Tales of the Tainted: Brodec - Chapter 3-
That inn was left behind, as the storm ripped its way down that high mountain pass. Brodec slipped out on the winds of that mighty winter storm and vanished back against the winds, a shadow against the blackness, heading back the way he had come. He knew the foolish feline would come too by dawn, or be found having killed the young woman. The Raven found himself unable to care that night. The mess in the inn was not his concern, he would not be remembered.
The storm however, would indeed be told of for a long while to come. It tore threw the lowlands of the mountains, falling trees, making travel impossible for two weeks, roofs gave in under the constant build up of heavy snow, yet the air always stayed so cold no sane man would venture forth without his life in the ballance. It raged across the lowlands, even touching out into the plains that came next, the winds shifting direction and the usual cold, constant wind of the grasslands, so cruelly cold and dry in the winter, was replaced by heavy, wet, snow-heavy air, and even colder nights than they had known before.
The rage of the Raven caused much damage that winter, ended lives and ruined families.
Many miles to the other side of those mountains, in warmer, dryer lands, the winter seemed a distant idea, here the rains of the season were a mixed blessing, but a welcome respite from the heat and dryness of the summer. He moved carefully here, not daring any flaunting walks in all his finery. He moved like the shadow he was, for here he was known, a god among men, a master walking among his animals. When he was seen, eyes lit with a flash of realization, and no sooner had one of the tainted, one of his children, realized who they gazed on, than he was gone, leaving perhaps a feather behind to prove they had seen his passing. Here, he was never safe, for many were the enemies of his brethren and his goals, and many were those that would bring his downfall, for he knew the truth those in the streets did not, but that many of his foes suspected. They called him god, lord, father, maker, but he was mortal, painfully mortal, and if one young fool managed to slay a god, who knew what would become of the world.
That same night he landed silently in the courtyard of a church. Statues of what could have been mistaken for him stood along the sides of that courtyard, but none, no matter how finally crafted or how perfectly lifelike, captured the fluid, unnatural grace of him as he moved toward the huge wooden double doors of the church. His wings, depicted in the statues always as extended up and backward, in a pose like an angel from the human gods, were instead alive as he walked, folding gracefully behind his back with the soft sound of feathers rubbing feathers. He seemed to flow down the long walkway meant to immortalize and honor him. With a thought, the doors flew open before him, silent as he was, and he slipped into the dimly lit main hall of the sizable stone building.
No sign of life in this main hall, empty at this hour of those coming to seek his favor or forgiveness. Favor and forgiveness, what jokes. He had the destructive power of a storm, the heat of a fire, the cold of a northern sea, and the unrelenting strength of the tide, but his favor and forgiveness were meaningless. If there was an after life, he had not seen it, or made it, and if there was a god that had forged the world, he was not that god. He had been like them once... No, not like them. He had been Human once, a handsome man, a strong and wild man, so very long ago.
He drifted like smoke down the maze like hallways of this, his fortress against the world. He could feel, with each step he took away from the outside world, the magic of this place restoring him. He felt awake again, the stress of the night gone. Old magic, powerful magic, set into these stone walls gave him strength and helped him to think, it helped to bind what he was together, and keep the madness from bubbling over.
The Madness... the bane of the Tainted ones. In times long lost to all, even him, for living threw those times now seemed so long ago, so unreal, he could not bring them to mind when awake, they came to him in dreams and flashes when unwanted, but trying to remember what really had happened was impossible... In these long ago times, they were made. There had always been men on these lands, a strong and proud people, his people. They had hunted the land, lived on the land, since time began. Then, in great wooden ships came the outsiders. They looked like his people, but they dressed and spoke strangely. They made war on his people, with steal swords and armor, his people fought back with bravery and skill, but were put down by the well equipped might of the outsiders. In a last desperate gambit to save the lands, the eldars of his people, of the old people, came to this spot, in the center of a small island, centered in a small lake, and begged the gods to save them.
The gods, or whatever they were, had granted some of their wish. The wish to have their bravest warrior given the might to protect his people, and to seal the land off from outsiders. These wishes were granted, and so Brodec, a young man then, was the first of the tainted, hundreds of years ago, he was changed in that circle of elders, from man into beast. From the spot where he was standing that day, the taint began. its nothing visible, nothing you can touch or move or change, it was simply a feeling for others at first, that this circle in the earth, oddly empty of plant life, was wrong. The elders shunned the place, and him, for he was the monster sent by the cruel gods to torment their once noble people in their darkest hour.
He grew there, learned what he was, and realized what he could do. He summoned all his will, all the might of the world around him, and summoned forth a storm like no other. It grew off shore, just visible from land at any point along the coast. Their land was an island, a huge one, but nothing more, and from every inch of its coast you could see that storm boiling out at sea. The flow of ships and men from their homeland stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and since that day, nobody had once made the trip from their homeland to the outside world and back.
The elders, realizing what had done them this great give, rushed to that small island. The moment they set foot on that small spec of land however, they felt it happening, and were powerless to stop it. They changed, and soon, the fifteen elders were all as much beast as man.
Since that day, the taint has spread constantly, slowly but unstoppably, from that small island in the center of the taint. Great magics and bindings placed down by the church of the humans have slowed it, but still it moves forward, sweeping over kingdoms and mountains. The first to go are those with the natural gift for magic, long before most are changed, the taint reaches out and changes those with the ability for magic. The combination of man and beast is unpredictable, unknowable. It happens suddenly, and as far as Brodec knew, since the day the elders changed before his eyes, had never been witnessed by another, always happening alone.
It was that same day, when the fifteen were changed, that the dark side of this mad gift from the gods showed itself. One of those fifteen old men, almost killed all of the others, and did slay three. He was a beast, a monster. The intellect and cunning, wisdom, of man had left him during the change, and the madness of a wild, enraged beast filled him. This happens to this day, more often all the time, rare still, but growing more common, the madness is the dark secret of the Tainted, and in the eyes of the church of the Humans, proof they are beasts that should be slain.
Now however, in the late years of his eighth century as the Raven, Brodec knew it was getting worse. He was part of the magic, not just another of the tainted, or even the first, he was the root of it all, the point on which the ballance between man and beast rested. Now, the madness was changing. Before, it effected only one in every few hundred, and was always instant and total, the change brought it, and it was unmistakable.
No longer was this true. Men and women from one side of the tainted lands to the other had gone mad over the past decade. They seemed to slip down into it. It started slowly, unnoticed until somebody got hurt. Here, in the bowls of his keep, his church, many of those that were slipping into animalistic madness were kept, both to keep them safe and to keep others safe, and because, over time, his company brought them back to themselves, sometimes.
He knew what they felt, for the madness was alive and well within him. Most of the tainted had human minds in changed bodies, those that were mad, animal minds in tainted bodies, he had both, side by side. The voice of the Raven, of nature and the gods, and the voice of his human mind, and their arguments often shook his touch on reality as he warred with himself over what to do, what to feel, and what was real.
Finally, having navigated the maze of halls without any light, following his mental map of the building that had been his home for some seven hundred or so years, he opened a small wooden door and slipped into the most unremarkable, and perhaps most important, room in the land.