I have often wondered if grief itself is a disease. It spreads through the veins like fever, burns in the marrow, makes every breath a labor. For in the weeks that followed the ruin of Dalewick, I found my body failing as swiftly as my fortune.
The days blurred into one another. We buried the children we could recover, though some were consumed utterly in the fire. I cannot write their names here, for each letter is a blade to my heart. Elira stood beside me in silence at every grave, her face a mask of ice. She would not weep before me. Perhaps she wept when I slept, or perhaps her tears had been burned away with the rest.
At first, I busied myself with repairs, with comforting the servants who remained, with sending letters to distant kin for aid. Yet no answers came, no help arrived. And soon, a deeper affliction seized me. My hands grew mottled with sores, my flesh raw and fevered. My strength abandoned me, and I took to bed, unable to rise.
The physicians who came shook their heads. "A wasting sickness," one muttered. "Born of grief, perhaps of tainted air." They prescribed herbs, poultices, prayers. None availed me.
I lay in darkness for days, staring at the canopy above my bed, listening to the drip of rain beyond the shutters. And always, beneath the fever, the same question circled like a vulture: Why?
Was this the will of some higher existence? Some great architect who spun the cosmos for his amusement, and set men upon the earth as toys to be broken? Or was it nothing more than chance, blind, senseless, pitiless chance?
If there is such a being as God, why does He allow the innocent to suffer? Why does He give children laughter only to snatch it away with fire and steel?
I asked these questions into the void, but the void answered only with silence.
One evening, as I lay half-delirious, Elira came to my side. She did not sit upon the bed, nor take my hand. She stood above me, her figure cast in shadow by the firelight.
"Alaric," she said softly, though her voice carried a sharpness that cut me deeper than any wound. "What curse have you brought upon this house?"
I turned my head toward her. "Curse?"
"First the cattle," she whispered, her eyes flashing. "Then the barns. Then the children. And now you waste away as though struck by Heaven itself. Tell me, husband" her lip trembled" have you offended some power? Have you angered the Almighty? Or is it your pride that has undone us all?"
Her words struck me harder than the fever. I tried to protest, to say I had done no wrong, that I had given alms to the poor, that I had never withheld charity, that I had walked with integrity before men. But she looked at me with a gaze I could not bear.
"If you truly are blameless," she said, "then why has ruin chosen only us?"
And with that, she left the chamber.
I stared after her, the silence pressing upon me like a weight. For the first time, I felt utterly alone, not only bereft of children, of wealth, of health, but of companionship. Elira's words echoed in my skull until I could not tell if they were hers or my own thoughts turning against me.
That night, the fever worsened. My body ached, my sores wept. In my delirium, I saw shadows creeping at the corners of the room, whispering, laughing, their faces twisted. I cried out, but no one came.
And yet, in that darkness, a single thought began to form.
Betrayal.
Corven Hale. I saw his smile, too eager when last he dined at my table. I remembered his questions, so many, about the strength of my herds, the stores of my barns, the guard upon my estate. Had he not always coveted what was mine? His lands were poor, his debts many. How easy it would be for him to whisper to raiders, to guide them toward Dalewick, to profit from my ruin.
Whether this was truth or the fever's fancy, I cannot say. But in that hour, I clung to it. For if ruin came by betrayal, then I was not cursed by Heaven, nor marked by fate. I was wronged by men, and men may yet be answered.
When morning came, I whispered to myself, though my voice was cracked and thin:
"Why, where did it all go wrong?"
And in that question, bitter and raw, there stirred a flame that fever could not quench, the flame of anger.