Limlight - Plagued Village

Limlight sits close enough to the Belfrian border that the people who live there have spent centuries unsure whether to consider themselves Draksborne citizens or simply people who happen to occupy the space between two kingdoms. The village is small and has always been small, built on the banks of a tributary river that feeds into the Gilrain, its economy sustained by fishing, timber, and the modest trade that passes through on the road connecting the two kingdoms. What distinguishes it from a dozen other villages of similar size and similar fortune is its graveyard, which is older than Belfrie as a nation and holds within it the remains of thousands of soldiers who died on this ground over three centuries ago. It was here, at the close of the Second Era, that one of the bloodiest engagements of the Belfrie Rebellion was fought, a collision of Imperial Draksborne forces and the rebel coalition that left the fields surrounding the village soaked for weeks. The village was rebuilt. The dead stayed. Historians and scholars have made the journey to Limlight with some regularity in the centuries since, drawn by the mass graves and the remnants of fortifications still visible in the treeline to the east if one knows where to look. The villagers have grown accustomed to this, tolerating the occasional academic with the patient indifference of people who live beside history rather than inside it. Under Severin Linhardt's tenure as mayor, Limlight navigated the first Dragonblight outbreak two years ago with fewer casualties than almost any comparable settlement in the region, a fact the village wore quietly and without ceremony, in the way that people do when survival feels more like luck than achievement. It does not feel like luck now. Phrenic Concordia moved through Limlight faster than any natural disease has a right to move, and within days of the first symptoms appearing, the kingdom's response teams had established an arcane containment field around the village perimeter, sealing whatever remained inside with whatever remained of the outbreak. The road that once connected two kingdoms now ends at a wall of shimmering force that lets nothing through in either direction. Inside, the streets that historians once walked with notebooks and careful footsteps are occupied by things that used to be neighbours. The graveyard at the village's edge, disturbed by the chaos of the outbreak, has given up something old and angry that the disease did not create but has made considerably worse. Limlight has been a site of historical significance for three hundred years. It is about to become one again, for reasons nobody inside the containment field would have chosen.