It began not with a scream, but with a cough. A dry, rasping sound that turned wet and thick within a day. Then came the fever, a heat that baked the flesh and stole the wits, leaving its victims mumbling to phantoms in the corners of their rooms. They called it the Whispering Sickness, for the hoarse, shallow breaths of the dying sounded like secrets being passed from one corpse to the next.

Within a fortnight, the sound of London was no longer the clamor of carts and merchants, but the constant, dolorous tolling of church bells. One for every soul departed. The bells never stopped. They rang through the day and into the night, a ceaseless iron dirge that vibrated in the teeth and settled deep in the bones. The air grew heavy, thick with the smoke of a thousand vinegar-soaked fires and the sweet, cloying scent of decay that no fire could cleanse.

My confrontation with Isabell felt like a lifetime ago, a foolish theological exercise in a world that still made sense. My righteousness, my certainty—it had all turned to dust. God, it seemed, was silent.

My days became a blur of deathbeds. I moved from one hovel to the next, my black cassock perpetually damp with the city’s foul mist, my throat raw from reciting the Latin rites. I would enter a room where a family lay together on a single straw pallet, their bodies slick with sweat, their eyes wide with a terror that no prayer could soothe. I would dip my fingers in the small silver bucket of holy water, the same water I was now convinced held no more power than that in a puddle on the street, and make the sign of the cross on a burning forehead.

“Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.” The words were automatic, the meaning hollowed out by repetition and futility. I absolve you of your sins. But I could not absolve them of their suffering. I could not stop the tremors that wracked their bodies or cool the fire in their blood. I was a physician for a soul, offering a cure for the afterlife while the body was brutally, messily destroyed before my eyes.

One evening, I was called to the home of a cooper. His wife and two small children were already gone. He lay alone, his powerful arms, which could once bend oak, now thin and trembling. His breath was a faint, wet whisper. There was nothing left in his eyes, no recognition, no fear, only the blank stare of a body already giving up its ghost. I knelt beside him on the filthy floor, the stench of sickness and human waste so thick I could taste it. I said the prayers. I anointed his head with oil. I spoke of God’s mercy and the promise of heaven.

He died while the words were still on my lips. His last, shallow breath simply… stopped.

I remained there, kneeling, the silence in the room suddenly more deafening than the bells outside. My faith, which had been a fortress of stone, felt like a house of sand, its foundations washed away by a relentless tide of death. I had held up the cross, I had offered the sacraments, I had prayed until my knees were bruised and my voice was a husk. And for what? God had not answered. The sickness took the pious and the sinner alike, with no regard for the state of their soul. My words were just words. My holy water was just water.

I pushed myself to my feet, my entire body aching with a weariness that was not physical. It was a hollowness in the center of my chest, a cold, empty space where my conviction used to be. I looked at the dead man, then at the crucifix hanging on my belt. For the first time in my life, I felt the terrible weight of its uselessness. I was a soldier armed with a wooden sword against an army of demons, and my God had abandoned the field.

While the priest wrestled with his God, I fought the sickness itself. The tolling bells were not a call to prayer for me; they were a timer, each chime marking another failure, another life I had not been quick enough to save. I did not see divine judgment in the fever and the cough. I saw a pattern. I saw an enemy with a method, and any enemy with a method could be met with one.

I had barred my door, not out of fear of the plague, but to conserve every moment for my work. My small shop was no longer a place of simple remedies for coughs and aching joints. It had become a laboratory. The air was thick with the sharp scent of alcohol I distilled myself, the earthy smell of drying roots, and something else, a faint, clean scent like damp soil after a rainstorm. It was the smell of my hope.

The Whispering Sickness, they called it. I had heard the descriptions from the few who dared venture out for supplies. The dry cough that turned to a drowning wetness, the fever that stole the mind, and the dark, web-like veins that sometimes appeared on the neck and chest in the final hours. It was this last detail, whispered by a terrified baker’s boy, that had ignited a spark of recognition in my mind. I had seen a drawing of it once, in a forbidden book passed to my mother from her own teacher—a text on poisons and their counterparts, which described a blight that grew on improperly stored rye. The book called the cure lux mortuorum—the light of the dead.

In a hidden, lead-lined chest beneath a loose floorboard, I cultivated it. A strange, grey-green fungus that grew upon a bed of spoiled grain I kept perpetually damp and dark. In the dim light of my workshop, it seemed to absorb the shadows, possessing a faint, almost imperceptible luminescence. It was a living, breathing thing, and it held the key. I was certain of it.

