The Black Wolf Fever Outbreak in Aquafa is a medical emergency and a contest over how its deaths should be understood. After patients bitten by animals develop a rapidly fatal illness, Hohsalle investigates its possible transmission and urges precautions; meanwhile, the survival of some Aquafaese and the deaths of Zolians fuel the rumor that the disease is the Curse of Aquafa. The outbreak’s significance lies not only in its lethality, but in the collision between incomplete evidence, religious doctrine, and an explanation that can turn infection into a weapon of ethnic blame.

Causes and Early Investigation

The first established outbreak among the enslaved people at the salt mine had already made black wolf fever a concern. When the governor asks whether the new illness could be the same disease, Hohsalle confirms that the mine has experienced an outbreak and warns that, if the attacking animals were ossam, precautions are warranted. He proposes addressing both animals that may carry the disease and people who may have been infected. Simply killing suspected beasts would not be enough: Hohsalle also fears that fleas or ticks on infected animals could move to human hosts, so he argues for a thorough, cautious plan.

The available observations initially point toward animal bites rather than ordinary person-to-person spread. At the salt mine, victims appear to have been exposed around the same time, developed symptoms, and died nearly together; a gradual chain of human infections, Hohsalle reasons, would probably have allowed someone to report the outbreak earlier. The disease appears highly virulent and quick to manifest, with almost all the weakened enslaved people and even slave keepers dying. Yet people who continued working at the mine after the incident did not show symptoms. Hohsalle therefore doubts that fleas, ticks, or transmission through the air explain that episode, and considers infection through bites from a beast more plausible. He accepts that killing rats and mice would be prudent, but cautions against treating all wild dogs or wolves as equivalent: if animals had attacked sheep, shepherds bitten by them should also have fallen ill, yet no such reports had reached Yotalu. The task, Hohsalle concludes, is to identify and eliminate carriers, not to hunt indiscriminately.

The Royal Hunt Cases

The outbreak’s course changes after the royal hunt. Patients with infected dog bites initially complain of fever and lethargy, symptoms that could be mistaken for ordinary consequences of bites. On the sixth day after the hunt, the Zolian falconer develops a rash. Hohsalle and Milalle had prepared for this possibility; they move to respond, carrying medical supplies that must be transported specially. The rash marks the beginning of many sleepless days and nights.

The falconer’s illness then advances with alarming speed. What begins with cold-like symptoms, including a sore throat and fatigue, becomes characteristic of black wolf fever once the rash appears. The rash emerges early in the morning; by evening he has a high fever, feels profoundly heavy, and sinks into a stupor. Despite attempts to treat him, he dies during the night. His wife and daughter witness his death but cannot approach or touch him because of the risk of contagion. Milalle covers his face and leads them away to rest, while Mana, the apprentice priest-doctor sent by Lona, introduces himself to the bereaved family and offers the presence of a healer.

At dawn the next day, the other Zolian patients break out in a rash. Medicine injected before the rash appears seems to delay their decline: they remain conscious until the following day. They then fall into comas in succession and die despite efforts to save them. By this stage, Utalu and Olimu are the only surviving Zolians among the patients, while none of the Aquafaese patients develops a rash. The apparent difference in outcomes becomes a source of fear and speculation, but it does not by itself establish that Aquafaese are immune.

Competing Explanations and Political Risk

The contrast between deaths and survival reaches the governor as a question about whether Aquafaese can die of the disease. Hohsalle responds cautiously: the illness has not been conclusively identified as black wolf fever, and it would be false to say that Aquafaese cannot die from it. The last recorded outbreak of black wolf fever was nearly 250 years earlier; although the present symptoms resemble the historical descriptions, resemblance is not proof of identity. Nor does the survival of the Aquafaese patients establish an ethnic rule. Izam’s symptoms, Hohsalle points out, were much more severe than those of Olimu, who is half Zolian; without Limuelle’s drastic intervention, Izam would probably have died.

Nevertheless, a religious and political interpretation is already spreading in Kazan. The claim that the returning disease is the Curse of Aquafa—divine retribution against those who violated the land—turns the patients’ uneven outcomes into supposed evidence of divine judgment. Tohma repeats the popular account that only Zolians and immigrants die, while people of Aquafa and Oki survive bites. He connects it to other stories: Olimu’s survival is attributed to his Aquafaese blood, whereas Utalu’s death is treated as meaningful because he had looked down on the local people. The salt mine deaths are folded into the same narrative: a place regarded as sacred to Aquafa was turned into a hellhole worked by enslaved people, and the attacking beasts are imagined as the Hounds of the Gods. These claims give separate events a powerful common explanation, but Hohsalle rejects the inference as unsupported.

