Eirwen the Still-Breathing

Eirwen the Still-Breathing was born Eirwen MacFior, a daughter of Daoine nobility—elegant, dutiful, and beloved within her walled town of Corramar. Her life unraveled in a single week, when the plague came howling through the gates like a curse. What began as fever became rot. Her family died. The temple bells tolled their last. And Eirwen, pale and coughing blood, was dragged with the rest of the dead to a communal grave, her shallow breath mistaken for death’s sigh. They buried her under clods of earth and lime.   But Eirwen did not die.   She woke in the pit, darkness pressing against her skin, lungs heavy with soil and phlegm. And she crawled—upward, through rot and bone, birthing herself from death’s mouth. When she staggered back into the town square, the survivors screamed. Her hair matted with grave dirt, her skin blotched with plague-bloom, and her eyes distant with something new—something ancient. They called her ghost, wight, revenant. But she was none of those. She was still breathing.   The sickness never left her. Her body remains fevered, her cough wet, her fingertips tinged with the pallor of the grave. Flowers wilt where she passes. Flies gather in her wake. She is contagious, but not cursed. She is a living contradiction—a carrier who cannot be claimed. In her solitude, she wandered into the wilds, and there she felt a deeper pull—not to life or death, but to decay. The forest whispered back. The fungus on her skin bloomed in answer. The Court of Blight, always listening, always hungering, sent dreams wrapped in spores. And she followed.   Now known as Eirwen the Still-Breathing, she walks as a Druid of the Circle of Pestilence, a vessel of rot and rebirth. She does not rage against death, nor seek to cure the plague within her. She honors it. She teaches that disease is a teacher, decay a cleanser. To those who fear her, she offers a choice: accept the beauty of rot, or be broken by it. To the Court of Blight, she is a living saint of sickness—a prophet wrapped in funeral silks and fungal bloom. And still, through it all, she breathes.