ROT
Written on October 2, 2021 (♎︎)
Author's Notes: Written for Whumptober 2021 for prompt No. 2: Talking is Overrated (Choking).
Dycedarg knew what it was before he saw the cloud. He knew the scent of it: the earthy bitterness on the air, like field blight or blood rotted and dried to dust. When he fell, he took himself to be drowning.
The Hokuten fell and drowned alongside him. The sky took on a green cast. When Dycedarg tried to speak—to shout an order, to call for help—his words came up as bile. The air felt as if it had sunken into him and taken root there, digging into the matter of his lungs like long-grown fescue grass, and all he could do for a moment was let it strangle him. As he sputtered and choked against the hard packed soil, however, he tried to quiet all considerations of recompense and fate.
He told himself that he did not believe in such things. He told himself that his life was not some fable moving towards its final irony.
He managed to pull himself upright after that. He forced himself to breathe. Even as his throat burned and his eyes stung, Dycedarg decided then that it could not kill him: that no alchemist or apothecary could distill two years poison into one miasma. He tried to bid his racing pulse slow itself as he stumbled, one footfall after another, onto the field. It was easy for a while after that: easy to turn his mind from dread and toward opportunities. He carried himself steadily a long while thereafter and told himself that no rot would grow into him.
When the Duke of Gallione met his end, Dycedarg did not reckon the decision made with anything less than a clear head. In the collapse thereafter, he almost thought it some fault on Zalbag's part that he should stand over him bewildered.
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