstream. The Rubicon had been crossed. Dr. Pym, his face pale and beaded with sweat, withdrew the needle. In the silent, candlelit nursery, the sound of the small glass syringe clinking against a metal tray was as loud as a cannon shot.
For a few hours, nothing happened. The boy, already exhausted from his long illness, simply slept. A fragile, agonizing, and almost unbearable hope began to dawn in the room. The four adults stood a silent, tense vigil, their differing worldviews momentarily united by a shared, desperate focus on the small, still form in the grand bed. Louis, the man of the future, stood beside Dr. Pym, the man ahead of his time. Across the room, Marie Antoinette knelt before a small priedieu, her rosary beads clicking softly through her fingers, a quiet counterpoint to the nervous, rational silence. Dr. Lassonne, the man of the past, stood by the window, his arms crossed, a statue of disapproving skepticism. Every shallow breath the child took seemed to echo in the vast, quiet space.
Then, the crisis began.
It did not start gently. It came on like a physical assault. It began with a violent tremor, a single, convulsive shudder that shook the boy's entire small body. His eyes flew open, but they were wide, unseeing, and glazed with a terrifying, pearlescent sheen. A high, thin wail of pain escaped his lips, a sound that seemed to tear at the very fabric of the room.
A raging fever set in, far hotter and more violent than anything they had seen before. Louis, touching his son's forehead, recoiled as if burned. The boy's skin was scorching, his pulse a frantic, thready drumbeat at his neck. He became delirious, thrashing against the silk sheets, his cries a jumbled, nonsensical mixture of French and the German of his mother's lullabies. His head whipped back and forth on the pillow, his eyes rolling back until only the whites showed.
And then, the most terrifying sign of all appeared. On the pale skin of his arm, around the almost invisible point of the injection, a constellation of angry, red pustules began to erupt, spreading outwards like a vile rash. It was the physical manifestation of the disease, the attenuated plague they had willingly invited into his body, now seemingly running rampant.
Marie Antoinette let out a strangled scream. The sight of this, the proof of the poison, shattered her fragile composure. "Murderers!" she shrieked, her voice cracking with hysteria as she launched herself towards the bed. "You have murdered my son! Louis, what have you done?!"
She tried to rush to the boy's side, to gather him up, to somehow protect him from the horror unfolding within his own veins. Louis, his face a grim mask of resolve, physically restrained her, his hands gripping her arms. It was a terrible, necessary act of cruelty. "Antoinette, listen to me!" he said, his voice a raw, desperate command. "This is the battle! His body is fighting the enemy we gave it! We cannot interfere! We must let it fight!"
She struggled against him, sobbing, her reason drowned in a tidal wave of a mother's terror. He had to signal to Colonel Giraud, who stood guard outside the door. The young officer entered, his face filled with pity, and gently, respectfully, escorted the weeping, hysterical Queen from the room, her cries echoing down the long marble corridor. Louis was left alone with his decision, the sounds of his wife's anguish a fresh wound in his own heart.
He turned to find he was facing a new front. Dr. Lassonne, his face ashen with a mixture of fear and professional vindication, advanced on him. "You have poisoned him!" the old doctor accused, his voice trembling with rage. "This is not a cure; it is a demonic ague, a corruption of the blood! You have listened to a foreign charlatan and condemned your own son! He needs to be bled, immediately! We must open a vein and drain this poison from his body before it stops his heart!"
Louis, his nerves stretched to the breaking point, now had to wage a desperate, one-man war against the entire medical dogma of the 18th century. He physically blocked Lassonne's path to the bed, his body a human shield. "You will not touch him," he snarled, his authority absolute, the gentle monarch replaced by a cornered, dangerous animal. "You will not touch him with your leeches or your lancets. His body needs every drop of blood it possesses. It needs every ounce of its strength to win this fight. To bleed him now would be to execute him."
Lassonne stared at the King, truly believing he was in the presence of a madman, a father whose grief had curdled into a murderous insanity. Defeated, he retreated back to the shadows of the room, a horrified spectator to what he saw as the murder of the Dauphin.
Louis turned to the only other man in the room who understood. Dr. Pym was standing by the bed, watching the boy's violent reaction with a terrifying, almost inhuman mixture of scientific terror and clinical awe. He was witnessing his life's theoretical work made manifest in the most high-stakes trial imaginable.
"What do we do?" Louis demanded, his voice ragged. "What now?"
"We can only support the body through the crisis," Pym said, his voice strained but steady. He was a scientist again, his initial panic replaced by a focused resolve. "The reaction is… more violent than I anticipated. The prince's system is fighting with incredible force. We must do what we can to aid it. Cool cloths, constantly applied, to manage the worst of the fever. Water, to prevent the humors from thickening. We must let the body's own natural defenses do the work."
This was where Louis's own hidden knowledge became critical. He took command of the sickroom. He was no longer a king. He was a paramedic with a single, precious patient, fighting a battle on a microscopic level. He dispatched servants to bring buckets of cool water and alcohol. He meticulously directed the two doctors—the willing Pym and the sullen, horrified Lassonne—in the application of cool, alcohol-laced compresses to the boy's head, his neck, his groin, a constant, unending effort to radiate the ferocious heat away from his body.
He then focused on the second great enemy: dehydration. "We need salted water," he commanded, a concept that made Lassonne stare at him in blank confusion. He and Pym worked together, a desperate, two-man team, using a small spoon to carefully, patiently, force tiny drops of boiled, slightly salted water between the delirious boy's lips, hoping that some of it would find its way down his throat.
The hours of the night crawled by, each one an eternity of frantic work and agonizing suspense. The Dauphin's fever raged, his small body a battlefield.
The crisis reached its absolute peak in the darkest hour, just before the dawn. The violent thrashing ceased. The delirious cries faded into a terrifying, utter stillness. The boy's breathing, which had been rapid and ragged, became shallow, then intermittent, then… it stopped.
Dr. Lassonne, his face a mask of sorrow, stepped forward and gently placed two fingers on the side of the boy's neck, searching for a pulse. After a long, terrible moment, he withdrew his hand and looked at the King, his earlier anger gone, replaced only by a profound, human pity.
"He is gone, Your Majesty," the old doctor said, his voice cracking. "It is over. God have mercy on his soul."
Louis shoved him aside, refusing to believe it. He pressed his own ear to his son's chest, desperately listening for a sound, any sound, in the silent, ruined landscape of his son's body. He heard nothing. Not a flutter. Not a beat. Only a dead, final silence.
For a terrifying, heart-stopping moment, he believed it. He believed he had failed. He believed that his arrogance, his knowledge, his desperate gamble, had killed his own son. The HUD, which had been a frantic, screaming blur of red warning signs and cascading alerts, suddenly went flat. A single line of text appeared, cold, sterile, and absolute.
DAUPHIN VITAL SIGNS: CRITICAL FAILURE. Life signs terminating...
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