People are dying in the streets.
The disease- he refuses to call it the Plague as others do, he won't give it that kind of power- began as just another innocuous thing. Children developed coughs that quickly passed on to their parents, parents shook their heads and sighed, unhappy. Another bad flu season. Soon it seemed that everyone in the city had somehow contracted the inconvenient sickness. All went about their business without complaint, ignoring the colds. Of what consequence was a cough? Bah. Munich natives were made of sterner stuff than that.
The first to fall ill, the children, showed more serious symptoms first. They began to develop long running sores, a raw red against the increasing pallor of their skin, all the more apparent when the sores fouled from red to crusting black. Their gums bled. Lumps swelled at their throats, thick and rotting and hemorrhaging, always filled with black-tainted blood. A few went into seizures before death came to claim them, snapping their own spines with the force of the muscle contractions. Some bled from their mouths, noses, ears, corners of their eyes. Some went mad; some seemed fine but for the lesions and exhaustion, until they dropped dead in the street.
The houses were full of fever, and death rode his black horse through the city proper at his own will. No one worked. Fathers abandoned sick sons, priests would not give the last rites. No one would bury the dead. The rats grew fat on human suffering.
It was a perfect opportunity.
Dante had urged Hohenheim, an alchemist in his late thirties, on for some time. Long years spent in musty research, endless toil toward one end, one idea that humankind had been searching for since the beginning of time was about to be realized. Life, death and immeasurable power, all in the palm of your hand. Intoxicating. A fantasy-reality. The philosopher's stone.
She had been so helpful as to arrange the sacrifices beforehand. Men, women, children- all dying in the cages that lined the walls. Hohenheim could not meet their eyes. Even in near-death they were still all too human, too real. Mere days, hours left to live... Minutes. They were being used for something greater than themselves, the creation of perfection. Moving to the center of the array, Hohenheim raised his hands, closed his eyes; Dante stood at the room's edge with a few other observers. If he had looked closely, he would have seen a small, gloating smile on her face.
The reaction crackled in white-blood brilliance. Hohenheim was left with the stone, heart stopped and and afterimage of gates and black arms dancing before his eyes. The cages were empty. He crumpled to the floor, mind working in feverish fits and starts as his breathing stopped. There was nothing more frightening than not feeling your own heartbeat.
He woke later, surprised to wake at all.
Hohenheim did not recognize himself at first- body too slender, hair too dark, hands too wide. Dante came and explained what had happened. He listened in some bitter mixture of fascination and horror to the story of what she'd done, sent Christoph's soul winging away into the dark to make room for the one barely attached to his own dying body. He flexed his hands, feeling the movement of unfamiliar tendons pulling under the skin. There was a bit tension just at the base of his left thumb where Christoph had accidentally cut himself when he was barely nine.
Dante brought him a cup of tea, sat by his bedside and kissed the corner of his mouth. Hohenheim smiled as she held up a blood-red stone for him to see. Most definitely smaller than he remembered it being, but there. Dante leaned in and told him that she was sure now, and could tell him without fear of disappointment; She was pregnant.
Everything in the world was perfect.
Long years ran into decades, decades into centuries. Stones were created again and again, Dante and Hohenheim grew apart. He watched his perfect son die a slow, painful death by quicksilver. He watched Dante resurrect their angel-child into an inhuman, twisted thing with violet eyes and a thirst for other people's pain. He watched the world change.
Running red-violet-black sores creep across the borrowed body. Dying skin succumbs to necrosis and falls away, oozing pearls of black-tainted blood. It itches and burns as the nerve endings die, heat and sickly-sweet smell from infection, and then he feels nothing at all.
Hohenheim remembers the people who died for that first philosopher's stone, how their bodies were failing and human and oh so mortal, fever and pain cut short in one blissful explosion of white lighting-
They were the lucky ones, after all.