The Corabelli Curse

Once there was, and one day there will be. This is the beginning of every story.

Once, before the union of the Delienean kingdom, when the noble houses still battled for scraps of land, the White Plague came out of the cold north. It swept across the land, stealing away the aged and the weak, and when there were no more aged and no more weak, it took the young and the strong as well.

Fearing infection, those who could still walk fled from the north, but they brought the plague with them, and one by one, the lands of the south began to fall.

Only Corabel, the great walled city on a hill, was untouched. To protect his own citizenry, Lord Ortega Corabelli gave the order to close the gates, and behind his high stone walls, he waited for the White Plague to release its grip on the land.

As the seasons turned, citizens from Gorman, from Shinjai and Ken and Alissar swarmed to the city, but the king would not relent. Refugees died by the thousands, and their funeral pyres choked the sky with smoke.

One day, as the lord stood on the ramparts with his daughter Zunisa, an old woman called up to him, pleading with him to open the gates for the sake of her grandson—the only member of her family untouched by sickness.

The lord refused.

The woman spat in the dirt. “Then I lay a curse on you, Ortega Corabelli. I curse all who share your blood, and all who share their love. All will suffer for the coldness of your heart. Not until your family has been stripped of everything will the curse be broken. Not until you, like us, are bereft and begging for mercy.”

For six more months, the plague took life after life, and the rolling green hills around the city grew black with ash. It wasn’t until the rains receded and summer returned that Corabel finally opened its gates.

By then, tens of thousands of people had died.

In exchange for aid, Ortega Corabelli demanded allegiance from the other provinces and, faced with the choice to kneel or perish, the rest of the major houses agreed.

Thus, the kingdom of Deliene was formed: with black and white for its colors, and a curse upon the bloodline.

Not a month after he became king, Ortega Corabelli and his wife became the plague’s last victims.

The newly crowned Queen Zunisa tried to provide for the people her father had neglected. In honor of the dead, she ordered the plains to be planted with thousands of white poppies. She established medical schools to train healers and doctors, and set up hospitals for the sick.

But before her twin boys were ten years old, she died of consumption she’d contracted while visiting a sanatorium.

Again and again, members of the bloodline floundered and died: victims of murder and sickness and suicide. They died in childhood and childbirth, in fires and hunting accidents. Wives and husbands, childhood sweethearts, mistresses and kept men, all perished, for the love of a Corabelli could kill you.

In each generation, there was always someone who lived long enough to continue the Corabelli line, and their children, too, carried the curse.

Until at last there were only two: Lord Roco Diamar of Shinjai, whose parents were lost at sea, and Eduoar Corabelli II, who was called the Lonely King.