Paulus stumbled down the dark foothills, toward the light in the distance. He didn’t know what the building was, or who might be living there, but it didn’t matter. He was dying. He had been for days actually, but he knew that he didn’t have long left now. His heart was pounding in his chest and his breathing was erratic and shallow. This morning he had left almost all of his meager possessions behind when the throbbing in his arm had woken him up. All he wanted to do now was to give his book to someone, anyone, who would get it to the proper authorities before the poison ran its course.
It was almost a week ago that he had pulled the strange object from the mountain spring. In doing so, he had finally freed himself from the river goddess’s final command, but in the process, he’d let a single drop of that poison land on the back of his left hand without noticing.
For the first day it had only been an itch, and he’d thrilled in the beautiful weather and had the last of his bread to celebrate the completion of his quest. He hadn’t even known there was a problem yet. He’d just scratched at the spot now and then like his other bug bites as he walked down the mountain.
However, what was a red bump on the first day, had turned into a painful canker by the second, and after that, the black tracery lines began to crawl slowly up all the arteries and veins beneath the surrounding skin, reaching closer and closer to his heart. At first the process was slow, but by the fourth day, the necrotic skin advanced with that darkness. It looked like some kind of snake bite, and hour by hour, and inch by inch, his arm began to rot away.
At first Paulus was terrified by what was happening. He’d tied his belt around his bicep as a tourniquet, cutting off blood to the arm, but that had stopped working tonight. Now he could feel the throbbing as the poison traveled deeper and deeper into his body. He was no longer afraid though, because now he knew what he must do.
“The records must be saved,” he murmured as he traveled inexorably forward staggering the whole way as he weaved back and forth like a drunkard. “They have to know. They have to know the truth about everything that’s happened, and everything that’s going to happen…”
Speaking was exhausting now, but it still moved him forward through his haze of pain. It reminded him of why he couldn’t just lay down and die right there on the wet grass, even if it would have been the easiest thing in the world to do. That part he couldn’t say out loud, because he might listen to himself. He was sure that if he paused long enough to undo the belt that held back the rot that had already ravaged and mummified his left arm, he would be dead before he hit the ground.
He paused a moment to listen. Hearing the sound of distant crows. He was sure they’d been following him for the last few days. They might be gone every morning, but they were there every night he made camp, waiting for the day he would fall asleep and never wake up. They were ready and waiting to pick his bones clean and devour his brains for all the secrets he contained to spread them to gods knew who, but he wasn’t going to let that happen.
“At least the poison in my veins will make sure that they didn’t live to tell anyone,” he whispered to himself with a chuckle that quickly became a racking cough.
Paulus forced himself to keep walking though, even through that. He had to; he knew that if he stopped it was all over.
He’d thought about cutting the hand off days ago, but he’d lacked the will to do what was necessary, and now he was paying the price. That, and the fact that his blade had almost completely rusted through by the time he’d noticed there was a problem.
“Almost there,” he reminded himself as he stepped onto a dirt footpath. That meant that lots of feet had been through here, he realized, and at least a few people would be connected to those feet, so he was definitely going the right way.
Soon he found walls he could stagger against. A waist high fieldstone enclosure was the first, but soon there were thatched outbuildings too. Soon enough cobblestone appeared beneath his feet, and he could see other, larger buildings looming up out of the dark as he approached some kind of small-town square.
“Help!” he called out, as he continued to stagger forward. His voice didn’t carry very far. It wasn’t even loud in his own ears because he couldn’t quite catch is breath anymore. “I-I’m dying… and I need… I need…”
Now that he was in the square proper, he looked into a second story window to see a woman. Paulus opened his mouth, but his words were taken away by the look of disgust she’d given him. Rather than help him, she made a sign of warding and then pulled the shutters closed, leaving him tottering in the dark. Part of him wouldn’t believe that a decent person as that woman so clearly had been could have turned him away like that, and he reached out to her even as he collapsed backwards onto the cobblestones.
From his view on the ground, he could finally see what it was he’d been walking toward. It was one of Siddrim’s eternal flames perched atop the little white temple that they so favored. They didn’t have them in every small village temple, but there had been two in Fallravea, and it had been a point of pride for his city and his family, that they'd been lit since the end of the last King’s mourning period. It was that pride that forced him to roll over and force himself to his feet instead of laying down next to the well there and dying like he should have.
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Clutching his papers to his chest, he staggered stiff limbed to the reinforced wooden door of the temple, and he pounded on it. There was no strength left in his arm though. Instead, all he could do was bang on it with his head while he leaned heavily against the cold wood, and slowly slumped down to his knees as the world began to swim around him.