But the work was painstaking. I had to isolate the active part of the fungus, to render it from a poison into a cure. It required grinding, steeping in alcohol, and slow, careful heating to create a concentrated tincture. Every day I tested it, placing a single drop onto a sliver of glass with a drop of sputum I had collected. The first attempts were failures. The sickness, a living, writhing thing under my small looking glass, was unaffected. But I refined the process, altering temperatures, changing the concentration, and slowly, I began to see a change. The writhing would slow. Stagnate. Die.

The most dangerous part was procuring my supplies. Not the herbs, which I had in abundance, but the sickness itself. To know if my antidote was working, I needed fresh samples of the disease. And for that, I had to go into the plague houses.

Tonight, the need was urgent. My latest batch of tincture was the most promising yet, and I needed to test it against the contagion in its most potent state—from a victim in the throes of the fever.

I waited until the moon was high and the watchman’s bell had signaled the deepest part of the night. Pulling a dark, heavy cloak over my simple dress and hiding my hair beneath the hood, I became another shadow in a city full of them. In a small leather pouch at my belt, I carried several clean glass vials and a long, thin pipette. My heart did not pound with fear, but with a cold, steady resolve. I slipped out of my shop, the lock clicking softly behind me, and melted into the narrow, refuse-strewn alleys. The air was cold, but the scent of death was a constant, warm miasma. Ahead, on a crumbling door, a crude red cross was daubed, a stark warning. It was my destination.

I stepped out of the cooper’s house and into the cold night. The door shut behind me with a hollow thud, sealing the dead man inside his silent home. I pulled my cloak tighter, the damp wool a poor shield against the bone-deep chill that had nothing to do with the weather. I began to walk, my steps echoing unnervingly in the empty street. There was no destination in mind, only a need to move, to put distance between myself and that small, silent room. The bells continued their endless tolling, a rhythm of despair that matched the beat of my own faltering heart.

My path was aimless, a wandering through the skeletal remains of London’s busiest thoroughfares. Here, where merchants would have once shouted their wares, there was only the rustle of plague-soiled straw blowing in the wind. There, where children would have played, there was only a stray dog, ribs stark beneath its mangy coat, sniffing at a shuttered door. Each red cross I passed felt like a personal failure, a mark of my own inadequacy. My prayers were nothing but air.

It was then that I saw it—a flicker of movement in the deep shadows of an alleyway ahead. It was a figure, cloaked and hooded, moving with a swift, furtive grace that immediately set my teeth on edge. My first thought was of a grave robber, a ghoul scavenging from the dead. A hot surge of anger, sharp and clean, cut through the fog of my despair. It was a relief to feel something other than helplessness. Here was a sin I understood, a transgression I could confront.

I slowed my pace, keeping to the shadows of the opposite buildings, my eyes fixed on the shape. It paused before a door marked with the dreaded cross, the wood stained dark with the sign of the sickness within. The figure knelt, but not to pray. It placed a small, cloth-wrapped bundle on the stone step, then rose and turned to leave as silently as it had arrived.

I stopped. My breath caught in my throat. It was not an act of theft, but of offering.

My mind reeled, trying to reconcile what I had seen. Who would risk their life to approach a plague house, not to take, but to give? A flare of something wild and unfamiliar ignited in the hollow space in my chest. It felt like hope, but it was a dangerous, heretical kind of hope, one that did not come from scripture or sacrament. My duty as a priest screamed at me to investigate this potential sorcery, this midnight ritual. But another, deeper part of me—the part that had knelt beside the dead cooper and felt nothing—was desperate to believe it was a miracle.

The figure was already moving away, disappearing back into the labyrinth of narrow passages. I did not call out. I did not think. I ran.

My heavy boots slapped against the slick cobblestones, the sound loud in the oppressive quiet. I plunged into the alley after the shadow, the stench of refuse and damp stone closing in around me. The figure ahead was quick, moving with a certainty through the maze of London’s guts that spoke of long familiarity. I was clumsy in comparison, my cassock catching on protruding bricks, my breath already coming in ragged bursts.

“Stop!” I shouted, my voice swallowed by the close stone walls.

