Fever has a strange way of peeling back the layers of a man's dignity. For Philia, currently swaddled in blankets that felt like they were woven from iron wool, the sensation was utterly foreign. When was the last time he'd been reduced to this? This… shivering, pathetic mess? He let his thoughts drift back, past the grand altars and the silk-lined carriages of the Capital, to a time he'd tried to burn from his memory. The orphanage. He remembered the damp smell of stone and the way the sickness would crawl through the dormitories like a monster, claiming the weak.
"Ugh," he groaned, the sound catching in a throat that felt like it had been scraped with glass.
