“Purify the headwaters!” echoed in his mind with the same cold, tormented voice as always, startling Paulus awake. He recalled everything else she said, too, of course. It almost never changed. So, it would have been impossible to forget, but none of her other strangled ravings that she made while gripping the bars of her steel cage burned right through him as much as that impossible command. The darkness? The dead? Even the moment when she told him to flee to land before the dragon overpowered her once more hadn’t mattered nearly as much as those three simple words.
He pulled himself into a ball, huddling his legs against his chest under the thin blankets as he shivered in the chilly predawn darkness. The reaction was more from fear than the cold, but it comforted him just the same. The winter had stopped his search for months, but with the spring flood, he’d returned to the Wodenspine Mountains, even though the cold still lingered there. His patched clothes and thin blankets might do little to warm him, but his urgency kept him from freezing each night. He would find the poison the Goddess spoke of because he must. There was no other option.
Why would he do anything else? In the villages where he’d labored for little more than food and place in the barn, all that awaited him were the nightmares as he recalled that awful night. At least when he was out here searching, he felt like he was outrunning the terrible Goddess that had issued him this burning command. That was doubly true on the days like today when he felt certain he was getting close. It didn’t matter to him that he’d felt that way for almost a week now. It seemed like the higher he rose following this stream, the cleaner his soul became. It was like he was slowly but surely rising above the world’s corruption with every step.
There was real relief in the search, and he secretly believed that if he succeeded, he could finally be free of the dead eyes that haunted him. On the days he couldn’t search as she’d ordered him, though, all he could do was relive that terrible night as his mind connected dot after dot in an endless and expanding web of evil. It always started sensibly enough - with the priestess and the Count. However, if he obsessed on it long enough, he could inevitably connect everyone from the fishmonger to his mother in a plan that was too vast for anyone to understand. Anyone but him, of course. He might no longer have the spies or the purse of a true spymaster, but his mind was sharp, and his notes were expansive. No one could take either from him, no matter how far he fell.
Even now that he was free of both the city of evil Fallravea and the cursed county of Greshen, he still imagined that the conspiracies he’d started to uncover followed him. He could never stay with a family more than a week or two now. Even when he was with good god-fearing people that rewarded him with extra portions when he worked until his hands bled, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the washerwoman was watching him. He didn’t know who she was reporting back to, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to if they were strong enough to enslave a river goddess and poison a whole river.
A thin strip of light clung to the horizon, but he would need more than that before he could build himself a fire. Still, he stared at it like a ward against evil until the sun finally peeked above the earth, dispelling most of the shadows on the high slope. This gave him the light he would need to decide which of his pages he could steal an inch of paper from so that he could shred it to kindling.
His overstuffed journal was all he still had after his year spent fruitlessly searching for the source of the taint she’d spoken of. He’d explored four tributaries and three watersheds but found nothing definitive. All he’d accomplished in that time was wearing out the soles of his boots and filling the last of his clean pages with detailed maps of places that few people had ever been to and no one but shepherds cared about. He no longer had the paper to document this latest trip, but that was okay. He could no longer afford ink either.
“Soon,” he told himself. “Any day now, and you’ll be done with this. Then you can finally rest.” He still had caches in the city. When he was done looking for the source of the sickness, and the river was pure and clean, he could finally return to Fallravea and retrieve them. Then he’d return to the village of Bellmor and disappear; of all the places he’d been on this insane quest, it had been the most picturesque. He could see himself retiring there under a different name as a trader or bookseller while he waited for the world to forget he’d ever been born.
None of that mattered right now, though. All that mattered was which pages he could tear a bit of paper from. Even though he didn’t need the book to remember, Paulus still treated it with a reverence that was more appropriate to a holy text than a scribbled notebook. He tore the thinnest strip he could stand to part with from the side of a sketch that showed the imprisoned Goddess. He then shredded that, using it to catch the sparks from his flint.
A minute later, he was feeding twigs to the tiny flame and trying to put the image of the Goddess trapped inside that giant corpse out of his mind. To him, that image always looked like the strange decaying dragon she was chained to had swallowed her, but something like that obviously didn’t eat. Its giant maw full of rusting steel teeth was only for murder.