The figure only quickened its pace. We twisted and turned, through passages so narrow my shoulders brushed both sides, under low archways slick with grime. My heart pounded against my ribs, a frantic drumming that was part exertion, part fear, and part that terrible, exhilarating hope. My suspicion and my duty warred with an intense, personal need to know. Who was this phantom bringing aid where God’s own servants had failed? The thought of Isabell flashed in my mind—her intelligent eyes, her quiet defiance, her hands stained with the earth. It couldn't be. The notion was madness.

But the hope persisted, a burning coal in my gut. I pushed myself harder, my legs aching, my lungs on fire. I was gaining. The figure glanced back—I saw only the deep black void of its hood—and seemed to falter, its breath coming in panicked gasps. It took a sharp right turn into what I knew was a dead end, a small courtyard blocked by the high, windowless wall of a warehouse. A trap. For them, or for me.

I skidded into the courtyard behind her, my boots sliding on the wet stone. I braced my hands against the rough brick wall to stop myself, my breath tearing from my lungs. The alley ended here. She was trapped. The high, blank walls of the warehouse pressed in on three sides, and I blocked the only escape.

She stood with her back to me, her shoulders rising and falling with her own ragged breathing. The dark cloak hid her form completely, making her seem like a creature born of the shadows she inhabited. For a moment, we were both still, the only sound our panting breaths and the distant, ceaseless tolling of the bells.

A cold certainty settled over me. I had her. “Turn around,” I commanded, my voice coming out harsher than I intended, rough with exertion and a dread I could not name. “In the name of God, show me your face.”

The figure did not move. It was as if she were gathering herself, summoning a strength I could feel across the small, damp space between us. I took a step forward, the leather of my boots scraping on the stone. “Do not make me force you.”

Slowly, she turned. Her hands, covered in dirt and what looked like dark stains, rose to the edge of her hood. With a deliberate, almost defiant slowness, she pushed it back.

My own breath froze in my throat.

It was Isabell.

The moonlight, thin and silver, caught the sharp lines of her cheekbones and the exhausted pallor of her skin. A dark smudge of dirt was smeared across one cheek, and her hair, escaping its pins, clung to her temples in damp strands. She was not the composed, detached woman from the herb shop. This was a different person, stripped of all artifice, her face a mask of profound, bone-deep weariness. But it was her eyes that held me captive. They were wide and dark in the gloom, and they held no fear. There was no pleading, no begging for mercy. There was only a fierce, burning defiance that met my gaze and held it, a silent challenge that dared me to condemn her.

My mind, which had been racing with accusations of sorcery and heresy, went utterly blank. All the scripture, all the doctrine, all the righteous anger that had propelled me through the streets, it all evaporated into the cold night air. I saw no witch before me. I saw a woman fighting a war on her own terms, a soldier more weary and more brave than I could ever be. I remembered the bundle she had left on the doorstep, an offering of healing in the face of certain death. I looked at the stains on her hands, the exhaustion etched around her eyes, and I understood. Not everything, but enough.

I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came. What could I say? What are you doing? The answer was obvious. Why? The answer was in every tolling bell that marked another death I was powerless to stop. Do you know the danger? The look in her eyes told me she knew it better than anyone.

We stood there for an eternity, locked in that silent, suffocating gaze. The chasm between my world and hers—of faith and earth, of prayer and practice—seemed to collapse in on itself, leaving only the two of us in this small, forgotten corner of a dying city. I felt the weight of her secret settle onto my own shoulders, a burden I had not asked for but now could not shrug off.

Then, she moved. It was a sudden, fluid motion. She took a step to the side, toward the narrow space between my body and the wall. I was so caught in the spell of her gaze that I didn't react, my body frozen, my mind reeling. She brushed past me, the rough wool of her cloak scraping against my cassock. For a fleeting second, I caught her scent—not of herbs or arcane powders, but of damp earth, cold night air, and sweat. The scent of work. The scent of life.

Then she was gone, a fleeting shadow swallowed once more by the labyrinth of alleys.

I stood alone in the dead-end courtyard, my heart hammering against my ribs. The cold stone walls seemed to press in on me, and the air was thick with the truth of what I had just seen. She had not run from me. She had dismissed me. And in the echoing silence, with the image of her defiant eyes burned into my mind, I was faced with a crisis more profound than any loss of faith. My God was silent, but I had just looked into the face of a woman who was not. And I did not know what to do.