#Chapter 222: Declaration

Ava I stayed up late every night for days after that, my eyes burning as I pored over medical textbooks and ancient manuscripts. The stack of books on my kitchen table grew taller with each passing day, but no matter how many pages I turned, I couldn’t find anything helpful. “There has to be something,” I muttered to myself, rubbing my tired eyes. “Some remedy, some cure... anything.” But the black fungus spreading through our dear friend’s lungs remained a mystery thanks to the undocumented nature of the damn stuff. No homeopathic remedy I found seemed even remotely applicable. No medical texts ever even mentioned the blight. The only thing I could find was a single passage from some old medical journal that was talking about the effects of poisonous mushrooms on the lungs, but it didn’t at all apply to the black fungus in Leonard’s chest. I slammed another useless book shut, a plume of dust spraying up as I did. A curse ripped from my lips, and I shoved