Ignis Sacer

FIRST PUBLISHED

April 17, 2025

The Kingdom of Arles, 1217: A fire burns in the flesh of men.

Saint Anthony’s Fire, a disease that leaves its victims with rotting limbs, searing pustules and terrifying visions, burns throughout the kingdom. Estienne, a village surgeon distrusted for his radical practices, yearns to seek the truth behind this pestilence but is bound in service to the local monastery and its controlling abbot.

When a travelling jester’s hypnotic performance casts the village and monastery into disarray, the boundary between feverish hallucination and impossible reality becomes warped by forces beyond mortal understanding.

In the wake of this chaos, Estienne is faced with a choice: persist in service of a poisonous doctrine or risk exile, insanity and death to seek the man who took everything from him, a village girl in search of greater purpose, and a truth more terrible than any of them can comprehend.