In 1494, King Charles VIII marched into Italy with an army.
He brought soldiers. Priests. Mercenaries. Merchants. Servants. Camp followers. Scavengers.
He also brought something else.
By 1495, Europe was recording one of its first great outbreaks of what would later be called syphilis. Nobody agreed what it was. The Italians blamed the French. The French blamed Naples. Others blamed sin, poisoned air, bad stars, or God having a particularly ugly morning.
They were all wrong.
The sickness spread through armies, inns, churches, bedsheets, trade roads, charity, confession, violence, and every human system that believed itself separate from the body.
At first, it did not need monsters.
People did the work themselves.
They gathered. They fled. They hid symptoms. They lied. They prayed. They opened doors.
Then the dead started listening.
1494-Z: Ledger #1 — The Great Pox is a brutal historical horror anthology set during a plague that should not exist. Each ledger entry follows ordinary people trapped inside the collapse: gravediggers, innkeepers, soldiers, clergy, villagers, and survivors forced to learn new rules before the old world finishes dying.
This is not the clean apocalypse.
This is mud, blood, fever, superstition, bad medicine, worse faith, and the first slow lesson of the dead.
Welcome to 1494-Z.
The zombie plague that wasn’t.
..
Each episode is a contained tragedy** with a different POV:
– A gravedigger and his daughter turning a cemetery into a fortress using the infected as weapons
– An innkeeper at a crossroads watching his tally board become a map of doom
– A bathhouse owner who believes he’s immune while his servant poisons him with the very water that’s killing everyone
– A ratcatcher who realizes rats are better epidemiologists than priests
– Cathedral workers drinking quicklime wine to survive deadly heights, then diving off the finished tower laughing
– An executioner whose ledger becomes the only honest record while he progresses from professional to monster
– Three nuns in a leper ward where mercy becomes the transmission vector
– A scribe copying letters until the infection makes him see the letter-writers as ghosts in his room
– A funeral guild arguing about what counts as death when corpses sit up during their own funerals
