Members of Outbreak limped up the street in a slow advance of fetid flesh, their feet shuffling in an uncoordinated, shamble as they dragged their diseased bodies through the ankle-deep filth that caked the threshold of Veerus city.

As they walked, they moaned softly, their rotting vocal cords shivering in a cacophonous symphony of labored breath.

The outbreak was not a quiet thing, a fact for which Eli was thankful as he pressed his back against the brittle stone of the desiccated city: slowly losing its battle to a long terminal illness.

Behind his protective barrier of crumbling stone Eli fought to keep his hands from touching the grim, soiled ground beneath his feet.

The outbreak continued their shuffling, staggering way up the street, visible to Eli only through a delicate, hairline crack slowly growing between the stone and mortar of his hiding place, their red decomposing flesh peeling back from rotting bone. A putrid wave of rancid air fogged up the lenses of Eli's glasses with a vile stench that set his stomach churning, the kind of smell that burrowed its way into your sinuses and settled in to pupate larvae.

Eli wiped his glasses silently with a hand, and immediately regretted his ability to see as he watched a pale worm wriggle its way from the rotting folds of tattered flesh, glisten briefly, and then return again to the cavernous place where a nose had once resided.

Eli turned away from the hole pressing his back against the wall and covering his nose and mouth with a hand. He forced himself to breathe slowly and deeply, an action which he immediately regretted as it allowed the city's miasma of filth to worm its way into the cavernous spaces of his skull.

Their groaning grew distant, only to be replaced by a low whisper emanating from the dark depths of his tattered leather satchel.

"I've seen fresher corpses."

Eli's mouth was watering, a sure sign his breakfast would be making a return visit. He let the saliva drip from his mouth and onto the ground. "They certainly don't invite a cuddle and a kiss on the lips." He said, attempting to chase back the nausea with humor.

The disgust was palpable even through the high tenor of the disembodied voice "Why thank you for painting such an evocative picture, I can almost taste it."

"I live to serve." Eli said, straightening up and passing a sleeve over his lips before casting a nervous glance up the road. "Why anyone would willingly serve Affliction is beyond me." He looked down towards the source of the voice and directly into the gaze of a large, baleful eye, which leered at him from beneath the flap of his satchel.

The Eye blinked wetly once and then twice before "The same could be said about people who willingly visit affliction."

Eli sighed, "You of all people should know that our visit here is hardly willing."

The eye rolled at him, "I doubt we are to find your father in this hell pit, and even if we did, I highly doubt you would recognize him without skin."

Eli's shoulder's stiffened slightly, jaw tightening even as his fingers went white around the strap of his bag, "This isn't just about that and you know it."

"Your Hope," the eye said, his voice a high pitched reedy quaver through the fog "Your little obsession always seems to bring us to the most loathsome cesspits: hiding under rocks or in the bowls of trees."

Eli adjusted his glasses, "This entire world is a Cesspit, Wink. and it isn't hope it's research. Hope is blind without action, research might just be able to help me before ...." Eli trailed off then not entirely willing to voice the concerns that had become so pressing in the proceeding months. Instead, adjusted the shoulder strap of his satchel and stepped down from the crumbling building and onto the street below. He tried not to think about how his feet squished through the filth or how his weight seemed to depress against the soil, as if he was walking across great slabs of meat.

A pallid mist rose up around them, and he was thankful for the protective shroud he wore over his face. It didn't keep out the smell, but he was at least relatively sure it would keep the Affliction at bay.

He stepped over a small creek of cloudy water, and tried not to think about the strange spongy chunks that bobbed just under the surface.

Wetness squished under his feet as he walked, and he stopped, reaching into his bag for a pen and notebook.

