Prelude: The Great Mortality

In 1348 CE, an illness ravaged the sentient population of Europe. Its vector was a mystery but its trajectory was apparent for all to see; starting in Italy, it worked its way northwards, taking villages and cities one by one as the weather warmed.

The illness killed with bloody lungs and coughing, often less than three days after exposure to someone who was ill. One member of a family would become sick and within four days the entire household was dead. It seemed that none were immune. A third of the population of Europe died during the plague's first onslaught. By 1350, over half of the population was dead. At the time, it was called merely the plague, or the great mortality.

Later generations would call it the Black Death.

The plague ushered in a time called the Dark Ages, two centuries of political and social turmoil out of which the Renaissance was born like a phoenix rising from the ash of the old world.

The illness that caused the great mortality would strike again, but never with the same ferocity and never again with the same grim results. The landscape that the plague left behind was so different from what had come before that, in later centuries, tales of the time before the Black Death were dismissed as fancy, as impossibilities.

For in those days, legends walked the earth...

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