The salt spray stung Elias’s face as he walked the cobbled streets towards the docks. The stench was worse here, a cloying mix of rotting fish, unwashed bodies, and something else… something acrid and indefinably wrong. The Grave Cough had claimed another dozen souls overnight, their racked bodies carted away on rickety wagons, destined for the mass graves outside the city walls. But the disease, as horrific as it was, felt… incomplete. It didn’t explain the groans. It didn’t explain the unsettling feeling of dread that had settled over Aethelburg like a shroud.