Wink moved to the side, gelatinous black body squishing flat against the side of the bag as Eli passed his hand in and then out, coming back with a faded leather-bound journal -- once his father's--l now his, bound with something that might possibly have been human skin, though he did his absolute best not to think about that, and flipped open to an inner page, past pages and pages of spidery writing and jagged sketches until he found a fresh page. He allowed his hand to rest momentarily on the familiar course paper, taking comfort from the journal: an item that represented the only piece of his family he had left: his father's research.

Wink stretched up from inside the bag, his long, gelatinous body elongating and stretching like a string of black slime , "What are you writing?"

"Just a reminder to throw away these clothes when we get back."

"Afraid of getting sick are we?"

Eli tapped his chin and passed the notebook back into his bag, "I think avoiding sickness in this place would be like trying to avoid air. My only real hope is that I catch a cold and not the plague." he jotted down another quick note as he walked, keeping one eye on the road ahead, "Out of all the Dreads, Affliction is, admittedly, one of my least favorite."

Eli's boot squelched again against something particularly slimy, and he didn't bother to conceal his expression of disgust. Wink's eyes glistened from leathery darkness,"That implies you have a favorite?"

"I think that is generally the whole point? Why else would anyone choose to Serve the Dreads? You have to pick a favorite."

Wink settled back into the bag, filling its contours like some sort of inky black puddle, large glittering eye floating just at the top, "I feel like there is a distinct difference between having a favorite and having a, I dislike this thing the least.'"

"I thought semantics was my thing."

Wink wiggled a little bit inside the bag, "Just getting back at you for all those times I had to listen to one of your pretentious lectures on the nature of fear."

Eli adjusted the strap of his satchel against one shoulder, "That is assuming you even listen to me, which we both know you don't."

"No, no I don't."

The two of them lapsed into morose silence as the outskirts of the city passed away, and the twisted trees of the nearby swampland faded into the backdrop of fog. Up ahead, looming in the half illuminated mist, he could see the outline of Veerus city, less like a city and more like a cancerous growth on the face of the world seeping corruption and disease into the brackish feted bog that surrounded it.

He could see it now, canals of pollution leaking out from inside the city by way of giant corrugated pipes, which dumped cloudy water into the bog. Then there was the smell, an indescribable tide that ebbed and flowed in waves of putrefaction, carrion, human waste and suffering. Had eli all the ink in the world, he would never have been able to describe the clawing stench that took hold of his nose and burrowed its way inside his throat.

His mouth began to water again, and he stopped in the street to bend over and gag head spinning.

He wouldn't allow himself to throw up, simply wanting the comfort and relief of expressing his disgust with this place. His hands tightened around the straps of his bag, the leather of the black gloves he wore creaking with protest as he straightened and plodded forward towards the looming shadow of the city.

Overhead a black bird croaked, and Eli traced its stilted path through the sky, watching as a feather drifted down from above.

He was surprised the creature had enough remaining feathers to maintain flight.

Approaching the gates of Veerus his eyes fell on a pack of mangy dogs --with rotting skin and eyes so encrusted with yellow discharge he wondered how they could even see. They were huddled by the roadside, surrounding something that lay unmoving on the ground before them, tearing at it with their rotten teeth.

It looked like it had once been a cat.

Or maybe a rat.

He heard the rats in Veerus were almost as big as cats. Regardless of what it had once been, the thing was so diseased it had expired right there in the street, its body becoming carrion for another generation of terminal animal.

He made sure to keep to the other side of the road, eying the mangy mongrels as they chewed on their meal, not relishing the idea of what a bite from one of those infected things might do to him.

As he came upon the gate, he found himself held up at the back of a long line of people all crowding around the entrance in a churning crowd of hunched shoulders and ragged clothing. Looking at the mass of flesh before him, he found himself purposely distancing himself from the filth of bodies.

By the looks of them, he could see that most were peasants from the outlying marshland. They had that look about them, with scaly red skin, and bare feet with yellowed nails overgrown such that they were twisting back upon themselves. He grimaced as he imagined how it must feel to walk these streets, the rot squishing up between their toes. Their hair was lank like swampy weed and hung about their shoulders like wet moss while their skin hung loose and baggy around their faces.

