"That was awesome!" Autumn exclaimed, "you looked so cool! What'd you even do to that thing?"

Victoria was sitting on her bed, eyes closed with her back and head against the wall behind it. She winced at Autumn's volume, "I severed its connection to the thing controlling it."

"Golem's don't have minds of their own," Titus added, glancing at Victoria in case she corrected his hazy memories of that one class he'd taken in college about magical constructs, "they're held together and controlled by an outside source. If they lose their connection to that source, they crumble."

"Do we need to worry about it getting back up?" Eli asked, "or another one showing up?"

"Maybe," Victoria said, still in visible pain from her overexertion of mana, "golems take a long time to form, so we don't have to worry about that one coming back any time soon, but there could be more out there."

"What about the thing controlling it?" Eli asked, "what are we dealing with, exactly?"

"I don't know," Victoria replied, "something strong, but distant, based on the aura. That's what I was sensing in the walking corpse, not a person but-- I don't know, maybe people? I'm still making sense of it. Whatever it is, it's definitely related to the strange auras in the soil."

Eli nodded, then looked to Titus, "how's Iris doing?"

"I'm alright," Iris mumbled from her bed across the room. She was huddled up in her blankets and shivering slightly.

"She's not alright," Titus corrected, "she's sick. Very sick."

"Can you help her?" Eli asked.

"If we had a healing potion, maybe. But my specialty is injuries, not illnesses. I can probably keep her alive if it comes to it, but she needs medicine."

"Probably?" Eli asked with concern.

"Yeah, probably," Titus said gravely.

Victoria rocked her head forward, cracked open her eyes and activated her auravision. The act sent pain shooting through her veins, which had been thoroughly burned by her exorbitant expense of mana to banish the golem. She held the vision as long as she could, looking across the room at Iris with as much focus as she could muster so soon after complete mana exhaustion.

"Medicine won't help," she grunted as she relaxed her eyes and dropped her head back against the wall, "it's the soil."

"What do you mean?" Eli asked hurriedly.

"Best guess? She's been cursed, and whatever happened to those poor loggers outside is happening to her."

"What about me?" Autumn said, "I got thrown in the dirt just as much as she did, and I'm fine."

"You're a lot higher level," Titus explained, "I wouldn't be so sure you're not cursed, too. You might just handling it better because of your rank."

Autumn's face had already been full of worry at the sight of her sick friend, but a distinctly new layer of uncertain fear filled her eyes.

"I'll call Glimmer and fly Iris back to the city," Eli said decidedly, "I'll find someone there who can help her, and bring them back for Autumn."

"We shouldn't take the risk," Victoria said, "we don't know what we're dealing with, and curses can be contagious. Going back to the city now could cause an outbreak."

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"Then I'll go find someone and bring them back," Eli insisted.

Titus shook his head, "for we all know, we could all be infected."

"What do we do, then?" Eli's voice rose an octave, "you sound like you're advocating for letting her die!"

"Of course not," Titus hissed quietly, throwing a glance towards Iris, "we don't even know if it'll get that bad. Until we know more, let's not convince our patient she's going to die."

"I'll make soup," Autumn suggested, earning confused looks from the others, "it might not cure her, but I know a few of the plants I've seen growing around here. Some of them help fight off colds, maybe they'll help with this."

"No one's going outside until sunrise," Eli declared, "but you can get on that first thing in the morning. We need a better plan than just that, though."

"We need to find the source of all this," Victoria said, "if I'm right that it's a curse, killing the thing that cast it should clear it up, as long as we get it done before she's too far gone."

"Then we get to work tracking it down tomorrow," Eli said, "we find it, kill it, and get the hell out of here."

Only Victoria and Iris slept through the rest of the night. Titus stayed awake to monitor Iris while Eli spent much of the night anxiously pacing up and down the rows of beds. Autumn nodded off for short naps here and there, but mostly she stood guard in front of windows to watch for signs of danger. When the sky began to lighten with the gracious glow of the rising sun, Titus and Autumn went out to forage plants for the soup while Eli and Victoria stayed back to watch Iris.

"I'm fine, really," Iris said, pushing herself up in the bed to lean against the wall, "it's just a bad cold."

"A few hours ago you were healthy," Eli said, "now you can't stop shivering. You're not fine."

"I can see it in your aura now," Victoria said, "you're definitely cursed."

Iris let out a pitiful laugh, "cursed, great. Now I'm really living the adventurer experience."

Autumn returned a short while later with the herbs she needed for the medicinal soup, and the party moved as group from the barracks to the mess hall. Titus insisted that he could carry Iris if needed, but she insisted in turn that she could walk on her own. After stumbling through her first few steps out the door, they settled for a compromise of her leaning on his arm for support as they walked.

Autumn prepared the soup in the ransacked kitchen, salvaging what little clean cookware she could find and complaining about the conditions the whole way through. She made enough soup for everyone, ensuring the others that medicinal or not, it would still be a good breakfast even for healthy adventurers. Iris slowly regained the color in her skin as she ate, and soon the shivering stopped as well. Dark bags still hung below her eyes, however, and her hands still trembled slightly as she lifted her spoon. A short while after eating she was able to walk steadily, and insisted she would go with the others to track down the source of all the weirdness.

The party left camp to the east, this time stowing their packs in Iris's bag to travel light in case they had to fight. They followed the path of destruction the loggers had cut through the fledgling forest. They found few clues as they weaved their way through the stumps that dotted the ground, only a few discarded tools and some scraps of clothing. After walking for nearly a mile, they came upon a stump unlike any of the others. As opposed to the young trees of the new growth forest, this one was easily the width of a mature redwood trunk that would be found elsewhere in the region. The bark was singed black, and rather than a clean cut like the others, the upper ridges were lumpy and uneven. As they approached, the discovered the inside of the stump was hollow, and inside it a vertical tunnel just wide enough for a person to squeeze through dug down into the rich black soil.

"This must be a remnant of the old forest," Eli guessed.

"Where are the roots?" Iris asked, looking around at the relatively flat ground that lacked any of the large, bulging roots of the old growth forest.

Victoria crouched beside the trunk and activated her aura vision, "there's handprints here. They're hard to see against the blackened bark, but they're marked in soil." Her eyes followed the bark down to the dirt, then the veins around her eyes shifted as she panned her gaze across the ground, "the roots are underground, most of the remaining trunk has been buried."

"Should we," Autumn hesitated as she peered over the edge of the stump into the tunnel, "go inside?"

"Not here," Victoria shook her head, "I have a feeling what we're looking for is going to be underground, but this isn't the spot. I've found a trail to follow, though. This tree's not quite dead, and an aura that matches the golem is running through the roots. I think we'll find what we're looking for if we follow it."

"Sounds like a plan," Eli said, "Autumn, plug this up."

Autumn nodded and looked around until she found an appropriately sized boulder. She hoisted it over her head and marched it over the burnt out stump, where she dropped it into the opening to the tunnel. Not satisfied, she climbed onto the edge of the stump -- prompting Titus to stand behind her with arms raised to catch her if she started to fall in -- and molded the boulder into a mostly flat plate of stone that spanned from wall to wall of the hollow stump.