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Paulus only stayed by the warmth of his fire until the sun was entirely above the horizon. By then, his feet and brain both itched too much to sit still, and he set off for further up the mountain. It didn’t matter to him that his feet were bare or that his few remaining possessions were stuffed into a satchel made of his best blanket. All that mattered was the destination, and like yesterday and the day before, he was certain that today would be the day.
Once he started walking, he didn’t stop except to eat old snow that he found in the shadows of trees and boulders. That was one of the reasons he was so sure that this stream was the tainted one: drinking from it made him violently ill. It was a technique he wished he would have figured out sooner, but it had eluded him on his quest until recently. This time he was sure. This was the tainted water, and he would follow it to its source.
Still, once it warmed up, the day was lovely, and other than the occasional cloud of gnats, it was as close to paradise as he’d ever known. From this high, he felt like he could see all the way to Dutton, and though he didn’t let himself stop to appreciate the view, he frequently glanced over his shoulder at it.
Paulus continued like that until he reached a fork in the road a little before noon as the stream split into two. This time he didn’t even need to taste it to know which of the two was tainted. He could smell it. The large flow to the left might look as crystal clear as the smaller stream to his right, but it had a faint whiff of death that only got stronger as he went further up the slope.
He knew he’d found the source of the poison half an hour before he finally set eyes on the cursed pool. It was easy to see because everything in the area was dead. The trees were brown, the birds were silent, and animal life was entirely absent. As soon as he set eyes on the pool, he understood why. In the middle of this glen sat a small spring-fed pool. Instead of being the crystal clear artisanal spring that he’d seen half a dozen times before, though, it was a bubbling pool of murky green that made his eyes water to approach.
He’d heard that there were smoking mountains across the sea that burned at night and stank of sulfur, but even this strange mockery of nature was as close as Paulus ever hoped to get to seeing one. As he stood on the bank, afraid to touch the water, he looked into the shallow pool and saw something bubbling and fizzing at the bottom. It was a large metal object that was too flimsy to be called a grate. It looked like a buckler of thin woven metal, which was full of holes. That made no sense, of course, because the thing couldn’t stop a single blow. Regardless of what it was, though, it was the only thing that didn’t belong, which meant that it was definitely the source of the problem.
After studying it for as long as he could bear, he decided there was no way he was reaching in there to grab that thing. Instead, he went off in search of fresh air and a long enough branch to fish the object out. The dead trees scattered throughout the glen had plenty of branches to offer. That wasn’t the hard part. The hard part came when he tried to use them to pull the thing out. They started falling apart on contact with the water and had fully dissolved in only twenty or thirty seconds. Paulus was incredibly thankful that he hadn’t just waded in there to retrieve the object and instead went off to find another branch.
After four branches, he was finally able to drag it near enough to the edge that he could reach in to pull the thing out with the tip of his short sword. Once it was firmly pierced, he pulled it out and carried it very carefully to the nearest rocky slope, where he placed it on a small boulder to inspect the oddity. From the damage he’d done to it just by poking it with sticks, it very clearly wasn’t meant to be armor. He wanted to bring it down the mountain to deliver it to the church so they could deal with the cursed thing themselves, but one look at his sword showed that to be an impossible task.
His blade had been made of fine steel, and until today it had been pristine, but now it was pitted in places and spotted with corrosion. Everywhere it had touched the strange shield, it was falling apart.
“What in the hells am I supposed to do now?” Paulus asked the empty valley as he set his sword down to dry. There was no way he was putting it back in its sheath until it was dry as a bone.
While he waited, he tried to figure out what he could do. He lacked the ink to draw it or any tools to carry it. In the end, all he could do was dig a hole in the scree and push it in with a large rock. Then he covered it up and marked the spot with a stack of flat stones. There it wouldn’t contaminate much water, and if he found someone that could help him investigate, he could always escort them back here, even without a map.
In the end, he belted on his sword and inspected the pool. Even those few hours had made a real difference, and the water was now merely murky rather than hopelessly polluted.
“I did just what you told me to,” he said barely above a whisper while he looked at his bare feet with something approaching reverence. He knew she couldn’t actually hear him from here as he spoke to the water, but he was sure she would feel the difference as the pool became clearer and clearer. “You hear that, Oroza? My task is complete. Let me rest now, I beg of you. That is my only prayer.”
Then he turned, and itching a stray bug bite on his hand, he turned and began to walk back down the mountain. Paulus could finally close the book on this insane chapter of his life.