It came suddenly, like a flood, no, like ten-foot waves suffocating everything in a cold black roar. Except the child was hot, he burned to the touch, and his mother feared to touch him lest he crumble to ash.

The man could not think of what to do. What skill did he possess that could help his family on this most dire of days? He was a robust man, always healthy, and so he was terrified of illness, which seemed to him as a strange fork in the path, where he could not read the signs that would tell him which way to turn.

He took himself to the wisest old crone nearby, but she was merely the newly elevated apprentice of a much cronier crone, who had taken the long path scant months before. She had no answers but to bathe the child with cool cloths and burn tapers to keep evil airs away. The man knew in his heart, which beat strong and fierce against the cage of his ribs with his love for his son, that these tricks could not heal the boy.