You wake in a strange room.

Your clothes are foreign and the walls are covered in objects from a different world.

You don't know where or when you are, or if you're still dreaming.

There are footsteps in the hall.

Jumping up, you race out of the room and into the streets.

You have just entered the Twilight Histories.

The Twilight Histories. You are about to explore the world of the black death.

In 1348, the plague arrived in Italy. It spread rapidly across Europe and was not stopped by land or sea.

When it was all over, as many as 60% of the inhabitants of Europe lay dead.

We sent a soldier ahead of you to explore this world.

She returned with tales of ghost towns and mass graves.

Fields were overgrown and sheep and goats wandered through the empty parish churches the soldier wandered

through manor houses and cottages where she found bodies decomposing in their beds

even the great cities were shells there were squatters living in palaces.

The markets were eerily silent.

It was as though the inhabitants of some happy golden age

were wiped out and replaced with a small, shell-shocked band of refugees

that haunted, wide-eyed beneath the marble edifices.

Perhaps worse than the sheer volume of death was the way the plague killed.

Our soldier described in graphic detail the buboes, swollen, pus-filled lymph nodes, which sprouted on the neck, groin,

armpits of its victims. Within mere days, the bubos split, not only outside the body, but also

internally, so that the victims became septic. Pain, fever, unquenchable thirst, stench,

...