The Necessary Mercy: A Dark Historical Plague Fiction (eBook)

THE GATES WERE BUILT TO KEEP THE SICKNESS OUT. THEY ONLY LOCKED THE HORROR IN.

France, 1348.

The Black Death is sweeping north, a silent tide of shadow and decay. In the proud market town of Virelais, the council makes a desperate choice: they seal the gates. No one enters. No one leaves. They call it salvation.

It will become a tomb.

Sir Alard Veyne, a disgraced knight fleeing a war-torn past, arrives in Virelais seeking only a night’s anonymity. Instead, he finds himself trapped in a city preparing for a siege against an invisible enemy. But as weeks pass and the plague fails to breach the walls, a far more dangerous contagion takes root within.

Paranoia spreads faster than any fever. Under the icy command of Councilwoman Maudeline Risse, the town begins a campaign of “preventative necessity.” First, the beggars are removed. Then the infirm. As winter tightens its grip, the definition of “unnecessary” expands, and the cure becomes infinitely more terrifying than the disease.

Haunted by the ghosts of his own failures, Alard watches as neighbors turn into informants and piety twists into sanctioned cruelty. In a city devouring itself to survive, he must decide whether to keep his head down and live, or draw his sword against the very order he is trapped within.

The plague is coming. But in Virelais, the dead may be the lucky ones.

**This eBook is a novella-length**