The Exorcist Doctor

Year 86, Month Locust, Day Thirteen,

Tonight, he went hunting again.

The storm hasn't ceased in a week. The bells in the Ossuary District were still bickering with the thunder when word reached my desk again: another den emptied; another floor sluiced clean by stormwater and blood; another set of doors left yawning to the street like teeth knocked out of a jaw.

I will not use his name, because he has none.

To summarize for my own peace before dawn: eight nights past, at the Black Chalice Bar, forty-two Repossessors met their conclusion beside a shattered dome of glass. I went, of course, with my notebook wrapped in sailcloth and my pen pinned like a dagger to my sleeve. The storm carved the alleys thin; even the Rot Merchant enforcers wouldn't walk me in.

But I found the place by smell. I found the surviving barkeep, and he told me what he saw: that the man arrived without footsteps, and that he smiled through a beak and toasted the dead with a drink that, by all rights, should've killed him. The barkeep said Finger Tobias of the Repossessors was unmade, piece by piece, until the floor washed him away.

I wrote the number forty-two and underlined it twice. I wrote "eviscerated." There aren't enough words to cover the many kinds of absence the human body can be forced to wear, but I try my best.

Since that night, the pattern has held. Each evening after, a Repossessor base darkened. Each evening after, screams untied. Some nights he has slipped through a back door; on others, witnesses speak in tremors of a lonely raven striding the middle of a street as if the storm had agreed to step out of his way. When the watchers spot the canister riding his back—glossy as a beetle, heavy as a sin—the district wardens blow whistles until their lips bleed. Civilians are rushed out through alley mouths and pipe grates; shutters drop; prayers pockmark the air.

Where he goes, the plague follows. That is not hyperbole. That is the machine on his spine—that is the whisper that sets the ward to running.

He has never been found after the slaughters. The enforcers chase shadows until they become shadows themselves. The Repossessors spill into byways with pistols and prosthetics and come up with rain in their mouths. "He is beneath us," one of them spat (not to me, but to a friend outside a dice den; I was the rat under the table catching crumbs of rumor). "He's using the Gulch Pipelines," another one of them told me.That is the popular theory. His vanishing act is made mundane by tunnels. It has its elegance, I admit, but the Gulch is a maze with a memory like rot. It shifts, it forgets, and it eats its own dead. Unless he carries a map as precise as a surgeon's hand, stitched with a thousand local corrections, the notion strains credulity.

And yet here we are, and I am not sure what strains more: the notion, or the city.

As for the shape of him, it grows a little with each mouth that tells it. There is consensus on some points. They say he wears a voracious devil-flower grafted to his right arm. In his left hand he wields a blade that catches no light as if it despises being looked at—silver, some swear, because it hissed when it bit armored bone. They say he clicks his heels and brittle things surrender: window, goblet, chandelier, and lantern glass all at once, a crystal storm. They say that when he chooses, an army of tiny metal ravens explodes from the cage on his back and knifes the air into ribbons. "Little devils," one boy told me with a shiver. "They sing," he said, and ducked as if remembering the sound. They say his eyes glow in the dark. They say he fights like a demon because no other word remains when a man threads himself through a hail of bullets and comes out the other side laughing.

They say there are three real ravens, too. They arrive before each slaughter and chatter to him like familiars. One old woman laid a trembling hand on my sleeve by the stairwell and swore she heard his half of the conversation: a doctor's bedside tone answering caws, as if receiving a report from three night clerks who have never once fallen asleep on the job.

But he leaves nobody alive.

That part repeats in every mouth, even the ones that love to embroider. "No one. No one. Not a noise left," said a locksmith whose shop stands two doors down from a now quiet tenement. Men, women, children peering through shutters report hearing—at least once, often more—the same sentence flung against the dark like a rock into a well: "Where is my wife?". He asks it, and then the asking stops and the killing goes on.

And the dead: oh, I put my boots in their water and my gloves in their ash. I visited three sites where the rain had not yet completed the work the killer began.

At Smudge Court, the bodies wore burns, the kind that eat in rather than up, chemical halos spreading over skin as if a sun had burst under the epidermis. At the Southbone Depot, a row of men lay neatly as books put down at once, their mouths blue with toxin. I would've called it poison, but poison has degrees and these faces had none left. In a warehouse at Hook Gate, I saw what I had hoped never to see again: a staircase painted with slashes. Someone generous with his cuts had worked there, and the floor had become a lesson in anatomy. Elsewhere there were bones broken into arrangements that joints cannot understand; necks turned past their muttered limits. I will not make the list longer. I cannot make myself more tired.

Suffice it to say the catalogue matches the hand I'm trained to recognize. In the provinces we have songs about the Black Physicians, but the ones who study in our city hate their rhymes. They do not sing, after all, yet this is their range: corrosive, venom, gas, blade, lever, and gear. This is their method.

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So here and now, I will lay my pen against the nerve and press.

