It was nearing the evening when it happened. Helena had just knelt down to harvest the final mushrooms when she heard the thud of Michel collapsing behind her. She just had gotten the scythe down to the stem when he fell and as she spun to look at him lying in a heap in the moss and lichen of the forest floor. He breathed heavily and tried to pull himself up using a low-hanging branch. But Helena didn't pay attention to that as much to the pulsating veins she saw through the cut in his pants.
As an Acolyte she had been trained to do many things: farm, lift heavy boxes, channel the power Old Yoss reluctantly gave her, and more importantly sense foreign influences. Her eyes could see more than what those not touched by a god could, and what she was was terrifying. Inside of Michel, there was something...a crawling and consuming presence that slowly spread throughout his body. It made her head hurt as the foreign power was opposed to the one behind her.
"Oh no ohnoohno!"
Helena practically dove down to touch Michels side and she began muttering prayers to call upon Old Yoss. She didn't have the training to cleanse someone of a foreign intrusion like this. Upon touching his side she felt the presence, even more, a discordant cacophony of mutters and screams. Tens of Thousands of voices talked all at the same time and with it, they transmitted a hunger and desire to subjugate that made her physically ill.
When Helena returned to lucidity she discovered she had thrown up. Michel on his end had actually managed to pull himself up to a semi-standing position.
"We ne-need to go to a healer. I can't fix...that."
Helena gestured at the darkening veins along Michels neck and he barely managed to nod in response. Michel was swaying from side to side while desperately gripping the branch he held onto. It was immediately obvious that Michel was not going to go anywhere, so Helena sighed.
"I will have to carry you Michel, do you know anyone who can help us? Because I don't think I can get you back to town in time."
She didn't actually wait for him to reply as she got up and walked over to him. Without any protests on his part, she lifted him like a sack of grain and turned to the quickly darkening and oppressive forest around her.
"Follow... my...directions."
Michel barely pressed out from between his lips and indicated a direction for Helena to run and she exploded down the forest trail. When she had been chosen to serve as an acolyte of Old Yoss the first touch of him gave her a simple blessing. Helena had the stamina of an ox, she could toil and work for hours upon end without issue. Carrying heavy things was not any kind of impediment to her, so she managed to carry a grown man and both of their bags while running through a forest with relatively little difficulty.
It had been pointed out many times how ironic it was that this was her first blessing when she hated to exert herself and work in general. But for once she decided to not bemoan her fate as she focused on running while straining to hear the directions that Michel whispered into her ear. As a town girl she wasn't used to the forest but the dread she felt after having sensed that which dug through Michels flesh, made her anxiety at the darkening forest seem like a candle compared to a bonfire.
Michels directions led her to a stream and all that she had to do was run alongside it until she saw a small cottage surrounded by mushrooms and with multi-colored smoke rising up from the chimney. Any more details than that were lost on her as she almost burst through the door and into the general living space of the small hut.
When she smashed in through the door a tiny old woman seemed about to yell in surprise and outrage, but one look at the man she carried over her shoulder was enough to silence the protest.
"Put him down on the bed."
The order was sharp and left no room for disagreement and Helena was more than happy to comply. She practically dumped Michel down on the bed and the old woman continued as she moved over to examine him.
"What happened to him?"
"We were attacked by some kind of strange eight-legged insect monster with metal-coated legs. It stabbed him in the hip and I healed it with a miracle."
"Unfortunate, I can't examine the wound then."
Helena suddenly had an idea and bent down to pull out the wooden box with the strange heart that she had found in the monster. It was a grey thing that strangely enough has small twigs growing out of it in addition to the tubes that connected the heart to the bloodstream. The tiny woman looked at the heart and blanched for a second before she muttered.
"Ah the festival, well that at least is a sample."
She immediately took a vial and scooped the blood into it from the heart by using a spoon. After that, she bustled over to a wooden chest and pulled out a waterskin.
"Make him drink this, it should help him with the pain. I will go out and see if I have anything for this."
And with that curt order, the woman walked out the door and left Helena with the unenviable task of making Michel drink. He had grown delirious and struggled weakly as she force the waterskin to his lips so he could drink. Inbetween the gulps as he swallowed the liquid she heard him mutter incoherently.
"Sovereign...collective...fragment...infection...unit."
The words made no sense to her and she just dismissed it as a side effect of whatever was coursing through his flesh. And she did not get any time to consider it as the woman practically stormed back in moments after she had left. Her face looked like thunder and she held a few mushrooms and a chicken in her arms.
