First came the headache and shortness of breath, followed by an annoying dry cough and loss of appetite. Light and sound became painful, clothing chafed the skin. There was dizziness, sometimes double vision, always chills and fever. Even the strongest were unable to work or think or even stay on their feet; they took to their beds and tried what cures they knew, but nothing worked.

The cough became persistent but still nonproductive, meaning it did not free the throat or lungs of whatever was attacking them. As the lung tissue broke down, some coughed up blood. They were the lucky ones. Eventually their lungs would fill with fluid and they would slowly drown, spared the symptoms of the later stages.

Those whom the cough didn’t kill faced nausea, vomiting, agonizing joint pain, a rigidity in the muscles and the spine that made it impossible to bend, to turn the head. Contemporary physicians described some victims’ flesh as literally stiffening to the consistency of wood.

By now the fever was so high it boiled the brain; victims babbled and raved, had to be tied down to keep from harming themselves or others, assuming they had not been abandoned by those fearing the contagion themselves. Some died then, others when the lymph nodes in their necks enlarged so greatly that their throats closed and they strangled, all this within a day or two of the first symptoms. Those who survived beyond this faced the worst of all: the rash.

It wasn’t really a rash, but the pooling of blood beneath the skin, signifying that the capillaries were disintegrating, internal organs liquefying. By then the only hope was for death, and soon.

Worst of all was the solitude. The rudimentary clinics the settlers had been able to set up before the illness struck were soon filled to overflowing, with medical staff dying almost as quickly as their patients. Those stricken in their homes were abandoned there; no one wanted to risk contamination. Whole families were sometimes sealed up in their houses, the living along with the dying and the dead. Corpses were dumped in common graves until there was no one left with the strength to bury them; the last of the dead were heaped up and burned or left to the scavengers where they lay.

When it was over, one out of every two healthy adults had died. The incidence of death among infants, children, elders, and the sickly was never accurately measured. Later statisticians estimated that if fewer than one hundred more of the entire population had died, the Sundered would have gone extinct, lacking enough viable members to breed a new generation.

When it was over, it was referred to simply as the Gnawing, a demon which inhabited the body and consumed it from within. Those few who survived it passed like wraiths among the healthy, possessed of a hunger that could never be satisfied. No matter how much they ate, they never recovered the strength and muscle mass lost to the fight against the disease.

The etiology was eventually traced to a bacillus native to the soil of Romulus whose spores, like those of tetanus on Earth, could lie dormant, encapsulated, surviving extremes of temperature in the driest soils for a century or more, until activated. Had the simple act of turning over the soil to plant crops disturbed them? Or was it that combined with the amount of wind and rain that year, the temperature, the angle of the sun, the position of the planet in its orbit, evil spirits, the wrath of unknown, offended gods?

And once disturbed, infiltrating the lungs of the farmer in his field, absently rubbed into a minor cut on the hand of a clerk in the village, ingested by an infant crawling along the floor, how did it become contagious, passing from host to host?

Perhaps if they had studied this more closely, those early Romulans might not have suffered from the fear of the thing millennia later. But once the Gnawing was over and the last victim disposed of, a kind of societal amnesia took hold. No one took the trouble to develop a cure, much less a vaccine, no one followed up on the anecdotal realization that some very few of their number were immune, and could pass among the suffering without so much as a cough.

When, down the centuries, an occasional outbreak was reported in a rural area, usually among school-age children, antibiotics were administered, and no one died. Grateful for that, the average Romulan followed the news report and then moved on, unaware.

Unaware that the parent bacteria could under certain circumstances mutate into a virus. Unaware that that virus could mutate further and integrate itself into a survivor’s DNA. Unaware that that DNA had further mutated down the millennia so that some descendants were immune, carriers of something that might by now be benign, or not.

Some precautions were taken. Whenever new plots of land were cleared for farming they were first examined for the bacillus which, mysteriously, could no longer be found. Samples of the original organism were kept in stasis in medical facilities in the most secure locations, just in case. In case of what, no one dared say.

The Gnawing is not written in the children’s stories, but every child knows it as they know their own fingerprints, the color of their eyes, the caste they were born to. It isn’t just a matter of hearing it from the adults (“Eat up all your viinerine,there’s a good child; if you don’t eat, you won’t be strong, and you might catch the Gnawing”); it is simply known. It is in great measure what makes Romulans what they are.

Some Earth historians insist that the Renaissance in Europe could never have occurred without the Black Death to reduce the population ahead of it. No telling on how many other worlds something similar might be true.

Those who survived the Gnawing beheld the universe with a jaundiced view in more ways than one. The disease had atrophied the nictitating membrane which had protected their eyes from solar flares on Vulcan, and literally changed the way they looked at color. To the alien eye, Romulan cities seem gray, Romulan clothing drab. Among the genes the virus altered were those governing visual perception. Where a human or Cardassian might see gray, Romulans now saw many colors, which meant that bright colors often disturbed them. Only certain shades of red could soothe, not unexpected for a species whose blood was green.

As for the psychological impact of all of this, if the survivors were xenophobic, could they be blamed? Thereafter anything which approached from the outside might be construed as an attack. When there is no off-switch for the fight-or-flight mechanism, one becomes a Romulan.

Other species found them arrogant. Were they not entitled? Take a Vulcan’s intellect and send it into exile, alone in its own company for however long, set it down on a world entirely different than anything it has heretofore known. Allow it to barely establish itself on its new world, only to be all but buried alive in corpses. Task such a species with a sickness, seemingly out of nowhere, which kills every second person it touches, and you frighten it, humble it, grind its face in the dust. When the sickness passes, those who remain, the taste of dust in their mouths, the stench of death in their nostrils, will never be the same.

Now observe as these people burn their dead and shake off the ashes and establish a civilization, only to find themselves bracketed by the rapacity of Klingons on one side and the sloppiness that is humanity on the other, and dare call it arrogant? Or only Romulan?

“There are really only two kinds of Romulan, you know,” Pardek told Cretak once, in one of his frequent avuncular teaching moods. She was very young then, and one of his newest aides, eager to please him in whatever way she could. Pardek had been married seemingly forever even then, so it wasn’t a matter of that. He was one of those men who cherished power above all else, even wealth and sex. What he really needed was a pair of young, unspoiled ears to listen to him.