La Grande Peste. The plague.

Just over a year ago, plague had struck Marseille after a merchant ship from Italy returned with nothing but corpses within it; and whilst the city had immediately gone into quarantine, it hadn’t done much when within the week people were dying en masse.

Now, it had struck a small village in rural France. A farmer had begun complaining about feeling feverish, and it didn’t take long for the whole village to be stricken with hysteria. Hysteria had not prevented the plague from spreading, however, as soon residents began dropping like flies.

It’d taken days to gather all the dead as safely as possible, as almost every able-bodied man and most women had already been killed. Their bodies were set ablaze at night, the pyre of human flesh glowing and flickering in a myriad of bright reds and oranges and yellows; it was almost beautiful, in a horrid way… but the beauty was hard to acknowledge with the stench of burning flesh and hair that came in tandem with the flames searing off the flesh of the ill.

Perhaps that was why nobody heard the set of soft footsteps behind them.

“Excuse-moi, but you all need a doctor, non?” the voice that rung out over the oppressive silence was strange, as if spoken through iron plating… and yet there had been no clang of armor.

Illuminated by the flames stood a… man, or what is believed to be a man. He looked the part of a doctor, though… not, in a way. He carried a bag, as black as the leather of his cloak, though there was no belt of herbs around his waist or even holes to breathe from in his mask. In the light of the roaring flames, he looked almost ghastly… like the skeletal hand of death wearing the garb of a man of medicine.

“Vous êtes malade, n'est-ce pas ? Je suis le remède,” the man spoke again, almost a mockery of the dead as he spoke of being the very cure that the villagers sought so very desperately, “allow me to help you. Je suis l’docteur.”

God save your soul.