He is not a revenant. Make no mistake. What walks Blightmarch is a Demonic Plagueplain Doctor. The adjective is the cathedral's. The noun is ours. "Demonic," to them, means a surgeon who has mislaid his conscience; to us, it means the last person you wish to be the first at your door when your daughter coughs up glass.

… How exciting!

A Plagueplain Doctor in Blightmarch at long last!

Oh, but this one is unnamed. I scoured our mortuary ledgers and the back pages of seven years of broadsheets—crossed references until my eyes burned—but I couldn't find him. No title recorded, no public censures, no sanctions, and no previous charges of atrocity. That is truly peculiar for a Plagueplain Doctor. Most collect notoriety like burrs—an infamy here, a rumor there—because their work guarantees witnesses, if not gratitude. He has none.

Which means… these recent strings of rampages are his official debut as a Plagueplain Doctor

How thrilling this evening has become! My quill scratches with a vigor it hasn't felt in years, for I am almost certain I will be the first to record his debut. To think, a nameless Plagueplain Doctor carving his name into our streets not with ink, but with entrails and thunder. Who better to christen him in print than I, the Great Spinneret of Bharncair?

But the difficulty, dear candle, lies in the christening itself. All Doctors bear a title. Their prefixes are their legends, etched into public memory with each rumor and repetition. We have the Grimatrix Doctor, the Righteous Doctor, the Armament Doctor, and now, this new one walks among us untitled. Untamed. My ink trembles with the responsibility of naming, for whatever I name him will surely stick for at least the next few months to come.

I resolved to collect more rumor, more flesh for the skeleton of my draft. So I did what one must: I left my desk and waded deeper into the rain.

At a noodle shop whose broth smells of bone and solace, I found a woman with wrists chapped from ladling soup. She swore to me, between hurried servings, that this Doctor has a clinic in the south tucked behind a stand of crooked forest. The assassins who tried to hurt the clinic told me it is guarded by three-headed hellhounds, trees that sway with their own will, and men of the night wrapped in bandages from head to toe.

Next, I found Repossessors who'd deserted their oath of blood. They looked like broken dogs, but they spoke eagerly when ale loosened their jaws. At the darkest folds of night, they said, and at the earliest blush of dawn, one may glimpse a local legend called 'The Flighty': a gargoyle perched on the roof of the clinic that'd dart across the roofs, wings in its bones, laughter in its throat. Their hands shook when they described it, but whether in terror or reverence, I couldn't decide. I thought to myself, 'maybe this clinic is just as terrifying as this Doctor is'.

But then I gained an audience with an old baron, and he told me, with a fond smile cradled in his beard, that this so-called demon keeps a house of calm. "A cool and refreshing place," he crooned, as if describing a wine. He spoke of fresh Gulch water, drawn clean and safe. He spoke of aero-resonant stones humming with lullabies through the halls. He spoke of a prayer chamber where a crooked statue of Saintess Severin stands, imperfect but beloved.

What a contradiction this Doctor becomes. A storm in the streets, a sanctuary in the south.

The neighborhood folk themselves corroborated the baron. They said if your body broke, the receptionist at the front—bright eyes behind her glasses, smiling more often in recent months—would receive you kindly. She would set you down before the Doctor, who was frightening in aspect, yes, but always careful, always kind. They said no injury was turned away, no illness left untreated, and each patient departed with a flower-cord bracelet tied about the wrist, fragrant and soft.

Most startling of all was their final confession: they say if a man was parasitized by a Myrmur, he need not fear the Exorcists or the Enforcers or any blade of execution. No, he could walk into that crooked clinic, trembling, and leave with the parasite removed.

…

Do you feel that, dear candle? The thunder inside those words? I swear the wax quivers at the thought.

But tragedy sings its counterpoint. For all their fond recollections, the folk sighed heavily when they spoke of the present. The receptionist is gone. More than one man, eyes clouded with want, confessed he would go back only to see her smile again. It was not medicine that drew them, but that expression: rare, warming, and healing in ways no tincture could ever match. The Doctor must have left to find her, too

Wait

I hear something

Ah, but listen, I must cut this short. Even as my pen races, I hear shouting and the hiss of powder from the next street over. Gunshots bark like wolves, and the storm bellows back. Another rampage is unfolding. My ink must follow my boots, for what writer worth her salt lets such theater go unrecorded?

Still, I weigh the question that has nagged me since the first whisper: what to call him. All Doctors carry their prefix as their crown and curse. Shall I gift him one?

At first, my quill trembled at the sheer audacity. But then I remember every witness, every shivering mouth, and they all spoke the same refrain: this Plagueplain Doctor, unlike every other, never fights alone. His wife is always beside him, they insist. A woman of light—a Symbiote Exorcist—-who joins him in his scalpel-sorcery in defiance of the Myrmurs plaguing this city.

If his wife is an Exorcist, and he is a Doctor…

…

Ah-hah!

I've got it!

On this black day, I shall call him—

— Written by Sora Fabre