”After it was all said and done, analysts from both sides got our documentation together, began studying everything we could. Even with the Reichsarmee, Republicaine Armee, international health volunteers and local doctors, it still took a decade for us to finally understand the scope of the Wet Plague. In all, we estimate that in the Peripherie when it was rampaging with little done to stop it during the bitter fighting of mid to late 1012, the sickness was killing one-thousand to twenty-five hundred people a -week-. That’s at least five-thousand a month. Soldiers from both sides, civilians. Didn’t matter. They dropped like flies, but due to the fighting and all the other circumstances, no one noticed until it was almost too late. Why didn’t they notice? Let’s not forget battles like Westkeep, Vilein, Vanguardigo, Vigovia, all happening right after each other. Death was all around, in its tens and hundreds of thousands. What was another thousand or two a week in one region going to matter?”
-Doctor Gomez Santano, University of Greenback, 1032 ALB

July 23rd, 1012
Balefire province, Imperial Occupied Duchy of Verenia
3rd Armee, 29th Infanterie-Division ‘Knallstädt’, 99th Grenadier-Regiment
Quarantänelager Kaufmann

The camp sat in the middle of a second ring of isolation, though the vehicles and uniforms clad and used by the griffons on the outside wore the same patches and insignia as those within. There was a barbed wire fence, though no gate, towers or guards at the corners. Merely a few dozen tents inside and the dim outlines in the dawn light of orderlies in masks and protective smocks hauling their burden out so the troopers in gas masks could collect them. The bundled loads were corpses, of griffons, dogs and ponies, claimed and twisted by the horrific specter inside. Not even the uniforms were reclaimed off the dead, instead tossed into a pit at the edge of the camp to be burned. Passing by in the opposite direction, troopers and orderlies carried stretchers laden with living soldiers, hacking and coughing or passed out and limp. The ground was covered in blood and vomit, rendered to mud by both the light rainfall and the prodigious amount of bodily fluids splashed across the soil.

Inside one of the tents, the griffon surgeon leaned over his patient, carefully examining. The pony had died not so long ago, perhaps a few hours back. She looked dreadfully pallid, as if a victim of drowning without the bloating that came from soaking in water. Sighing behind his surgical mask, he gestured for scalpel and saw. The bronze dog nurse carefully passed the tools over, her own skin sweaty and pale beneath her coat from all the work they’d already done that day. The surgeon cut open the mare’s torso, slicing from the base of the throat down the length of the barrel. The saw he used to carve through the ribs, like a lumberjack sawing off bows. Then his talons went back in and cracked the bones, taking them out entirely. Off to the side, an orderly wretched a dry heave behind their mask, and the surgeon paused only a moment as he considered. Must have been a new one. Those who had been here for some time either passed out already or became numb to the suffering around them. He moved on with his work, carefully slicing open the lungs. Once they were open, foamy fluid began seeping out with the hiss of escaping air that had not already left through the holes dotting the sickly, dilapidated organs. The surgeon, the nurse and even the orderlies all crowded closer to get a better look.

“Just like those Aquileian POWs,” the surgeon muttered, his voice exhausted and despondent. “Just like the others out there.”

“Mein gotten,” one of the orderlies uttered, reaching up to touch an emblem of the Triarchy around his neck under his smock. “She drowned in her own lungs…”

The surgeon straightened up, stripping off his medical gloves before falling back to all fours.

“I need some air. Orderly, take her away.”

The examination, cursory as it was, was complete. The orderlies moved to take the stretcher off the table, draping a sheet over the dead mare. The door opened, and the surgeon stumbled out as he fumbled a pack of cigarettes out, nearly tripping over the next body waiting in the hallway. From the door to the exit was lined with stretchers bearing corpses, all waiting for a postmortem examination. Some of them weren’t quite corpses yet, almost on the brink of death as they lingered in their misery. Some, dead or not, didn’t even have a stretcher to be carried on, piled down and stacked like sacks of grain. The surgeon pushed to the door, trying to hold his breath as he finally reached the exit, shoving out into the open. They had all been similar to the mare on the table, choking and coughing and hacking as the sickness struck them down. Caught early enough, some survived. Most didn’t, and could be struck down as quickly as forty-eight hours or linger for days or even weeks. It wore all the appearances of a type of influenza from the marshes and swamps, hence the term “Wet Plague”. But whereas most severe flu killed the very young and the very old but healthy young adults could survive, the Wet Plague reaped an equal toll on the fighting ranks, most of whom were below the age of thirty. Already, the dying had gotten to the point where separate quarantine camps like Kaufmann were becoming common as munitions dumps across the Peripherie. Efforts were being made to keep the sickness from advancing north into the Herzland, but reports stated some outbreaks had already been found in Griefenmarschen and Yale. Strangely enough, few cases had been reported from Angriver itself.

The surgeon finally reached open air, far enough away from the corpses and the ill. With shaking claws, he lit the cigarette, taking a deep pull and letting it out more for the sake of getting that second one in his lungs. Weeks he had spent on this case, trying to compile a report for the Reichsarmee on why this had been such a problem that needed addressing. At first, he had been rebuffed. Trench diseases happened all the time, it was said. What was so different about this one? Most armies lost a significant amount of troops to illness. It was a factor of war.

Except it wasn’t.

There had been no outbreaks of the Wet Plague when the war was up north in Feathisia, and the trench fighting there had been just as bitter, though chemical weapons had yet to be deployed by either side. A case could be made that it had spread from Angriver and the war had reached the Peripherie around the time when Angriverian troops were finally allowed to deploy with Reichsarmee divisions. But then why were there few to no cases in Angriver itself? Evidence did suggest that the chemical weapons themselves may have had a mutative effect on the Plague, turning what might have been a rather mild if extremely contagious flu into a much more sinister killer. Possibly, but some theaters affected by the Plague had yet to report the usage of mustard gas, the very mutagenic agent being blamed. What unicorn healing magic the Empire had access to couldn't battle the virus, merely help assuage the symptoms and side effects, almost as if the sickness was able to mutate to resist even magic.

“What -are- you?” the surgeon muttered before taking another drag, finally feeling himself beginning to calm down. His question, pointless and empty as it was, had been directed at the Plague, an attempt to understand something that had defied understanding. Why was it so lethal? Where -had- it come from? And, most importantly of all, could they contain it before it reached the more populated cities of the Herzland? And then, could they kill it?

He finished his cigarette, resolved to once more process line after line of sick soldiers. Many of them hadn’t even been on the line very long, just happened to be stationed in an infected area. Cloth masks over the beak or muzzle among the veterans were becoming the norm. Some elected to wear their clumsy, uncomfortable gas masks all the time, seeing their suffering as better than catching the Plague. It was worse than when the towns got infected. A town could eventually run out of griffons to infect. A line unit had fresh victims rotated in to replace the losses. At this rate, would the forests of the Peripherie have enough wood to supply the Reichsarmee with coffins? Or would they have to resort to mass graves soon instead of shipping the corpses back to the vulnerable, ignorant and so far unafflicted Herzland?

The surgeon grunted as he started back. Then he began to cough. It got worse with every step, sounding more and more strenuous and wet.

Then he collapsed.

Author's Note

So this is an idea I've been sitting on for a while, and one thing the worsening conditions at my work have done for me (49 C is not exactly conducive to creative writing when all you want to do is crawl into a freezer after your shift and sleep the few hours left to you) is to inspire me to work a little more on some of my ABS content as my attempts at the longer F2F chapters have suffered. Rest assured I am still trying, but ABS at least allows me to avoid stagnation.