Imagine it.
The year is 1348. You live in a small, dirty hut crushed against your neighbor's. You cannot read, and you cannot write, and your father is the only one among you all with history of schooling.
The idea of Knighthood has died with the years, chivalry along with it. Fathers abandoned their children, husbands their wives, at the first sight of Plague. Your neighbors drop like flies, and every day you look outside, to bodies littering the dirt roads and children being thrown from their homes, monstrous black sores visible on their necks.
You can see, at times, homes being blocked shut, the screams of occupants still caught inside reaching your ears like the highest of whistles. Your relatives won't see you, won't speak to you, fearing your dead siblings disease. Your mother is ill, with dark tumors spotting her armpit. Her skin is pale, at times yellow, and she drools blood.
The Hundred Year War still pushes onward, throughout Europe, even as soldiers drop to the ground in heaps. You hear rumors of cannibalism among the armies, though you cannot be sure. You are young, and few bother with you at all.
You are often left to your own devices as your parents tend to your younger siblings. You wander the streets.
They have run out of burial space, and have resorted to digging mass graves and piling diseased bodies atop one another. You hear talk of more dead then living, and soon their will not be enough left to dig the holes.
The skies seem to be in a constant tinge of grey, downcast on all of Europe. A generous hand is hard to come by, and even the priests have run for clear water. Church leaders will not hear final confessions, and will not bless the dying. Thieves pillage the abandoned homes of the deceased, at times stealing from the ill.
Morals have left these grounds, leaving only a grim dread to hang onto everyone's clothing like a bad smell. Why bother with pleasantries, it seems, when you will probably be dead tomorrow?
Picture it.
This death has plagued the streets since you were small, and it is all you know. You often wonder how you have survived--who has spared you? You see your neighbors and your family writhe in agony in the lonesome dirt, surrounded by bleak and lawless conditions, left to die in their own darkness. This curse has over looked you.
You think about heroes, of knights with armor glinting off a sun you cannot remember seeing. You think of services, of the beautiful glass windows with bright colors and images smiling down at the peace that is not there. You have not seen them, since your father has banned you from the church. The sick are being tended, he says, and the curse could linger even at the steps.
Live it.
Curious, you want to ask why you are allowed near your mother, or allowed to assist the gravediggers in burying your siblings. You don't, however. You cannot find a point.
The one thing – the single thing – you take solace in is the thought of your immunity. You have lived your life with this death, and it has overlooked you – it is what makes you exceptional. Special. No black sores break the youthful purity of your face, leaving you with the power to do what others cannot. And you have only one choice to make.
Who will save them?