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Sister Annise stumbled down the stairs half asleep to see what all the commotion was about only to find Priest Mallen and his acolytes wrestling the body of a hermit onto a table in the small clinic that the temple ran for the villagers of the area. Thankfully it was empty but for the four of them, but that still did nothing to explain what was happening at this late hour.
“What in the name of the light are you doing at such an infernal hour?” she demanded as she swept a few stray brown hairs out of her face. From all the noise she’d heard, she’d feared they were under some kind of attack, so she’d only put on her cream-colored robe and left her white apron and shawl upstairs to investigate.
The priest noticed immediately and rebuked her with his eyes, but he said nothing about it. “A dying hermit was found on our door. He’s been bitten by a snake I think, though it’s much too late to save the arm.”
As Priest Mallen spoke, his acolyte Theo moved out of the way for just a moment, but it was long enough to see the ghastly shriveled thing that was the old man's left arm. No, he wasn’t old, she corrected herself as they started to strip him. He was just haggard. From his birdsnest hair to his gnarled, blackened feet, he was every inch the holy man. Right down to his dangerously slender waistline and emaciated ribs.
“Well then, if you’re here make yourself useful and burn these,” the priest said gesturing to a pile of wadded up robes and a sheave of disintegrating papers that might have once been a book. “We’ll do what we can for the poor bastard but I’m not expecting much.”
“You’re going to heal him?” she asked hopefully. It would have been a strange thing for the priest to attempt. He almost always hoarded Siddrim’s light, claiming that the recipient wasn’t worth it, so this time she wasn’t surprised when he shook his head and picked up a cleaver.
“Maybe if he survives the night,” the priest answered, cleaning the meat cleaver with a rag, “but even with a tourniquet, I don’t expect a man in his condition will survive the blood loss. Still - we must place it in the lord of light’s hands.”
Sister Annise brought her hand to her heart and bowed her head in reverence at the mention of her lord's name, but only for as long as was necessary. Then she quickly scooped up the garbage that the priest had pointed out and fled the room. Though her heart went out to the man, she had no wish to see any butchery this evening. She was certain it would give her nightmares.
She had only just gotten out of the infirmary door and shut it behind her when she heard the dull impact of metal on meat and gagged at the mental image that was briefly conjured up involuntarily in her mind.
Though she was sure that the flash she saw wasn’t the sight, she blamed that gift for the vivid imagination she was cursed with. She couldn’t see anyone sick or in pain without knowing exactly what it would feel like, and when she was trying to assist someone who was vomiting, it was all she could do not to join them. It was a curse that she’d lived with her whole life, and tonight she was grateful for Priest Mallen’s low opinion of her as she went to the main fireplace and threw the lice infested robes onto the bed of coals, quickly making the flames leap to life for a moment in a burst of greasy brilliance.
She was about to add the papers too without a second thought. After all, as soon as they were ash she could return to her bed. Sunrise would always come sooner than she would have liked. Something stayed her hand though, and instead she decided to flip through them first.
At first she expected them to be mad religious ramblings, and at places, where the writing was still legible, they sometimes seemed to be. “The poison river continues, no matter how far I travel into the mountains today. She follows me. Her and her storm clouds and only the light of the heavens keeps her lightning at bay,” she read to herself.
Did that make the hermit some mad Orozian prophet then? If that was true then should she hold on to these for The Penitent Seekers of Truth? She wasn’t sure, and ultimately it was hardly the place of a sister to decide these things. Still, she couldn’t help but flip to another spot and read again.
“But the Count has no enemies. None I can point him to. He’s already had me kill the few he had, which makes him both the villain and the hero of his own story. Still if I do not find a name to give him by our next meeting mine is certain to move a few places higher on the invisible list that the shadows put into his head.” This passage was almost nonsense, and if the words weren’t enough to convince her that the man that had written it, the doodles around the edges of the book were certainly enough to do it. Random words were circled and linked to other random shapes. It was insane.
She decided that more than anything she didn’t want to deal with whatever this mystery was, and was about to flip the book closed, but as she gazed transfixed at the madness on the page, she felt herself start to freeze up. Then suddenly she could feel the edges of her brain quaking as a vision boiled up out of the edges of her mind and her body began to tremble. She was having a fit, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
Suddenly the fire fell away, leaving her in the dark room that expanded into an endless and expanding web of darkness. She could see people she didn’t recognize connected in ways that she didn’t understand in an infinite tangle of causality that spread further and further until it was the landscape itself, from the Wodenspines to the Oroza. From here she could see that the river flowed with blood, and that a town far to the south was on fire as a black sun set in the distance behind it all.
It was a terrifying image, and almost as soon as it was done, she found herself on the floor, gasping and sobbing at a feeling of loss and fear too terrible to understand.