Vaska woke to the bright stars in the black void night. Her arms were aching and she was developing a headache. She sat up and drank the finished off a vial. Einnar was snoring away on his bedroll. She wished that she could have convinced him to leave her, if he kept following the her sooner or later her would die either from the curse or by the hands of who ever was spreading the disease.

Now she knew where she had to go and since she was awake there was no reason to wait. Einnar could catch up or not, up to her. She packed up and made sure that the fire was out before starting out on her journey.

If what she suspected was correct, someone would have set up a base camp at the black late that would allow her to track back the to the poisoner. That was what it was someone was using the curses waters of the black lake to spread the curse around to the other people who have done nothing to deserve to have their lives ruined. It was almost ironic that as she went to the source of all, no most of the woe in her life she was to find someone who was causing all others woe of the same sort there or maybe that was the point.

The sky was starting to blush with dawn when Einarr caught up with her. He must have woken up not to long after she had left.

“I'm not going to die.” He said after a while. When Vaska looked over at him, he smiled. “You're not the first person to try to leave me behind because they thought that it would be the best.” That held an entire story behind it, Vaska nodded and continued walking. Along the way the footstep began to synchronize as they walked, there was no each or offbeat noise just the sound of four feet sounding like two. “Where are we going?”

“To the Blackwater. It's where everything began.” Vaska said. They walked up one large hill and over the crest they saw the lake the reflection of the early morning sky in it. Covering the opaque water. As they got closer and closer it began to be more obvious that something was wrong as they approached. There was no birds, no animals, noting. Along the side of the lake there was a ruined dock, wooden planks rotting away into the lake. Vaska stared out over the lake, her thoughts racing. She had never hated anything like she hated this lake.

“Do you know what happened here?” Vaska asked. Einarr shook his head. “Thirty years ago this was a thriving area, there were at least three different villages in the area. Then strange reports started to happen.” It was so cold out that their breath was starting to steam in the air. “Eventually we got a messenger from one of the villages saying that they were being attacked.”

“What happened?”

“The king sent an army to clean out what ever had destroyed the three villages. The army succeeded, in destroying the monsters. But at a high cost, over half of the army was destroyed. But the worse was yet to come. They went back to their homes, started families and twenty years later.” Vaska paused and took several deep breaths. Einnar just watched her.

“Twenty years later they started to change. They had contracted the Curse and it had laid dormant in them. They changed right in the village and started to attack everyone around them.” Vaska tapped at the location of the black scar. “Many people died, because they didn’t understand what was happening. Eventually they all died from the Curse or they were killed.”

“You know a lot about it.” Einnar ventured.

“One of those warriors was my father.” She admitted. “He changed in the middle of market day, he ended up stabbing me in the stomach.”

“That scar.”

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Yes. I have the curse, and have for ten years now. I've been taking the medicine that the healer who's working on a cure makes. But I don't know if it is doing anything, I could change at any minute.”

“Let me worry about that. You can't help that something awful happened to you, but I can defend myself or at the very least,” He chuckled a little bit. “I can probably outrun you.”

“You don't know that.”

“No, but neither do you know that I can't.”

“Fine.” She couldn’t convince him. She started walking down to the lake. It might take a few days fro the them fully cover the area, but she would start with the shore. Maybe there was something that would help them narrow it down.

She walked around it, if it wasn’t for the bloody history and that the cursed waters this would have been a beautiful place to live. The sky was blue and the plants were around flourishing despite their leaves being a dark almost black color in stead of a light green. Up onto the top of a hill half a mile away, there was a ruined house in the distance. She called Einnarr over and pointed it out. If they didn’t find anything on the shore of the lake they would have to go and check out the ruins of the villages that had been destroyed.

About two miles down the side, she could see that someone had been there recently. The remains of footprints were there, with shards of what looked like pottery had shattered there. Einnar whistled, he had walked up away from the lake.

Vaka got up and walked over to him, there was a footpath up into the hills. If it had been used when the villages had been populated it would have overgrown by this point, but the edges were clean and nothing was growing in the center of the path. Hands on their swords they started up the path. As they walked up they saw more and more of the evidence that someone had been there, and fairly recently. She needed to see the person that had created the poison that had killed so many people. Eventually the path led them to a house, that was in surprisingly good condition. They stayed at the path and crept off into the bushes, watching the house. They hid quietly as only a two of people that are used to the pressures of hunting or lying in wait for the prey. They watched for what must have been two hours, before deciding that no one was inside. No smoke was coming from the chimney.

The door to the house wasn’t locked. It swung open with a slow whine. Inside it was like a blacksmiths paradise. Coils and pipes linked into each other and into the vats. Liquids dripped as things processed. Vaska didn’t know much about the processes of distilling and brewing spirits, but if anything looked like the brewery this was it. This must have been where they were creating the poison. Einar found in one of the vats what looked like boiled muck and in the other end pure water. Just opening it released a foul stench into the air. In the other vats was the actual alcohol being brewed. Vaska would have actually bet hard money that this was the home of the poisoner. They had the tools laying out on the papers, on the table. The recipe of what was being made in the vats was laid out. It was a dual process, they would create and brew the alcohol then mix in the concentrated muck then rebrew it again a bit, mixing in more hops and covering any taste that might have remained.

There were phrases written down and the referenced the lake. What properties of the lake was he hoping to concentrate? 'the black essence that leaked from below' What was this nonsense.

“I'm going down to the lake.” Vaska announced.

“What. Wait.” Einnar called out.

Vaska walked down the path. She wanted to see what they meant by the black essence they meant. She walked down to the lake. The lake was a still as a black mirror, she glared at it. “You don't scare me.” Vaska said to it. She walked down to the edge. It wasn’t like she could get more infected then she already was. So she dropped her armor onto the ground and went in to swim. The water was cold and dark but as she walked out then started to swim, she probed it with her feet not trusting it enough to dive. It was mostly soft mud, each time she rose up and dropped back down, she found nothing. On one of them she saw Einnar watching her from the shore. It might have been on her tenth plunge down when she felt something hard with her feet. She managed to grab it and briefly flipped onto her back to pass it to her hands. It was a saucer of some sort. Frowning she kicked her way back to shore. She showed it to Einnar after she came to shore.

“Do you think that there was a village under the lake?” Einnar asked.

“Maybe, I'll have to check the records in the village. They might have records.” I hope Vaska thought.