Revelation (1)

Across Midland, countless people share the same recurring dream: a realm destroyed by plague and by enemy soldiers mounted on giant monsters, its towns torn apart by quakes and floods, the sun blotted out by smoke and the night stripped of moon and stars. Amid the corpses and the dark, the dreamers catch sight of a glowing white falcon, an emblem of hope and their deepest longing.

Reality mirrors the vision. Laban rides Midland's western reaches past a fleeing populace, the land stripped bare of timber and stone during the Hundred-Year War. A landslide buries a road; he wades into the mud himself to pull out survivors, among them a plague-stricken child near death. After loading the rescued into wagons, he rides alone into a deserted town and finds a chapel heaped with plague victims, where an old man scatters the giant rats he blames for spreading the sickness.

Wandering the empty streets, Laban weighs whether the plague and the famine are the war's harvest, and recalls how the King poured Midland's strength into a two-year hunt for Griffith rather than rebuilding. He pictures the King's face, aged into madness, and wonders what truly happened two years ago, then concludes that to Midland's people the one true falcon is Griffith, just as his adjutant reports the King has died of illness. Behind him in the plaza, swarming rats arrange themselves into the face of Conrad of the God Hand, who briefly surfaces, spits out spirits, and dissolves as the rats scatter.

A shared dream of a fallen kingdom and a glowing white falcon spreads across all of Midland. Laban rides the ravaged land and personally rescues plague survivors from a landslide, discovering a dying, infected child. He finds a nearby town emptied by plague and overrun by rats. He realizes the falcon in the dreams represents Griffith. Word arrives that the King has died, and in the plaza rats form the face of Conrad of the God Hand.

This chapter opens the Birth Ceremony Chapter of the Conviction Arc and ran in Young Animal issue 17 in 1998. It introduces the Falcon of Light motif tied to Griffith and quietly places Conrad of the God Hand at the heart of the spreading plague, seeding the arc's supernatural catastrophe.