"This is unlike anything I have ever encountered before and it might take everything I have to save him. So you will keep your mouth shut and let me work, Acolyte or I will send you out until I am done. Do you understand me?"
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Helena realized that this was one of those very few times when a question was in fact not a question. Many claimed that often questions weren't truly questions but Helena had rarely encountered one that she would actually classify as proper question. this time she thought it would be a bad idea to anger the asker by actually answering. So she merely nodded and stepped away so the woman could begin her work.
Her hands practically flashed as she rapidly cut the various mushrooms into cubes and let them drop into the cauldron. Next the chicken was bound with string and attached to a chair while the lady began to mumble incantations over the bubbling liquid. It almost seemed like the liquid started to flow along with strange movements that the woman made. Like some kind of ancient puppeteer manipulating the very water itself.
The incantations were in a tongue that Helena could not understand so she didn't even try to. All she did was watch and worry while the woman worked with her craft. When the woman grabbed the worried chicken then the next became obvious to Helena, and she glanced away as the life blood flowed out of the throat that the woman cut above the cauldron.
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Michel felt both horrible and relieved at the same time, he could feel something eating at his body. He had been poisoned before so that part of the sensation was unwelcome if familiar, but what made it worse was that accompanying that feeling was the sensation of having his flesh change. It felt like something was destroying and slowly rebuilding his body as it moved through him.
Distantly, Michel could hear Gunnvors voice as she worked on him and worried sounds coming from Helena. So he knew he was as close to safe as possible. She would either save him or she wouldn't but there was no better place for him to be at the moment. Therefore, he resigned himself to the suffering he would go through as his body fought the intruder that slowly corrupted him.
"Sovereign."
Even now he could hear the whispers of the forest, but now he recognized something else. Not only was it the foreign concept that the trees had never shown the capacity to talk about before. No it was that for the first time in his life he heard something else whispering along the same...network of whispers. A new voice where it before had only been the whispers of the trees that he could hear.
He couldn't hear any words from that other voice in the distance, it was too far away or too far removed. But he could almost make them out as he tried to mumble along with the voice. Until finally a wave of relief hit him and quited the madness and the pain and left him in contented bliss.
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It took the old woman, who turned out to be named Gunnvor, the entire night to ritually purge the presence that had anchored itself in Michels flesh. She used the sacrificial poultice made with the lifeblood of a chicken along with precise incisions into his flesh to bleed him, in addition to a myriad of tinctures and mumbled incantations over his body. But eventually she managed to defeat the toxin converting his body and come the morning she shook Helena out of her light slumber.
"You need to take him and leave."
"W-whuh, what do you mean?"
"Shut up girl, you need to take him and leave. He can't recuperate here and whatever it was that left him in this state it won't take kindly to what I did tonight."
"Erm, what do you mean?"
"Don't make me repeat myself. You are an acolyte of Old Yoss, you can carry him and your packs back to Hor. The old man at your temple needs to see that heart and then you need to get in touch with the Baron. The forest isn't safe anymore and I do not what brewed this up, but it needs to be stopped or something terrible will come of it."
"But...but you fixed him."
"I threw every trick and cure I had at my disposal at him and it barely worked. You need to take him and go before more of those monsters comes to look for him. Gods know that I will be leaving shortly as well. So, GO and don't argue with me again!"
Helena was barely able to press out a thank you and grab her pack and the still delirious Michel before she was practically chased out of the cottage. She might be a lazy girl but she was not stupid, when she was told to run then she would in fact RUN if that was necessary.
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Gunnvor looked out of her window at the girl who disappeared in among the trees before she moved to begin preparing for her own departure. She had no idea what had attacked the two but every instinct in her told her that it was bad and that it would get worse. All she had to prepare were some of her most important tools and reagents. If this grew into a true crisis then she had no doubt that her experience would be needed if more people were attacked, and she couldn't do her work without these things.
As she picked up an ancient tome from underneath her floorboards and turned to put it in her sack, she felt a change come upon the air and then there was a knock on her door. It slowly swung open to reveal an enormous spider the size of a war horse standing outside while flanked by two sickly looking deer. She opened her mouth to shout an incantation and the spider spat a globule of webbing that coated her entire body and glued her against the wall. The two deer stepped inside and the spider swung the door shut as one of the deer nibble on the only bit of exposed skin that Gunnvor had left.
The Juggernaut Spider then turned and left the area as morning arrived and bathed the cottage in its light.