It began, usually, with a strange tickle in the back of the mind. Just a small, niggling sensation that did not go away. Then it would change, when your eyes were closed, to a whisper, a voice just out of hearing range murmuring in your ear, keeping you from sleep. After that, it worsened rapidly. Some of them felt their hands gone, chopped off and bleeding, and yelled themselves hoarse trying to summon help for a wound that did not exist. Others simply screamed and writhed around their bellies, thrashing in unexplainable pain that tied their insides into knots, death a mercy that refused to visit. All felt cold hands on them in the night, cold, dry hands, and the voice, gradually growing louder, whispering, whispering…
Sleep abandoned them, but the voice did not. She – it was a she, an unearthly, horrible voice that vibrated strangely with the words they almost-but-could-not hear in a weird parody of a child's reedy voice –
And as they reached with trembling hands to seize a knife to spill their blood and end the dreams, they froze, hearing at last the deadly words, understanding their curse.
Briarwood is the pretty poison.
It was said that every one of the infected men spend their last hours screaming until their lungs simply collapsed, unable to tell what had so terrified them, unable to blink, as though a single image was emblazoned upon their eyelids where they could not look away. It was whispered, after the secret of the disease came out, that each man had seen the first witch they had broken, but of course, no one knew. No one was left alive to tell, no one who could say that the image they had seen had been simply of a lady, clothed in Darkness, her face in shadow, whispering her deadly incantation without a shred of mercy, a shard of pity.
There is no cure for Briarwood.