And on the third day... [Solo]

It all began in Sweden.

Coming off of an unproductive excursion to Murray manor, Andrei Kessler—as he so often did—buried himself in his work and soon found himself on a plane with two others to the Nordic country. Everything seemed to be going smoothly; he dismantled the complex wards around Sigard’s tomb, Quinn vaporized a few wayward shamblemen, and Jian, well, he just stayed out of the way and took notes on even the most mundane details of the trip. Yes, even by Andrei’s pessimistic reckoning, it seemed as if they’d be back in Stockholm by nightfall.

In reality, the trio would not see the open sky above their heads until early the next morning. Jian, the reporter from Wizard Weekly, took too keen an interest in the preserved corpse of Sigard and inadvertently set off a whole array of runic traps locking down the entrance of the tomb when he tried to get a closer look at the runes tattooed on the dead king’s chest. Thankfully, unlike a certain South American expedition, the trap itself only served to hinder the group’s progress, not threaten their lives in any immediate way. After all, darkness was nothing to a group of wizards who could summon fire and lightning at the flick of a wrist.

Left to work by the light of Quinn’s wand, Andrei—silently cursing Jian’s ineptitude—deciphered the runic array his companion had triggered. It wasn’t anything too difficult to break, but it took time and concentration. Luckily, being trapped in a Scandinavian tomb gave the aging man plenty of time to work with, so he began the long string of incantations needed to unravel the messy rune work of the ancients.

A few hours and a sore throat later, the Hogwarts professor and his companions once more breathed the fresh winter air. Fortunately, at least in Andrei’s opinion, the next couple days were not nearly as exciting as the first. Coordinating with Swedish authorities, he cataloged the tomb’s contents and did one last sweep for traps before getting paid and heading on his way. All that remained to be done was write up a paper on the tomb, publish it, and chalk up his adventure in Sweden as one of the more unremarkable archeological finds in his career right behind the Murray manor hoax.  

And indeed, it would have remained perfectly unremarkable had the professor not developed a cough upon returning to his London home. One moment he was cooking dinner and the next his throat tightened up causing him to cough and wheeze like a newborn child. Not unused to sickness, he brushed off the fleeting fit until after dinner when it began again. This time, as he coughed, his whole body began to ache as if he had not had water in days. The last thing he heard as he fell to the ground was the shriek of his wife, his beloved Marie.

Everything went black.

Six months later he woke up in a hospital bed with his tearful family around him. Through the torrent of tears, laughs, and kisses, he learned he had barely survived his run-in with what wizarding archeologists called ‘Tomb Sickness’. Found in one in every hundred wizarding burial sites, not much is known about tomb sickness save for the awful effects it had on the human body. Somehow infused with the magical energy of a dead witch or wizard, the pestilence quite literally worked to mummify its victims from the inside out—he had contracted it while performing his long-winded incantation in Sigard’s tomb.

Andrei was lucky, or so his nurse told him. He’d lost what little muscle mass he once had, his voice was reduced to a low rasp, and his whole body ached, but he was lucky. Little did he know the real fight had yet to begin. The road to recovery was long, full of potholes, dead ends, and nearly insurmountable peaks.

Each day went much the same way. He woke up, ate some horrible hospital gruel of questionable origin, read for a while, and then went to physical therapy. The first month or so he needed help getting out of bed and the therapy consisted of him often falling to ground in a quivering heap. However, day-by-day he became stronger and stronger until he no longer needed help. In the evenings he read the day’s news and tried his best to respond to the letters of well-wishers. Adelaide Goshawk, in particular, had a bad habit of writing sharply worded letters every week, if he didn’t know any better the older man would have thought the headmistress was worried about him.

It took another eight months before the runes professor was released from St. Mungos. He still needed a cane to walk, often found himself racked by coughing fits, and had to drink a vile tasting potion every other day, but it was better than becoming another cold corpse in the ground. In his last days of freedom from paperwork and students, Andrei Kessler spent time with his wife. They talked, walked, and giggled like new lovers.  There is nothing like a good old fashion near-death experience to make the heart grow fonder, go figure.

Man, it felt good to be alive.