Fleeting images of the madness that had descended on the sleep little village kept flitting back and forth across her mind, images graven on her heart and soul.  They were fuzzy around the edges, as if the sickness that had laid waste to her body had somehow tried to do the same with her mind.  She staggered forward, but her eyes were empty, turned inwards towards a brutal landscape that defied comprehension.  She knew she should be feeling something.  Sorrow, despair...anything at all.  But she felt dead inside, a thing completely bereft of human emotions.  It was frightening, but even fright was too strong an emotion.  Empty.<br/><br/>The apparition in the road ahead resolved itself slowly through a haze of unshed tears.  She had to blink them away, stopping, swaying in the road as she watched it approach.  She could not be certain in herself that this creature wasn't but a fever-induced hallucination, a nightmare that would suddenly sprout spiders' legs and gnashing teeth, to rip her flesh from bones.  "Are...you real?" she murmured, staring hard at the long eared stranger.  Elf kin were a rarity, but she was too distraught to be taken by the wonder of meeting one in the flesh.  Even more so because she was convinced that she<span style="font-style: italic">was</span>delirious, and this was naught but a fever dream.<br/><br/><span style="color: #66ccff">Jax crooked an eyebrow. Oh boy. "Of course I am real. You look more dead than living, though. Just like the people in Marins Creek, if that's where you're heading." Taking pity on the girl, she forced her mildly disgusted grimace to turn into a smile. "What's your name?"</span><br/><br/>The girl gave a start when the apparition spoke, and could have melted with relief.  Not some vengeful apparition, and not a sign of incipient madness, either.  She regarded the woman wearily for a moment before replying.  "I...feel awful."  Certainly true enough.  Every joint ached, and her lungs seemed to ache even more than that.  The pounding in her head matched the rhythm of her heart, each pulse driving an icicle behind her eyes.  It took her a moment to continue.  "But better than I did before.  I-"  The rest of the woman's words hammered home, then, like a blow to her gut.  She stared blankly at her, and then slowly shook her head.  "D-dead?  All...all of them?"  There was stark incredulity in her voice.  Incredulity, or simply an overwhelming desire to not believe in what she already sensed was true.<br/><br/>She stood there, mouth opening and closing soundlessly, head shaking in denial.  Dead, all dead.<span style="font-style: italic">No...they can't be!  There has to be someone, somewhere...some how?</span>A tear gleamed in her eye, and then cut a track through the grime on her pallid face.  It was soon followed by others.  "N-no!  That can't be!" she cried out, and shook her head more violently, sending droplets scattering through the air, twinkling like gemstones in the fiery late afternoon sunlight.<span style="font-style: italic">No!  My Aunt, she was hale when last...no, it can't be!</span>Her traitorous mind supplied other details, details that had been held back for oh so short a time.  Two corpses on a bed, bloated and filling the room with their own stink.  A feast for worms?  No, maggots had claimed them.  She could see, in her minds eye, her brothers' swollen body laying on his bed, face black and neck swollen so that his final moments had been little more than tortured attempts to draw just one more breath.  Half eaten face, bone gleaming pinkish in the failing afternoon light while the maggots danced across his rotten flesh.  "N-no....there has to..to..."<br/><br/><span style="color: #66ccff">"I'm afraid so," Jax replied simply. What was there to add? The girl fell to her knees, sobbing.</span><br/><br/>Her words trailed off into incoherent sobs.  She curled in on herself as if she could protect her heart from the poisoned barbs the world was driving into her flesh, one after another.  Skin proved a poor barrier to reality, though.  She was too weak to shriek in her grief, but her sobs echoed well enough in the tomb of her homeland.<br/><br/><span style="color: #66ccff"> "Uh, you, uh..." Jax wrung her hands, uncertain of what to do faced with the emotional devastation before her. She sighed and knelt down, tilting her head in an attempt to get a better look at the girl's face.  "Listen, there is nothing you can do for them, trust me," she said quietly. "I was just there. There is nothing for you there. Do you have anywhere else to go? A nearby town, a family member...?"</span><br/><br/>After a long moment, the girl slowly regained some hold of herself.  There was strong metal in her, buried deep, but even the strongest steel could only take so much before it broke.  Running a dirty hand across her face to dash away the tears from eyes made redder from the paleness of her skin, she slowly shook her head.  "No."  She sniffed, and had to clamp down on another wave of sobbing before it could pull her back under again.  "All of my family lived h-here. They are...they are..."<span style="font-style: italic">Dead</span>.  The word rang across her conscious mind like a struck gong, and the wave of despair washed over her again.  For a time, she couldn't be bothered to gather the pieces of her soul, content to wallow in her grief.<br/><br/>Eventually it passed.  She squeezed her eyes shut, nd raised her tear streaked face to this strange woman.  "I...have never left this valley in my life. They say Eloria is a big kingdom...but I only know this piece." she said in a hollow, forlorn voice.  Her eyes were the picture of pain itself, a soul stretched over coals and unable to escape.<br/><br/><span style="color: #66ccff"><span style="font-style: italic">Damn.