The Taste of Madness
Daphne
One month later
If anyone had asked me last year what madness tasted like, I would have laughed at them. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I might have said. “Something that’s in your mind doesn’t have a taste.”
I, of all people, should have known better. Fate had taught me a brutal lesson, one I’d never forget. Madness tasted like tears, blood, and the sour bile that rose in my throat after every vision. It smelled like feces, piss, and the stale sweat that clung to my skin like a filthy pelt. It was the stench of my own body, of a vessel breaking down under a weight it was never meant to carry.
My body went limp as the last convulsion subsided, a final, violent shudder that left me boneless and aching. For a long moment, I didn’t move, listening to the frantic hammering of my own heart.
It was the same sound I remembered from when I was six and hiding from older boys in an empty water barrel. I’d pressed my fists against the wood as their footsteps grew closer, the thudding of my own pulse the only thing I could hear in the suffocating dark. The boys had run past the barrel. I wasn’t nearly as lucky now.
The vision was gone, but the echo of it, a spike of pure agony behind my eyes, remained. It felt like a splinter of bone driven through my skull, a festering shard of some other reality. My body screamed at me to stay down, to let the gray earth swallow me whole. It would be so easy.
“Too much...” I mumbled, the words a thick paste in my dry mouth. “The screaming...”
It hadn’t always been this way. Once, the gift had been a whisper, a secret ally. It had been the faint, shimmering thread that warned me away from the satyr with cruelty in his heart. It had been the gentle guide that tugged me toward the baker who would give a starving orphan a loaf of bread for a smile. The threads of fate had then been my shield, a divine favor that kept me alive.
But the whispers had grown to a roar. The single threads had become a suffocating tapestry. I’d fled, trying to escape my owngift into the depths of the Korinos Wilds, where no one could find me. But there was no escaping destiny.
This last month had been a steady descent into disaster. It had all started with the one vision to end all visions. Not a glimpse of a possible future, but a brutal plunge into the heart of creation.
I had seen it. A colossal loom, an impossible artifact of bone and petrified wood, where three ancient figures wove the very fabric of existence. My mind had been stretched to the breaking point, forced to comprehend a pattern too beautiful and terrible for any mortal to witness. Voices had erupted from every thread, a deafening chorus of every moment that ever was and ever would be.
The experience had shattered me. It had broken the dam, and now the flood was constant. The visions were no longer gentle nudges. They were violent seizures, overwhelming torrents of information that left me drained, wrecked, and lying in my own filth.
But within that fracturing of the soul, a single, desperate hope had been forged. A name, a place, a ritual I’d glimpsed in the chaos.
Asphodelia. Charon. The trade.
The words were a mantra, a prayer whispered in the ruins of my sanity. It was the only path left that didn’t end in a shallow grave. I had to find him. I had to trade this curse for the one thing I craved more than life itself. Silence.
A different voice, my own, raw and guttural, fought back from the depths of my exhaustion. “Get up.” I didn’t move. The pain was a heavy blanket. “Get up. You didn’t come all this way to die in the dirt.” I’d crawled out of my own life, left the home I’d built with my own two hands. I’d walked for days, letting the poison of the Blighted Lands seep into my bones and the visions tear me apart. For what? To give up now, when the end was so close? No. Never.
With a pained groan, I summoned what little strength remained. My palms scraped against unforgiving rock as I pushed myself upright. I staggered to my feet, swaying.
Before me, the landscape unfolded in a portrait of decay. I’d heard stories from travelers of how the Blighted Lands were expanding, but to see the devastation was another thing entirely. The air carried a metallic tang that coated my tongue. Each step was an effort. The journey stretched before me, an endless expanse of black rock and skeletal trees.
Hours bled into one another, the unchanging sunless twilight making it impossible to mark the passage of time. There was only the struggle of putting one foot in front of the other. Ahead, through the gloom, the dark silhouettes of collapsed buildings began to appear. A village.
My path forced me through it. I passed a moss-covered stone marker, half-buried in the dead earth. Carved letters, barely legible, spelled out a name. Agrion.
A chill that had nothing to do with the air swept through me. This place was haunted by a violent history that made the hairs on my arms stand on end. As I stepped onto what must have once been a main path, the voices came.
“Barren witch! How dare you deceive us?”
The shriek was a phantom, sharp with an ancient rage that bled from the very stones. I flinched, my gaze darting around the empty ruins. The silence here felt different from the quiet of my isolated cottage. It was the profound emptiness of a graveyard.
I didn’t stop, my boots crunching on gray soil and something that might have been bone. I saw a blacksmith’s forge, the hammer lying rusted beside a silent anvil. The ruin felt personal, its decay the brutal, sudden work of violence, not the slow unraveling of time.
“My husband is dead because of you! The monsters tore him apart!”
A woman’s wail of grief echoed from the collapsed roof of a nearby cottage. The ruin looked like the carcass of a deer I’d once found in a harsh winter, its ribs picked clean by scavengers, a monument to a slow and lonely death.
This was a place of profound sorrow, a wound in the world that had never healed. I hurried my pace, desperate to be free of its grasp.
And then I saw it. Tucked in the heart of the ruins, a faint glow flickered. Hope lanced through me, as sharp and painful as a dagger.
