P lague sweeps across the land; its putrid, leathery wings casting a chill shadow upon the trembling people below. Decay follows boil and blister. Death follows the green rot. Cities fester with corpses. In all corners of the known world, crows feast on carrion, plucking eyes from dead men’s skulls. Dogs gnaw on bones that once belonged to their masters. Church bells toll without ceasing—never an hour passes without hollow knell. Carts rumble and squeak through the cobblestone street, bodies piled high for the pyre or pit. Mass graves yawn open in the cemeteries, foul-breathed maws of gluttonous hunger ever ready to devour more dead. Swollen full and yellow, the moon hangs in the sickly night sky like a festering abscess. It halos the lance of Castle Tantegel’s highest tower. Beneath it, the silent town of Brecconary, throne of King Loric XVI, tosses in its slumber, denied peaceful rest by scourge of fever dream. In one dark, dank corner of that fell city, a hunchback lumbers along, pushing a handcart laden with a family of four. He pauses to wipe sweat from his filthy brow, thankful the children were young and light and the parents were gaunt with pestilence. All day and night for months had he labored so, taking the dead to the cemetery, the woods, or just outside the city walls to be burned or buried, he cared not which. Sometimes, though, made a long trip short by dumping his haul into the sewer, not that anyone would notice or care much if they did. The walleyed fool joked to himself, “By the gods, it smells better down there than it does up here!” Truth be told, the simpleton wasn’t the only one trusting mortal remains to the filthy, black waters. Wrapped head to toe in dingy funeral shrouds or stark naked as the day they were born, hundreds of bodies floated in the cesspools beneath Brecconary’s streets. The superintendents knew, but the transgressions went without fine or tax. In such times of woe and sorrow, what could it matter if a stiff’s ashes were scattered to the wind, if it were buried in the earth, or if sent afloat to a watery grave?