Despite all that, none of them were repulsive enough to be mistaken for one of the outbreak, or even one of the city dwellers, who were characteristically marred by leperous pockmarks and spongy patches of skin.

The swamp peasants lived on the land upon which affliction held dominion, and many of them served the cancerous being to one degree or another, but none of them were directly subject to it, unlike many of their city-dwelling brethren.

Unfortunately for them, that meant they were still subject to disease as a natural course of things, as evidenced by their jaundiced skin and gaunt faces. Just ahead of him, he saw an elderly woman hunched over a bundle of rags from which peered a face: feverish, red swollen, and puffy with dark rings of blue encircling the eyes..

He doubted the child had long to live.

Anyone who managed to grow up in a place like this and survive until adulthood was a miracle on their own.

The gate approached now, and just as the gate guards came within sight, the man before him collapsed suddenly convulsing in the filth of the street before going still. None bothered to stop and look. Eli barely flinched, watching as a group of leprous men scurried from an opening in the gate hauling a hand cart spotted with unmentionable brownish stains.

The body was lifted by liver spotted hands and tossed into the back of the cart before being dragged away, to be tossed into one of the plague pits, the contents of which drained from those massive pipes and out of the city.

As he waited for his turn at the gate, Eli reached into the bag and pulled out his notebook and pen, scratching a quick sketch of the scene before him.

The men standing at the main gate were less diseased than the others: the only suggestion of their sickness being the pallid nature of their skin, and the glossy sheen of clammy sweat that acted as a constant veneer over their bodies.

He couldn't tell if they were bald on purpose, or if the sickness had taken their hair.

"State your business." One of them said, and Eli followed the man's eyes as they ran up and down his body. Eli shrugged off the crawling sensation that ran a course over his spine as the man's eyes paused to linger on the unblemished skin of his face..... Almost hungrily.

"State your business," The second man repeated, voice raising with impatience.

Eli clenched one hand around the strap of his satchel, "I am here in the capacity of my work, as an information broker."

One of the men snorted and hawked a thick filmy wad of phlegm onto the ground, "And what information do you have to broker?"

Eli looked the man in the face, the corners of his mouth turned slightly down, "What kind of information are you looking for. I have information on the safest trade routes, weather predictions, medicinal recipes-"

He was cut off.

"Let us see your identification."

Eli nodded, dropping a hand into his bag to retrieve the little booklet of papers which he then passed over to the first man who looked it over with the same suspicious gaze.

In the end, it was his eyes that gave him away, running across the page too quickly and in such a strange pattern that he couldn't have been reading.

The man waved a dismissive hand, "Let him through."

His partner broached no argument, either unaware of the man's inability to read, or entirely indifferent to the fact. In the end, neither man read his papers, and Eli was allowed to pass unhindered as they turned their attention to the next poor unfortunate standing in line.

As soon as they were out of hearing range a grumble rose up from the depths of his bag "Shame on you."

Eli resisted the urge to brush a hand through his hair, " It wasn't totally a lie... I am an information broker."

Wink stared at him from the shadow of the pouch. When he next spoke his voice was uncharacteristically somber for a gelatinous black ooze, "You are hardly likely to find your father here, and we both know it."

Eli set his jaw forcing himself not to take Wink's comments personally, "I know, but this isn't about that, this is about.... Me."

Wink hummed, "Oh, we're here for that?" He gave Eli a quick once over with his large, baleful eye, "You and I are both erudite enough to know some things are just a lost cause." His voice was teasing, but Eli couldn't help but feel there was a hint of truth behind the words.

Instead of responding emotionally, he simply snorted, "Big words from a wad of goo I might have just scraped from the bottom of my boot..... do you even know what it means?"

"I know plenty of large words, because unfortunately the only reading material I have in here during our long journeys just so happens to be your creepy journal and Cripman's Thesaurus fifth edition. The least you could do is drop in some decent reading material every now and again."

