The Thief and the Blind

Possessively, hungrily, Arianwyn looked back to her blessing. The bones, intricately carved and delicate, were too exquisite to be left where they lay in the dusty dirt road. Heat rose in Arianwyn's cheeks. It was shameful that she had let them rest there as long as she had, and she bent down to pick up the elegant gift.

The pain was so sudden and so horribly great that she dropped them immediately.

A sharp, splitting pain seemed to diffuse from Arianwyn's fingertips where she had touched the cold, lifeless bones. It seemed to pierce through her very being, eating her, consuming her with great ferocity and yet so cruelly, decidedly slowly. She felt the throb of hurt pass through her hand, crawling up her fingers and into her palm where it settled like a parasite in her flesh. Crying out in anguish, Arianwyn fell back away from the bones, instinctively kicking the largest piece away from her in her scrabble to flee their presence. Her blessing hurt more than she had ever been hurt before.

The worst was the foreignness of the misery. Arianwyn was no stranger to her own agony; pain was, in many ways, an old friend. She had been beset by chronic, incurable, unrelenting pain when she was a mere child. Her own blood threatened her wellbeing, her own body betraying her at every turn. She could not recall a day, no, a moment without an ache in her muscles. Yet this agony was beyond what she had ever experienced.

It consumed. It ate. It tore and chewed and ripped at her very flesh, ripping her apart from the inside out. Her very body seemed to wither away and rot from the inside. Arianwyn held her hand up under the pale, eerie light of the moon, desperately trying to remove her opposite hand and inspect her wound. Teeth clenched tight in shooting pain, she carefully parted her own fingers, expecting to see a festering wound.

Nothing could have prepared her the alabaster white of her exposed bone.

"No!" Arianwyn cried out in horror, gasping for breath, feeling suddenly as though she was drowning. She grasped at her own flesh, pinching the skin of her palm in her fingers, as though her own defiance might combat whatever wretched, horrible magic gripped at her being. Though she clawed back, her nails digging into skin, she could not stop it, and she was forced to watch as her very flesh melted away. It fell away like candle wax, dripping from her form, though it seemed to fade long before it reached the earth below her. To her deepest horror, she could do nothing but gasp and gape in terrified awe as the curse progressed up her hand, to her arm, shoulder, across her chest, then everywhere. Paradoxically swift and torturously, painstakingly slowly, her flesh melted away, revealing alabaster bone.

She shook so violently her bones chattered, a sensation so sickening and foreign that she would have been sick, if she had had any stomach left to be sick with. The stuff gust of midnight forest breeze felt wrong cascading through her ribcage, chilling her from the inside out and threatening whatever scraps were left of her sanity. Yet, somehow, she remained standing. She knew not what held her skeletal form together, and she dared not think about it too long, the very consideration of it sending a migraine shooting through her skull. She wanted desperately to lay down in these woods and cry, or give in to whatever curse had consumed her and crumble to dust. Yet, whatever decay had befallen her seemed satisfied just to consume her flesh, and left her bones intact. Though she was paralyzed, waiting for the end, no end came. She was left where she was, standing in the middle of the packed dirt path in the woods, reduced to nothing more than her skeletal remains; a rotten corpse left upright, as though death itself had forgotten to finish the job.

This was a cruel, cursed trick. A trap. The Thief and the Blind had worn the visages of patrons, but Arianwyn believed them in that moment to be mere imposters, distributing curses to innocents who passed these roads at night. Frauds, liars, deceivers—they had to be. She could scarcely grip her sanity, believing she had been swindled by two mortal mages, she simply could not accept that she had become the plaything of patrons, the rat in an experiment by forces beyond her imagination. There was no reconciling what she had experienced with reality, no recognition that could grant her peace with the nights events. No, she had been a fool in a trap, a victim in this all. Now, it was her task to warn whoever might be next.

Arianwyn did not return to the hewn bones she had dropped; did not look for them amid straggling grasses or the dry tumbling leaves. She did not dare behold them again or grant them credence by searching for the curse carved into the runes. No—the forest would reclaim them. Predators would scavenge them before the next innocent person travelled these paths; she had to believe it. She could not look at them again. Leaving them behind her, she chose a direct down the path, not confident that she had chosen the right destination, but knowing well was she was fleeing.

In a way, she had been chosen. Selected by ego and by hubris to experience the deepest agony of her life; to experience a pain she felt she should not have survived. And yet, she did. The blessing which consumed her flesh had stopped short of eating her bones. Whether it was a miracle or burden, she was alive. No more would experience what she had. She swore in that moment to follow the path to whoever might be next to walk upon it and warn them of the strangers she encountered in the woods. No one else would accept the gifts, and no one else would experience her horrors. This ended with her.

Never again would another fall victim to the Thief or the Blind.

Arianwyn makes sure to warn others about the two and their gifts.