The Forbidden Pool

Lifting the long shirt up through his belt and pulling it off over his head, it was plain for all to see that the wound, though long, was extremely shallow. Already had the blood ebbed its flow, and under the scrutiny of his fellow townsmen, Mikel watched as the blood stopped in total.

* * *

With a dry throated scream he woke, his hands running to the wound on his stomach before he realized his location. Mikel was, by the look of the surrounding area, two days outside of town in the same location that he had found the house of the witch who had told him what he needed to know. But there was no hut, and definitely no witch, but a quick look showed him that indeed there still was his reason for coming. Climbing painfully to his feet, feeling the dry skin of his hands crack and bleed, Mikel settled out in what he hoped to be the right direction, thinking all the while on what had happened and what was needed, for the Forbidden Pool would not come to just anyone.

By nightfall of the first day, the cut he had received from Drig had become a rash of dry, flaking skin. By the morning that rash had reached from his naval to his chest. By the following night it covered, front to back, from his groin to his shoulders. Afraid of what was happening, knowing nothing more than the relation to the dishonorably given wound, he had rushed to a healer. With the gash on the stomach closed, there was nothing to be done. "No poison do I know that could cause such as this, and I know nothing of spells and magic." Her only advice was to seek out the witch and ask for aid.

Little help that had been.

Two days it took him to find the lair of the crone, or so he thought it with the carrion and dried bones about. Two days during which the rash spread until almost his entire body was covered. And all the old lady could do was laugh at the vision that was Mikel.

Irritably he scratched at his arm where the old woman had grabbed him, the nails of his fingers short and jagged but still pulling free a snowfall of dead skin that was growing still worse.

The woman's voice was raspy and she hacked often with her cackle, perhaps from thousands of years of use he thought. With a smile on her face she had sealed his fate and spoke the words he remembered as perfectly as the tone of her voice. He had fallen asleep as dizziness took him.

"A fungus," he groaned for what he hoped would not be the last time. The wound on his stomach had been infected, likely by planning of Drig, with a fungus that was quickly spreading through his body and destroying it. He had not told Abigail, told none but the healer who knew little of his problems, and left immediately to seek aid. To seek the Forbidden Pool, he thought almost wryly, if someone in such a state could be thought of as wry.

On he walked, ignorant of the trail of unmelting snowflakes left in his wake.

* * *

Days of travel passed quickly in spite of the pain that wracked his body of skin so dry the slightest movement broke open dozens of cracks.