Chapter Text
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
… This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
She knew it was only a matter of time before she became one of millions who would give their lives to a virus that caught the world by surprise.
In the beginning, the news trickled in slowly. Whispered reports of a novel infectious disease affecting the southern hemisphere came in on one or two international news sites, about how a strange new fever, similar to a common cold, had started to spread from the origin to its closest neighbours. But where she was, most of the population paid no attention. After all, new diseases are coined every other day and as long as it is not here, what do the people have to worry about?
Soon after, cases of this fever were reported in cities where airflights brought travellers in from far and wide. The first reported death was of a young man who died at home, not realizing that the illness he was not getting worse before getting better. Then, it was a family of seven in the capital who died within hours of each other. An elementary school in the East with three-quarters of its population gone in a fortnight. A whole town in the Midwest diminished.
Finally, the white wave was here and it was here to stay with nothing to stand in its way.
Actions from the Head of State came too slow, too late.
Perhaps he, like everyone else, had been caught off guard by the sudden spike in deaths. Perhaps he thought it would just be a fleeting thing, a passing thing, and he had better things to do – things like that shiny new military campaign he was planning, or that green initiative he wanted to scrape to make way for a new nuclear armada. Or perhaps, he felt safe tucked away behind his ivory mansion where the disease did not and could not touch him.
But the White Horse came and he still died—screaming in rage and abandoned by the same puppets who filled his ears with needless platitudes.
At the time of the outbreak, she was a junior lab technician working in one of the major hospitals of the largest cities, and a pandemic such as this unleashed their worst in places where the population was the most dense. She was the youngest member of the hospital’s task-force to study samples of the virus, to analyze the blood, tissue and fluid of the dead and the dying and to find a way, any way that could give them a better understanding on the nature of this white death.
But as the death count rose and doctors and nurses and caregivers began dropping like flies, she traded in her job as a lab tech to that of a nurse, offering care in a hell that burned with a cold, blue fire. Now, she was the last line of defense and a dying hope in a hopeless place for the scorned and the damned.
It was only a matter of time before the scythe of mortality caught up to her. But even when she knew it was coming, reality still felt very much like a kick in the chest that left her winded when she cast her eyes upon the test in her shaking, clammy hands.
She was still so young—in her mid-twenties—with what was supposed to be a long life ahead of her, meant to be filled with goals and desires and new experiences that were great, terrible and everything in-between. Instead, she was going to die in a place that was both a home and not a home. She was going to die without ever seeing her father again. Her dear, sweet Papa with his weathered face and ruddy cheeks, armed with a devastating sense of bawdy humour and a love for her so bright that she feared he would never be able to find peace in her absence.
But death would come, and it came swiftly for some, agonisingly slow for others.
For her, it came upon her like fate shrouding a fabled heroine—slowly, familiar, and then all at once. She had been healthy one day, and not three days later, became one of the faces hidden behind oxygen masks and plastic sheets as her lungs began to give way under a crushing pressure.
Finally, she breathed her last, pleading for air in an overcrowded hospital ward, a faceless name among the many.
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Elsewhere, in a white castle where the Ocean Road meets the Roseroad, a little girl of nine summers gasped awake, alive, choking on the putrid mass of blood and mucus clogging her nose and mouth.
The last moments of her too short life were spent clawing at sweat soaked sheets and mewling in agony as the sickness tore through her the way it had others, before she died in a pool of her own sick.
Now, from beneath a pale shroud, Alysanne Tyrell breathed anew.
But she did not breathe the same.