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People began to grow curious as to why when she touched a person and went into a “fit,” the person soon died.
The whispers grew. Narrowed eyes started to follow her.
The town proclaimed her a witch and that word alone was enough to have her burned at the stake. Her fear grew with every move the town made toward her in the following years.
People would leave bones out in front of the clinic. Smaller versions of the stakes the witches of old had been burned on would be erected near where a patient had died after one of her fits.
It wasn’t safe any longer to try to heal the people of the town, not that she was great at it otherwise, and all too soon it wasn’t even safe enough to walk among them.
So, Bryn took to walking Saints’ Road at night with the other sinners.
Looking to the gate as Jace neared it, memories of the sickness that had caused the gate to be permanently closed to the outside world flooded her thoughts.
Now, only traders were allowed to leave once they had been issued a royal permit by the governor of Ifreann. While they did still trade with the other towns under King Bres, lands known as the Drystan Territories, they were never allowed to venture outside of those areas to other countries not under the king’s rule.
Since they paid their tithe and worshipped the sanctioned religion, they were allowed to be mostly self-governing. Especially since King Bres was too focused on the countries that rebelled against his rule, sending out his bloody assassins, aptly known as wraiths because of how they became shadow and death while in combat.
The rebellious countries, as the church described them, were the reason for the sickness in the first place. Their sinful behavior created the need for unbelievers to be punished, and so their god created the disease. The wicked fell to it, and any devout who died must have been secretly wicked.
The god of Ifreann apparently did not take kindly to those who refused to follow Ifreann’s religion and king.
Though Ifreann had a dark history all its own.
Ifreann had been a red-light district long ago, back when it was called Hell’s Gate, and some of that darkness still clung to the buildings like shadows. The town having been around since before the collapse of the world as their ancestors knew it.
Bryn found her own irony in the name since the church taking over had made most days in Ifreann a literal hell for her.
Back when it had been Hell’s Gate, people had freely roamed the streets day and night, finding pleasures of the mind and flesh.
The survivors of the Collapse rebuilt the town known for sin in the world left over from the destruction. They changed the names of the city and buildings, putting the church in the center of town next to where one of the most infamous brothels once stood, in an attempt to disabuse the citizens of its hellish past. The church worked hard to erase the sins of their ancestors.
Outside the gate of Ifreann wasn’t much better.
It had once been a place where trees and water had been at one time plentiful, before the desert took hold, choking out the natural life that had once thrived. Nestled between two large rock formations, Ifreann was a desert with only brown and oranges as far as the eye could see. Cacti being the only color to break up the monotony.
Mother Nature reclaimed the world the humans had used and abused. Just as the scientists of days long ago had warned she would.
That mixed with the lack of color made the town seem even more hellish than saintly with the stone walls surrounding them day and night, and gates that rarely opened.
The same rusted, worn gates made of brass and wood that stood tall and proud day after day in the hot desert sun at the front of Ifreann.
Once a welcome, and now a warning.
At some point after the Collapse, Ifreann had once been a shining beacon in the desert for those in need. A walled fortress for wanderers who were lost in endless sand, desperate for a place to rest where heat and predators would not ensure their deaths. Where desert sickness would not bring their minds close enough to the edge of madness, resulting in death all the same.
Those same walls that encased the small town had been built to keep the worst of the desert out, but now that included outsiders, travelers not born to the people of the town or brought in before they closed the gates for good. Bryn was lucky enough to have made it past the gates before the town’s paranoia had shut them off from the rest of the world.
Today they would open for something other than a small outfit of men leaving to trade since the horns never went off for such an event.
No, the horns were a warning for everyone to stay inside.
The sound meant that at some point overnight, the city guards had found people not of the town standing at the front of the gates.
Which meant her cousin was walking the same path to possible death that her father had taken years ago, and Bryn was trying to contain herself. Grabbing and folding her hands in her musty curtains, she bit her lip, a tear slipping from her eye as the last of her family who cared for her passed by her window.
The scrios and the doctor. Two men to both represent and govern the wellness of the town, spiritually and physically.
Jace, as the doctor, was needed to verify the people were not sick or, if they died, were not contagious past death. To make sure the horrible disease that had killed so many not that long ago would not make its way through their small population yet again.
