Chapter 8: The Principles of Contagion

Leo stared at the Guildmaster's daughter, his mind a frantic storm of conflicting thoughts. The professional paramedic in him was already assessing symptoms: fever, labored breathing, localized discoloration, slow progression. But the man who had seen magic save Elara knew this was something far outside his textbook knowledge. The creeping black lines on Liana’s arm were not a natural pathology. They were an invasion.

"Let me see her," Leo said, his voice taking on the clipped, professional tone he used when the world was falling apart. He approached the bed, his fear giving way to the familiar, grounding process of examination.

Valerius nodded, stepping back to give him space. Gretta, the old healer, had been summoned and now stood in the corner of the tent, her arms crossed, her expression a mixture of deep skepticism and morbid curiosity.

Leo gently took the girl's hand. It was hot to the touch. Her pulse was rapid and weak. He leaned in, studying the black lines. They weren't just on the surface of the skin; they seemed to be in it, a three-dimensional web of darkness. The skin around them was inflamed and angry.

"You said it was from a scratch?" Leo asked, his eyes tracing the path of the corruption back to a small, almost-healed wound on her wrist.

"A tiny thing," Valerius said, his voice strained. "We cleaned it, bandaged it. The scratch healed in two days, but this... this rot appeared a day later."

"Has anyone else been afflicted?" Leo asked, his next question immediate, instinctual. "The hunters who killed the Shadow Cat? Anyone who handled the carcass?"

Valerius and Gretta exchanged a confused look. "No," Valerius said. "It is a curse, not a plague. It afflicts only the one who was wounded."

"You're sure?" Leo pressed. "No one else has so much as a lingering cough? A fever? Strange dreams?"

"The concept is foreign to you, outworlder," Gretta interjected, her voice sharp. "Curses are personal. They are a pact between the monster's malice and the victim's blood. They do not spread like the kennel-cough between dogs."

Leo ignored her, his mind racing. He was operating on a fundamental principle Gretta and Valerius couldn't possibly comprehend: The Germ Theory of Disease. To him, there was no such thing as a "personal" infection. If a pathogen existed, it had a vector. A way to spread.

Assume I'm right, he thought. Assume this 'curse' is a microorganism. A magical one, but a microorganism nonetheless. It has to follow certain rules.

"I need to see the men who were on that hunt," Leo stated, turning to Valerius. "And I need to see the body of the Shadow Cat, if you still have it."

Valerius looked taken aback. "The hunters are fine. And the carcass was burned, as is our custom with cursed beasts. What good would any of that do?"

"I'm trying to understand the enemy," Leo said simply. "In my world, we learn as much about the disease as we do about the patient. It's the only way to fight it." He looked from the Guildmaster's desperate face to the dying child. "I will do everything I can for her. But you must trust my process, even if it seems strange."

The plea in his own voice surprised him. He wasn't just asking for Valerius's trust. He was asking for his own. He was a man of science walking into a world of witchcraft, and he was terrified.

For the next hour, Leo worked. He had the two hunters who had been with Liana's father brought to the tent. He examined them thoroughly, ignoring their gruff protests. He found nothing. No fever, no strange marks. He then began a systematic questioning, treating it like a modern contact tracing interview.

Where did they hunt? What other beasts were in the area? What did they eat? Where did they get their water? The questions seemed mad, irrelevant, to everyone else in the tent. But to Leo, they were building a map.

He learned the Shadow Cat had laired near a stagnant, marshy pool deep in the Whispering Woods. That was his first clue. Stagnant water was a breeding ground.

He returned to Liana's bedside. He needed a sample. A biopsy. But cutting into that cursed flesh seemed like a terrible idea. Instead, he took a clean cloth, moistened it with boiled water, and swabbed vigorously at the inflamed skin around the black lines. It was the best he could do.

He then took another clean swab and took a sample from inside Liana's mouth. If it was a systemic infection, it might be present there as well.

"What is the meaning of this ritual?" Gretta demanded, her patience clearly worn thin. "You collect spit and dirt while the girl dies."

"I'm looking for a weakness," Leo said, carefully placing the two cloth samples into separate, clean clay jars. He needed to see what was on them. He needed a microscope. An impossible request.

But maybe not.

"Kaelen!" he called out. The warrior, who had been standing guard outside, entered immediately. "I need something. A piece of glass. It needs to be very clear, and curved. Like the bottom of a bottle, or... or a lens from a spyglass."

Kaelen and Valerius stared at him. "A lens?" Valerius asked. "We have a few. What for?"

"I need to make something. Something to let me see what is too small for the eye to behold."

The idea was audacious, almost insane. But as he looked at the two sealed jars, a flicker of something he hadn't felt since arriving in this world sparked within him: the thrill of the chase. He wasn't just a healer anymore. He was a detective, hunting a killer no one else could even see.

He spent the next hour working with Kaelen to construct a crude device. He took the lens from a scout's spyglass and mounted it in a wooden frame over a small, polished metal plate. It was a pathetic imitation of a microscope, but it was the best he could do.

He carefully smeared a tiny amount of the saliva sample onto the plate. He held a lit candle behind it for light and leaned in, pressing his eye to the lens. For a moment, all he saw was a blurry, magnified mess. He adjusted the distance, his hands shaking slightly.

And then he saw them.

The image swam into focus. It was a world teeming with life he recognized—the normal, benign bacteria of the human mouth. But among them, something was different. Something was wrong.

There were tiny, writhing motes of darkness. They weren't just dark in color; they seemed to actively absorb the candlelight, appearing as pinpricks of absolute blackness against the illuminated backdrop. They moved with a predatory, unnatural speed, swarming and consuming the normal bacteria around them.

He had found it. The pathogen. The curse.

He switched to the other sample, the one from the skin around the wound. The concentration here was a thousand times greater. It was a writhing mass of pure darkness, a microscopic sea of hungry shadows.

"My gods," he breathed, pulling back from the lens, his heart pounding.

"What is it?" Valerius demanded, rushing to his side. "What did you see?"

Leo looked at him, his mind reeling with the implications. "It's not a curse that's just in her blood," he said, his voice low and urgent. "It's everywhere. On her skin. In her mouth. It's... it's contagious."

Gretta let out a sharp, derisive laugh. "Impossible! Curses do not work that way!"

But Valerius wasn't laughing. He was staring at Leo with dawning horror. "Contagious? You mean..."

"Anyone who has been in close contact with her," Leo said, his gaze sweeping over the Guildmaster, Gretta, Kaelen, and then down to his own hands. "Anyone who has been in this tent... we've all been exposed."

He looked back at the makeshift microscope, at the impossible, squirming darkness he had just witnessed. He had a terrible, sinking feeling that he had made a catastrophic miscalculation. It wasn't just on the swab. He knew, with sudden, ice-cold certainty, where else he would find it.

Without a word, he grabbed a fresh cloth, wiped it across his own sweaty forehead, and placed it under the lens. He didn't even have to focus. The darkness was already there, writhing. He was infected. They all were.

The curse wasn't just coming for the child. It was coming for all of them.