The First Town

	The plague had struck the outermost towns first. The frontier towns, the most recent marks belonging the Vaskhul crusaders, still in a state of disarray and disorientation. Their surviving members had been made to swear fealty to Nailaxkha and all of its children at the end of a blade. At those same blades the rest fell, for accusations of witchcraft, whether it was true or not that they practiced dark magics. Things had only just begun to stabilize almost a month after the annexation, but panic had begun to stir when Vaskhul patrols discovered the graves of the witches to be empty.

	No matter, thought the Vaskhul leaders. They would simply entrench their defenses. The enslaved townsfolk dedicated lumber and stone meant initially for the expansion of their now harrowed community to instead building walls, trenches and every fortification they could muster for the little forest town. Lanterns placed tightly together dotted the trees, leaving no space for yards out from the walls untouched by the light of Nailaxkha’s divine fire. The slaves were trained in divine-powered siege weapons rolled in from the inner territory, ensuring they could serve a function in battle that did not provide the possibility of turning on their captors.

	But of course, it’s never that simple. The death they had left unsupervised much too long came in not on foot, not yet in the form of shuffling dead gnashing at the air, but instead on the wind. A terrible current had befallen the first of three towns, a fetid scent like singed hair and illness given form settled in a dark pall over it. The slaves fell ill quickly, but seemed to recover within a matter of days; it was their captors that suffered most. They showed no weakness to their laborers, but black, rot-slickened fingers had begun to wind around their souls, carrying with them no specific symptoms other than a bottomless and unrelenting malaise. They retreated within their makeshift citadel, and were seen sparsely by the town, some of whom seized the opportunity to escape. The rest stayed, worried that whatever had blown through the town would only be worse in the forest.

	The town fell silent. The people stayed in their homes. The Vaskhul had vanished. On the last day the pall persisted, a figure appeared at the gate, the grass burning and decaying beneath its feet. It seemed to drip with pitch fluid, which the slaves could not smell, but was pungent enough to the Vaskhul that the stench of mass graves and pyres reached into their tower. The people did not open the gate, but it cared not; it pulled itself through the gate, seeping through the wood and leaving it rotten and sallow in its wake.  It trudged through the town, golden eyes unwaveringly focused on the citadel, making no contact with the worried gazes of the townsfolk.

	They saw it disappear through the door. They heard the telltale clatter of armor, shouting in a language they had yet to learn, and the clamor of battle. When it pulled itself back through the door, when it disappeared into the forest, with it went the cloud and the malaise, and with it went the Vaskhul. Days passed before anyone dared to touch the citadel. When they were finally certain that their absent captors had been slain, the door crept open.

	Tens of bodies, rotting and smelling of fire, torn apart by holy fire and blades and hammers, filled the first floor of the tower and fewer to each floor above. The gilded, engraved armor of their captors laid empty of their souls in the midst of it all. The disease had come for them, manifest in shambling horrors. Leaving the armor to rest, the citadel would be burned to the ground, and the captors would be forgotten. Perhaps a new life could be had, though many were lost. Bit by bit, the lanterns disappeared, and the walls around the town began to crumble, and their trust in the forest began to return.