Hohsalle also warns that the rumor can make the outbreak worse. If Aquafaese believe themselves immune, they may lower their guard around animals carrying the disease. Greater exposure, he fears, could allow the disease’s behavior to change. If it has the characteristics of black wolf fever, warmer weather and rising flea and tick populations could create a route for wider transmission through insects that have fed on infected people or animals. The immediate danger, in his view, is not that a curse has selected its victims, but that a false assurance of safety will encourage exposure while the means of spread remain uncertain.

Outbreak Evidence and Unresolved Transmission

Hohsalle’s concern about prevention sits alongside a practical obstacle: treatment is still experimental. He has taken blood from patients to improve medicines made with weakened disease agents, but because every patient received the new medicine, the doctors cannot tell whether any would have survived without it. The falconer bitten near the chin showed the most dramatic and fastest severe symptoms. Sulumina showed the greatest resistance, followed by Mazai and Olimu. Hohsalle wants to know what accounts for that difference, and whether it could guide prevention more reliably than rumors about ancestry.

A broader investigation complicates the idea of a single new outbreak beginning at the salt mine. A map assembled by Tomasolle and Cheehana shows scattered cases of mittsual-like symptoms across the former Kingdom of Aquafa, from the Yukata Plains in the south to the Oki forests in the north. The oldest report dates back eight years, and the accounts describe separate attacks by wolves or ossam, usually with only one or two people falling ill and no reported onward spread. The salt mine incident is therefore not the beginning of every recorded case, even though it had become the popular marker of the crisis.

That scattered pattern raises a further epidemiological puzzle. If the disease is not passed from person to person but infected wolves live in packs, Hohsalle reasons, more cases should have appeared near a pack after its first infected bite. Several years have also passed, enough for ticks and mosquitoes to multiply through multiple summers. Yet the recorded cases remain isolated across a broad territory. Cheehana suggests that host animals may move on before transmitting the disease to ticks, but that possibility does not explain how dogs and wolves across such a wide area became infected in the first place. Tomasolle notes that northern and southern wolves could not simply have mingled; spread from one neighboring pack to another is a possible natural route, but it leaves another mystery unresolved. The evidence thus supports neither a settled account of transmission nor the claim that the disease follows ethnic or divine lines.

Medical Doctrine and the Meaning of Cure

The outbreak unfolds against a longstanding conflict over medical authority. In the Pure Heart Creed, Zolian physicians are revered as the fingers of the god, and medicine is expected to follow divine teaching. When priest-doctors judge an illness incurable, the accepted practice is to leave the patient in the god’s hands and offer only medicines that ease a peaceful death. That principle has already been challenged by Otawalle medicine: Emperor Natalu summoned Limuelle and Hohsalle to treat his gravely ill wife despite opposition from advisers who considered their remedies heretical. The two cured her, but their success provoked a confrontation between the emperor and the association of priest-doctors.

During the Aquafa outbreak, the possibility of an effective weakened-agent medicine makes that older clash immediate. Hohsalle argues that Aquafaese patients who lack resistance can die too, but that improved medicine could save them. If Zolians refuse inoculation and cannot be treated, however, the disease could in practice become a plague that only Zolians fear. The implication unsettles the room: people might interpret those deaths as divine will, and the Zolians’ presence in the disease’s homeland as the cause of their own suffering, leaving the Aquafaese free of blame. The governor does not decide lightly, but ultimately permits Hohsalle to continue developing and improving the remedies.

The outbreak therefore leaves two questions open at once: how the disease travels, and how communities will act while they do not know. Hohsalle’s case rests on comparison—symptom timing, the distribution of cases, differences in severity, and the absence of expected clusters—not on certainty. Against that careful but incomplete inquiry, the Curse of Aquafa offers a simple story that can redirect fear toward Zolians and persuade Aquafaese to take fewer precautions. The epidemic’s danger is consequently biological and interpretive: an uncertain infection threatens lives, while a confident but unproven explanation threatens to determine whose lives are protected.