</span> Jax waited patiently for her to breathe just a little more normally before pressing on. She didn't know this girl, not in the slightest, but she'd be buggered if she just left her in the middle of nowhere on the brink of death after delivering news like that.<br/><br/>"Hear me out," she said, hesitantly placing a hand on the girl's shoulder after a quick look has assured her there were no weird growths or rotting patches of flesh there. "I am not from around here, either. I, too, am looking for a place to go. Why don't we find one together, eh? I've got water and a bit of food, and I'm not - terrible at getting more, either. So, let's find somewhere a little nicer for you, eh? You won't last long on your own in that state." Jax held out her half-empty waterskin to the girl. "How's it sound?"</span><br/><br/>She flinched from that touch.  Even through cloth, the woman's hand was like ice against her fevered body.  At least the plague that had taken everyone else had left her alive.  She had gotten sick again, but that at least was a more mundane sickness, and far less dire.  In perspective, at least.  "You...are an outlander?" she asked, incredulous.  It should have been obvious; after all, there were no elf kin in Marin's Creek or anywhere else in the local range.  Their kind were found in the forests further north, and further south in the wildlands.  "No one comes here.  They call it...called it..." a shadow crossed her face, and for a moment it looked like those dark eyes would let loose another flood.  She mastered herself, barely.  "They called it the back end of forever."  Her words were a barely heard whisper.<br/><br/>The back end of forever was as apt a term as there was ever to be for this sleepy part of the world.  The Elorian Mountains stretched from sea to sea across the wide spit of land connecting the lower continent to the icy northern wilderness.  There were very few passes through them, and aside from a trading post on the border of the ice fields much further north, there were no towns of any size beyond the range.  The mountains were often jokingly called 'The wall at the end of the world'.  Somewhat jokingly.<br/><br/>Not really wanting too, she tried to get to her feet.<span style="color: #66ccff">"Well, 'outlander' is nicer than some of the other things I get called on occasion," Jax mumbled, hooking an arm around the girl's shoulder to help her up.</span>She made no reply to that comment, using the other woman's support to take some of the weight off her aching bones, fever heated flesh pressed close the the elf.  "I was sick for weeks.  I got better, but then I got sick again with something else."  She hung onto the staff like it was her support, that and the outlander woman whom she had never met before today.  "Thank you.  My name is...is..."  Her voice trailed off, faint to begin with, into silence.  She looked confused.<span style="font-style: italic">What is my name?</span>That expression deepened into horror.<span style="font-style: italic">Who am I?  What is my name?</span>"What...what is my name?  Why can't I remember my name?"<span style="color: #66ccff"> Just as she was getting fairly certain she could stand on her own, the girl immediately panicked. Jax was having none of it.  The sun was burning, the road was dusty, she was tired and disappointed and there was just no time for mysteries that couldn't be solved on the road.<br/><br/>"I'll just call you Plaguerat until then, if that's all right with you," Jax said, steering the distressed girl down a fork in the road that lead toward a forest, visible some way in the distance. "If you wanna come, we're going now. I've had enough of this place."</span><br/><br/>She shuffled along gamely, a flash of irritation burning quickly in her eyes.  It was the first time an emotion other than sorrow had expressed itself on her face, but it didn't last for very long.  She was too tired and hurt too much to be angry at such childish disrespect.  The pain was far worse than the weariness, truth to tell.  "But," she began, but never finished the sentence.  It dawned on her then what they were doing, and a different kind of sorrow came to her.  They were going to leave the only place she had ever known.  If she hadn't cried herself out before, she would surely be weeping now.  First her family, and now everything she had ever known.  All in the space of one afternoon.<span style="font-style: italic">Why is this happening?</span>There was no answer to that silent question.<br/><br/>The silence was oppressive, and sick and tired or not, she longed to break it.  "So...what were you doing here, anyway?" she asked, not out of any true curiosity.  Her whole thoughts were elsewhere, on places familiar and faces as well, all receding into a place where they would remain forever: memory.<br/><br/><span style="color: #66ccff">"Eh, y'know, working," she replied as vaguely as possible, not wanting to tell the girl that the reason she had come was to see if there was anything worth stealing from her now dead friends and family. Tall, silver beeches had begun to appear on either side of the trail, casting a pleasant shadow. Jax looked at Plaguerat, still stumbling along, helped by her staff.<br/><br/>"You're lucky you survived," she said, not entirely sure if the girl really was.</span><br/><br/>She cast tired eyes around her, looking at the trees beginning to crowd up to the road.  The forest this low was more deciduous than anything, but she knew when they began to climb the pass out it would change character quickly, to coniferous giants.  And could care less.  She turned, and looked at her 'rescuer'.<br/><br/>Almost as if reading the woman's mind, she replied.  "Am I lucky?"<span style="font-style: italic">Cursed....with life when all else I know have perished.  No, not lucky at all.<br/><br/>Far from it.</span>