Blackmore's Night – Self Portrait
Paint me a picture and hang it on the wall
Color it darkly, the lines will start to crawl
Down... down... down...
Spin me around and around
Draw me away to the night from the day, leave not a trace to be found...
Down... down...
Nothing is real but the way that I feel and I feel like going
Down, down, down, down, down, down, down…
How Bethany experiences the taint. (672 words)
She didn't tell anyone. It didn't look all that bad, this tiny wound on the back of her hand where she scraped along a rock, not much more than a scratch. It still didn't look that bad when she checked it after she had washed off the darkspawn filth in a small pond in one of the caves. She had been concerned, of course, but when nothing seemed to happen, she forgot about the scratch.
Until the wound began to itch. Until she seemed to hear whispers in her head, like ambient noise, quiet and hissing and there was a feeling of nausea in her guts, not very prominent but disturbing because it was there. That's when she first realized that something was not as it should be. But she still did not tell anyone because she didn't want to believe that it was the taint even though somewhere in her mind, she already knew. It could be a number of things, right? That itch could be an allergic reaction to the water in the pond. The stomach ache could result from something wrong she had eaten because, really, living off nothing but the increasingly unappetizing rations they brought could certainly upset your stomach after a while. And that whisper? Imagination, surely. They were wandering the deepest, dankest, most spine-chilling parts of the Deep Roads, who wouldn't get paranoid there, suspecting eerie voices and horrible creatures behind every corner?
But it was neither of these things. She soon felt like she was devoured from the inside out, as if something dug at her innermost core and wriggled its way through every vein, every fiber in her body. She knew she had a fever and everything hurt; her teeth, her skin, her bones. And there always were these whispers that were getting louder and more insistent with every day they passed through those blasted Deep Roads. And the whispers were tempting. They seemed to pull at her and made her want to join them in what turned out to be a song, strong and beautiful and full of longing. Sometimes it made her forget the pain and for hours she would just trudge after the others in total oblivion of her surroundings, just listening to that song and she still said nothing because, at that point, what was there to say anyway?
In the more clearer moments, when the song seemed to fade a little and the pain was more prominent, she knew what happened to her and what she was becoming. She knew that she was losing herself to the taint and that there was no help to be expected and so she decided to not tell anyone until the end. She didn't want to worry her sister before it was inevitable. Sarah had so many worries already and she did not want to add to the list if she could avoid it.
And not telling also meant that she could pretend for a little longer that she was not going to die. The thought that her life would soon end in some long-forgotten, eerie tunnel with miles and miles of rocks over her head frightened her to no end. Would she turn into a ghule first? Would they kill her and then leave her dead body behind to be devoured by maggots and darkspawn? It made her shiver to even pondering that idea.
But when the moment finally came that she could not hide her condition from the others anymore and she collapsed onto the hard, cold ground in one of the more gloomy passages they navigated, her mind was strangely calm and the thought of dying not that frightening anymore. It was almost a relief. The ache in her tainted body was almost unbearable and the song… the song made her head spin with it's beauty and tempting promises. It would either be the song or death taking her now and it made her smile because no matter what would be the case, she would not have to suffer anymore.