The Dream Keeper's Dragon

10. Three Hundred Steps to the North

"Oh no, the stuff oozes right out of me. Huge relief when she comes by."

"Right."

"She tried to build her hut with it once, secure the structure. The stuff hardens and becomes hard as a rock, but the sun is too hot here. It cracked and the whole thing came tumbling. Good thing she won three lives off a necromancer in a game of chess."

"Uhu." She bent down to scratch the scab. Talking about seemed to have made it itch even worse.

The ground behind them caught her attention. The green grass had lost its color exactly along the trail which she and Jermyn followed. Aurelie turned around to find that the wildflowers bent over lifelessly and the leaves of the trees curled.

"What's happening?" she asked.

"All living beings will run from you, as you will drain the life from them if they are close. All plants will die at your side. You will take the beauty out of everything that you come close to. And that is how you will survive. If there is no life around you, you will not live," he said aloud, his eyes distant with memory. "That's what she told me the day she turned me into this." He lowered his head to look at his barky body.

"But the Dead Wood has no . . ." Aurelie started to speak right as the realization hit her. "Oh." Her heart sunk. "You were trying to die."

He did not answer.

His pain was evident, no matter how hard he tried to hide it. He seemed quite calm about it, though, which worried her more.

"Why did the curse not break? Do you think she had extra lives as well? She looked quite dead to me." Her bloody handprint on the white face crossed her mind. She shuddered, burying the image deep into her mind.

"There are some curses that are broken with the death, some with a spell, and, well, some cannot be broken at all. This must be one of them. I feared this to be the case, but I have long accepted my fate," Jermyn said.

Aurelie turned back. The trees were half turned into snags, the grass under their feet a golden yellow, and the flowers a rotten brown. The path they walked was marked by his curse. If anyone was to look for them, they'd just have to follow the dead plants Jermyn left under his feet. Jermyn turned and saw Aurelie examining the damage he had caused.

"We cannot stay together," she whispered. Hollowness filled her stomach and traveled up to her chest. Just when she thought that she had a companion, he was ripped away.

"That was never my plan," he replied, and walked forward once again, draining the life out of the nature around him with every step. The grass and flowers leaned toward him, filtering their life into him.

"Jermyn, I have no one else." She stopped and placed a hand on her chest. The pain was hot and raw. "I can't bear having you leave me too. I'm not made for this. For the road or the squatter. I've never even been beyond our cabin without some sort of escort."

"You'll do just fine."

"The King is already on his way," she said, rubbing her eyes with her fingers. She couldn't dare cry in front of Jermyn.

"Aye, he probably is."

"Maybe I can just follow you. We could meet rebels on the road. They must be scattered all over this place. We can look for them together . . . and—"

"No."

Aurelie decided to change the subject to keep him talking. She could see that the death of Marianne and the persistence of his curse tugged at him. If she kept the conversation going, he would be bound by courtesy to say longer. A knot had formed in her throat too. If they kept talking about separation, she'd cry within the next sentence or two and Jermyn already proved to be very poorly equipped when dealing with a crying girl.