Eli huffed, "Yeah, perhaps, perhaps something with lots of pictures and very small words."

"You cheeky bastard."

"That's me." He looked up at the pale sky above and sighed. Besides, the wink was only half right. This wasn't about stopping fear anymore; This was about saving his life. Eli only had so many days left, and those days were numbered.

He turned up another side street, following the map he had memorized earlier towards the center of the city. As he kept going, evidence of rot and sickness became even more evident. More and more of those hand pulled carts trundled down the streets hardly even bothering to cover their gruesome cargo, a mass of limbs and flesh melted together to become an unspeakable conglomeration of recognizable human parts twisted into an unrecognizable human form.

A metaphor, Simile or perhaps a close facsimile to the physical avatar of Affliction itself.

His father's journal described it best quoting a passage from" The Dreads and their incarnations" He could almost see the page upon which its description had been written, penned neatly in his father's steady hand.

The creature lies within a pit in the ground-- a strange place for a god, though it is somehow fitting. The pit is filled a tenth of the way with brackish feted water, and flies churn in great wheeling circles overhead. When the creature moves it shifts with a great squelching sound that rips and rends like diseased flesh being peeled from bone. The pit itself is wide, almost unfathomably so, stretching out for what must be miles, and inside rests Affliction, a god of sickness, disease, and plague.

To look upon it is to understand unfathomable corruption and disgust as its great amorphous blob of skin seems to churn and undulate below. Its outside is bruised in the many colors of a bruise, sour and perverted into this strange and unholy facsimile. It cannot be fathomed from where it starts and where it ends, and the limbs that wave above its head could be hands or feet or tentacles.

Not many but the Outbreak have seen the creature's true form, for the power it holds, means that, to look on its body is to embrace the sickness, be permitted by it to become one with it.

To rot right down to the marrow of one's bones.

Eli had some pity for the writer, for if he had seen what he had described, it was likely he was either one.... Dead, or two, a shambling corpse labeled as one of the Outbreak

He couldn't say he felt entirely sorry for the man, as his first hand account saved Eli the curiosity of having to look at himself..... and the horrible boils that likely would have resulted. Overhead the sky had turned orange as the sun disseminated through the fog of corruption which shrouded the city.

It was a horrible place, and if it wasn't for the Outbreak, the people would likely have fled long ago. but the Affliction had claimed them, and it was a jealous master.

Eli was close now, maybe a few blocks away from the library, and overhead, a rolling bank of clouds was passing its first shadow over the city.

Looking at the library, he could only hope that it would be cleaner on the inside than it was on the outside.

It would be best for him to keep his head low lest he attract the attention of one of the Outbreak. He didn't want to become like these poor trapped souls, subject to their dark god.

It was never a good idea to catch the eye of one of the dreads.

The results tended to be very poor indeed.

For everyone involved.

He was only delayed once on his way to the library, cutting behind a low stone archway as a contingent of the outbreak moved up the street, shambling and moaning like the deadmen that they were. He couldn't tell what they were doing, but had suspicions that they were out hunting.... Looking for someone like him perhaps to bring into their fold, or to infect , their dark offering of fear to their hungry waiting god.

They passed up the street, and he slipped out from his hiding spot, hurrying forward to the one building in this place that offered any semblance of sanctuary: a shining beacon of purity against the vast rot of flesh arching white dome dominating the murky skyline.

This would be his refuge, though as Eli drew close he could not help but note the cracks in the building's stately veneer, its once gilded facade intent on a slow march to ruin while the rest of the world crumbled towards rapid decay.

At one point, it had probably been constructed out of large blocks of white marble, though the city had stained the pure stone with yellow over the years.

He paused just outside the door and took a long deep breath, looking up at the words that hung before him.

The Parvus Library of Learning.

And then he reached out with two gloved hands and pushed the doors inwards.