Chapter 432: The Letters
"Your Grace, the officials from the east province are asking for more grains. Should we send it?" The guard asked.
Xion frowned. "Haven’t we already sent it?"
The guard hesitated before speaking, "Yes, Your Grace. They said there were bandits, but... There is also news that they might just be hoarding the grains."
"Don’t send." Xion was decisive. "How are the soldiers in the 3rd camp?"
With the Archduke gone, the burdens of rule now pressed on Xion’s fragile shoulders, though no one would have guessed from the calm mask he wore before the council and the soldiers.
The memory of the Gin family’s treachery still poisoned Suniva. The common people recoiled at the very mention of the great clans.
To them, every noble name was a mask for greed. After all, the Gins had proven just how little the people’s lives meant to them.
They were pawns, sacrificed for the sake of power.
The only faces they trusted were those of the governor and their two lords.
Hence, besides sharing the office with the governor, Xion managed to become the face of trust.
As long as he said the sick could survive, it was enough for them to cling to that belief with all their might. Because to them, that was the prime truth.
Perhaps it was precisely due to his healing abilities that they were eager to follow Xion. Even more than Darius.
Xion found it overwhelming.
He had once been only a healer. Yet fate, merciless and relentless, had thrust a province into his keeping.
Each morning began the same for him.
The gongs of the city rang at dawn, and Xion rose before the echoes faded, already reaching for his satchel of medicines.
By mid-morning, he was in the infirmaries, moving from one cot to the next.
There were too many wounded.
Farmers crushed under carts while rushing food to the army, children caught in accidents in abandoned alleys, or those hit by the bandits or a few rebels that slipped past the net.
Xion never turned anyone away.
Because of his presence, the injured from all over had started to swarm the infirmary as well. Among them were the soldiers with their limbs cut off.
Xion prepared a separate area for them. While treating them, he would also ask them about the news of the border.
With Darius and Nikolai holding Silas back, the situation was becoming stable.
The royal army had more in numbers but was not more experienced than the Northerners. Now they were being killed by the very barbarians they loathed.
"Hold still," he would murmur, steadying a soldier’s mangled arm.
His own sleeves would be soaked with blood by the end of each day, his fingers trembling from fatigue.
Still, he stitched, he mixed salves, he prayed quietly for the strength not to collapse before them. Because if he faltered, then so would the city.
Most of the healers had left with the Archduke. Those still left behind had been working just as hard.
"Your Grace, what about the elderly in the 6th camp?"
"Take Colt and Denry with you to treat them," Xion said, washing the blood off his hands.
The orders came swiftly for the healers waiting for his command before rushing to their assigned areas.
In the afternoons, when the patients were resting, he shifted from healer to governor.
Councilmen, merchants, and even frightened peasants crowded into the great hall with their grievances.
Grain shortages, border raids, bandits taking advantage of the Archduke’s absence... it was endless.
And Xion listened to them with great tolerance.
He had no sword like Darius, no commanding presence that could silence men with a single look, but he had patience.
Then, he would make decisions. Funnily, most of them ended up with him giving orders to kill.
Xion, who once only wished to be a doctor, now gave orders of death without flinching.
He even felt a surge of happiness when he thought of those vile people leaving the earth.
It was this decisiveness that kept some dissatisfied officials from questioning his authority.
By candlelight each evening, he sat at his desk to write.
The letters were long, sometimes rambling, sometimes filled with details so mundane he wondered if Darius would even care to read them.
Reports of harvests, lists of wounded soldiers he had managed to save, worries about the council, about unrest.
Xion dipped his quill, muttering under his breath as the ink spread.
"Harvests down twenty percent... three more soldiers crippled today..." He paused, staring at the parchment. "Don’t worry I am taking care of them all."
Then, softer, the words slipped free. "I miss you. I really so, you know... I can’t breathe when you’re not here. Please, Darius... come back alive."
He sealed the letters with his own crest and sent them with the fastest messengers to the border.
Whether they ever reached Darius, he did not know.
Only one reply had come in three months.
The words were as pretty and bold as he had remembered them.
Darius said they were close to breaking the last fortress of the enemy army. That soon, he would return.
Xion had clutched that letter to his chest, reading it on the nights when worry threatened to consume him.
There was no one to hold him through the cold night, no one to feed him, no one to whisper sweet nothings into his ears.
"You’d better hurry up, or I’ll get mad at you."
To ignore the ache in his chest, he threw himself into work even more.
When the governor burned his dead son in the forest, there was nothing left inside his body. It was just an empty shell.
With all these pieces, Xion finally linked the threads that had been tangling in his mind.
If the reports weren’t from authentic sources, he wouldn’t have believed it at all.
A few months ago, a rich merchant’s apprentice stumbled into the infirmary with feverish eyes and rotting flesh.
The boy’s hands weren’t in working condition. A pitiful sight, really.
So, despite the lack of food in the province, the locals gave the boy a fever-reducing medicine and charged him a huge amount of money.
He left only for the farm girl, who was with the boy, to catch the same symptoms. She had died within a few days.
Then the screams began.
Soldiers who had been declared dead clawed at their shrouds, staggering to their feet with jaws slack and eyes empty.
Xion did not want to believe it.
The dead walking was supposed to be the stuff of old wives’ tales, something the priests whispered to frighten children into obedience. Yet it was happening, right before him.
Starvation.
That was what had led to this.
The Gin Clan probably didn’t know what they were doing while hoarding the grains.
The siege of the north had bled the countryside dry.
"Food was scarce, Your Grace," Allen said, sitting in front of the desk.
"Bellies were empty, and in their desperation, some villagers had done the unthinkable. They had cooked the flesh of a corpse."
Xion stared at the parchments scattered in front of him.
He and Allen had been trying to get more information about the Death Walkers. But he never expected something like this.
Then again, he had also never seen the human selling market before.
"They cooked the corpse of the girl who died from the sudden fever. Hadn’t they? This is so messed up." Xion felt his head throb.
He didn’t know it was lucky or not, but not everyone who ate it rose again. But still, many did.
"Most of them are burning in the back forest," the Alchemist tapped the parchment where the rough estimation of victims was listed. "But we aren’t sure if these numbers are credible."
"Brother Allen, those people carry the virus now. Even if it lies dormant—or dead, as I hope—they still roam freely in the streets."
The blood drained from his face as he wrote everything in a separate letter.
"I’ll send this to Darius. Please keep an eye on every feverish person. Tell the guards to be on alert."
Allen looked at the thin figure. His lips parted, but he couldn’t say it out loud.
They might already be surrounded by the dormant army of the dead.
"I understand, Your Grace." He bowed his head before getting up, leaving Xion to scribble.
There was something else to the case as well.
The first person to get sick was Ethen. Darius’ old friend and also the one who gave them the holy book.
Xion’s hands trembled so badly that he nearly dropped the parchment.
It was unthinkable.
Ethen’s father was one of the thirteen elders, a man known for his fierce love for his only son.
There was no world in which that old man would have allowed this fate to befall Ethen willingly.
Unless... Michael.
The name hissed through his mind like venom on the tongue.
Father Michael was lurking in the shadows. That damned priest had been weaving the threads of ruin ever since.
Perhaps he had killed Ethen’s father already. Then used Ethen like a walking petri dish of disease.
Maybe Michael had killed more than one elder.
That would explain why they couldn’t get hold of the thirteen and Michael for such a long time.
Xion pressed his fingers to his temple, fighting the nausea that churned in his gut.
Sealing the letter, he addressed it to Darius, praying it would reach him swiftly.
But no reply came.
Not even when the days dragged on into weeks.