Few lands in all of Bullard empire are as treacherously dreary or as deceptively dignified as the Seven Weeping Isles of Earl van Elsboro. A string of storm-lashed islands off to the western of the empire, shrouded in unceasing mist and crowned with rusting slate rooftops, they endure in quiet defiance of the astral sea's endless gnawing. From the cradle of my birth to the ash-gray corridors of my adulthood, I have known no other home, no other hell. Our archipelago was renowned for two things, though only one brought joy to its inhabitants. First, our mastery of alchemy, elevated to a precise and perilous science—gas-lit cobblestone streets shimmering with phosphorescent hues, the acrid tang of black powder marking both celebration and catastrophe, and a medical tradition rivaled only by the plagues it so often struggled to tame. And second: the rain.
Ceaseless. Inescapable. As omnipresent as breath, and twice as cruel. A veil of mist and drizzle clung perpetually to stone and skin alike, seeping into bones, into dreams. The rain fed our cisterns and filled our graves. It slicked every rooftop, every windowpane, etched rivulets into tombstones and festered in cellars. It was the rhythm of our days, the silence of our nights, the lullaby of our children and the dirge of our dying.
It was here, amidst crumbling brickwork and walls furred with moss, that I, James Blut, was born—heir to a bloodline of apothecaries and, with neither ceremony nor protest, to their trade. From my father I inherited my gray hair and the steadiness of hands needed to incise flesh and measure toxins with equal precision. From my mother, noble of birth and fine of bearing, I gained my emerald eyes and the coin that purchased my early education. At the tender age of four, while other children played with carved boats in the puddles, I was deciphering tinctures and the intricacies of root and mineral beneath the stern gaze of a private tutor. By ten, I had surpassed him.
My brilliance—such as it was—did not stem from ambition. It was necessity that honed my mind. When your inheritance is a profession tethered to suffering, and your tools are knowledge and pain, you either learn swiftly or perish in irrelevance. Apprenticing under my father, I came to know illness not as a foe to be vanquished, but as a persistent and evolving companion. And through this companionship, I came to know her.
Eleanor.
She was like a sunflower in this kingdom of mildew and stone, tall and golden and radiant in her defiance of gloom. She stood taller than most women, even in youth, with a laugh that rang clear as chapel bells and freckles that danced across her cheeks like constellations. By local standards, she was not considered beautiful. But local standards had long ceased to matter to me. I had grown weary of admiration without understanding, of debutantes who praised my aristocratic lashes and gentle features but shrank from the precision of my scalpel. I had learned to mistrust beauty's chorus, for it sang only when the stage was dressed in vanity.
Eleanor did not court me, nor I her. I never would. Our love was not a story for poets. It did not bloom beneath moonlight or in the margins of ballads. It began, simply, one rain-heavy morning, when she arrived at my door with a basket of fruit—humble, imported, and wholly unexpected. A thank-you, she said, for treating her ailing uncle. Few had ever thanked me before. Fewer still had meant it.
We grew close, as those who share warmth in a cold world often do. Her hands, calloused from sculpture and soldering, were deft and unflinching. She crafted trinkets and tools with equal passion. In time, I commissioned a gift for my mother: a crystalline copper pocket watch, its casing etched with petals and stars. We delivered it together. I can still recall my mother's frail smile as she cradled the piece, fingers trembling with age. My father, ever the stoic, clapped my shoulder once. I like to believe he was proud.
He never said so. He never would.
Soon after my sixteenth birthday, the plague began.
It came not as a whisper, but as a roar. Vicious and unrelenting, it swept across the isles like fire across dry reeds. Pestilence was not new to us—we lived in sodden homes, among close quarters and crowded hearths—but this affliction was different. It did not merely weaken the body. It hollowed it. The stomach rotted, the intestines twisted, and the eyes sank into skulls like extinguished candles. Patients shriveled into husks. Their screams echoed through stone alleys, until silence claimed them.
My father and I fought against it with every tincture, every poultice, every whispered prayer. Day bled into night. Night bled into delirium. We ate little. We did not sleep. The clinic, already grim, became a place of perpetual mourning. For four endless weeks, we worked.
And while we fought, my mother died.
Not from disease. From human greed. A burglar, seeking medicine, broke in and found none. In panic, he struck her. She choked on her own blood as he fled into the storm.
He was caught. He was fed to the rats beneath the eastern causeway.
But justice brings no peace. My father—once the tireless steward of our practice—fell into shadow. He did not speak. He did not work. His heart was too broken to be of any use.He left me the tools, the patients, and the silence.
I was sixteen.
Each day, I treated the dying. Each night, I collapsed in Eleanor's arms. Supplies dwindled. I sold everything I could . I begged, traded, borrowed from smugglers and saints alike. Still, I worked.
Then, the change began.
I noticed it first in the instruments. Scalpels never dulled. Alcohol containers flowed like the rain—unending. Herbal remedies, once unreliable, became near-miraculous in effect. Even the fireworks children offered in barter burned brighter and longer. I felt... lifted. As though something unseen had taken part of my burden.
Rebah, the Diligent One—god of farming, of toil and earned opulence.—had blessed me. The god of those who sow and sweat and survive. Not the god of kings or warriors. The god of those who endure.
My ascension came on the morning of my father's death.
He passed without ceremony. I buried him on a hillside overlooking the edge of the isles so he may never have to look upon the people who condemned him through their selfishness, with Eleanor and a half-drunk priest as witnesses. Not a single patient came to pay respects. The man who once saved half the island was laid to rest in silence.
The plague was beaten not long after I turned seventeen. A cure was discovered—simple, elegant, devastating in its efficacy. The sickness faded into memory. I returned to the clinic. But the isle had changed.
I had changed.
Eleanor and I were hailed as heroes. Applause whispered through damp alleyways. But when Eleanor died, the chapel overflowed.
Yes. She died too.
I mourn her passing with every breath I overindulge in, and curse my inability to declare my undying love for her in time.
No tragedy is ever singular in the Weeping Isles. Suffering here is not a visitor—it is the landlord.
And so, when the tithe was declared—five hundred thousand coin or conscription—I made my decision. I did not hesitate. I would serve.
For what did I owe this place anymore?
The Weeping Isles had taken all from me.
It was time, perhaps, that I took my equipment, my knowledge and myself from these accursed lands.