The small patch of vibrant green pulsed in the blighted soil, an impossible defiance. Ohto stared at it, a knot tightening in his chest. Anja’s poultice. Her strange, bright tenacity. It had been years since he had seen such unmarred life at Kivikallas. The memory, sharp and cold, struck him then, a needle through the fabric of his carefully constructed apathy.
The early days had brought no horns or scales, only a creeping chill. He was a boy, no older than seven, when he first noticed the numbness. It began in his hands, a dull, insistent ache that made holding his small wooden boat feel like gripping a block of ice. His tutors, worried, had summoned every healer in the duchy, but none could find a cause. Lady Lempi grew increasingly distraught, her eyes pinched with a fear he was too young to comprehend.
Then came talk of the *Luonnonhidas*, the Slow Decay, a wasting sickness that had claimed distant relatives. A rare malady, they said, with no known remedy. Desperate, Lempi had sought out the alchemist, a man with teeth like needles and too-wide grins. The smell of scorched wormwood and ozone clung to Kivikallas for weeks, grease marks tracing sigils over his mother's bedchamber walls. He could still recall her frantic rustling of parchment, her murmurs trailing late into the night over ancient folios, pinned to the promise of a bargain.
The day of the ritual was a blur of shadows and chanting. He had been so frail, shivering despite the heavy furs, his small body wracked with a cough that never seemed to leave. Lempi had held him close, her tears soaking his collar, her voice trembling in his ear as she recited the invocation. The chamber pulsed with an unnatural energy, a cold wind whipping through unseen cracks. Searing heat followed, ripping through tendon and marrow. His skin felt like wood, his bones like granite. He cried out, a thin, reedy sound, as the world swam before his eyes.
Then, silence. The pain receded, replaced by an emptiness that stretched from his fingertips to his soul. He looked up, his vision clearing, to see Lempi swaying, her flushed cheeks bleached bloodless. Her hands, which had just moments ago clutched him so tightly, now trembled, reaching out to him with a terrible, dawning horror. Her lips, dry and cracked, parted, letting out three breathy words devoid of warmth. “What have I done?”
That was it. Not words of love, not relief, but a crushing, soul-deep regret. He had been a child, but he had understood. He was the cause of her despair, the reason for the emptiness in her gaze. He had been cured, yes, but at what price? Her life force, her very vitality, had been twisted into the curse that now bound him. He had watched her waste away in the months that followed, her form growing translucent, her spirit fading until she was nothing but a spectral echo, a perpetual warning in the sealed wing. He had learned then, that some bargains leave scars far deeper than any illness.
The scent of damp earth and the faint sweetness of sap pulled him back to the present. The green patch seemed to glow. He saw Anja then, crouched beside it, her profile sharp and intelligent as she studied the vibrant sprig. Her calculated kindness, he had called it. But her hands, currently brushing a loose particle of soil from the leaf, were undeniably gentle. He moved towards her, the granite of his steps a dull thud on the path.
Anja looked up, her expression shifting from intense focus to that familiar, almost-ditzy cheer. “Lord Ohto! See? It’s thriving! The solution is working, just as I suspected.”
He stopped a few paces from her, the words catching in his throat. How could he tell her what he truly feared? How could he lay bare the true terror that had haunted him for decades? The curse was not merely a physical transformation; it was a slow encroachment of rock, carrying the certainty of an end he could not stop.
“Anja,” he began, his voice rougher than he intended. She tilted her head, waiting, her gaze surprisingly direct. He looked at the fragile green life, then back at her. “You… you spoke of the blight. Of its nature.”
She nodded, pushing a stray strand of flaxen hair from her brow. “Yes. A toxicologist’s view, perhaps not a sorcerer’s. But the principles are similar. A contagion. A parasitic force.”
“It’s more than that,” he said, his voice dropping low. “The petrification… that is merely a symptom. A containment.” He took a step closer, compelled by a need to confess, a need to share the burden that had crushed him for so long. “She bound the *Luonnonhidas* to me. To my very form. The curse contains it. It prevents it from spreading beyond these walls.”
Anja’s cheerful facade faltered. Her eyes, usually so bright, shadowed with comprehension. “The blight… it’s not just killing *you*. It’s trying to escape.”
He met her gaze, his own filled with a raw, unfamiliar vulnerability. “If the final petal falls… if the curse breaks completely… it will not simply mean my end. It will mean the unleashing of the *Luonnonhidas* upon the entire duchy. It will consume Aurinko, turning everything to dust and stone. The blight is not confined to Kivikallas, Anja. It is confined to *me*. And my greatest fear, the one that has driven me to this isolation, to this refusal of any connection… is that I will fail to hold it. That it will break free, and poison the world I have tried so desperately to protect.”
As he spoke, a deep tremor ran through the very foundations of the castle. A faint, sickening grind echoed from the ancient granite. Anja gasped, stumbling slightly. Ohto felt the shock shudder through his calcified ribs. A hairline fracture, thin as a spider silk, appeared on his right cheekbone, spiderwebbing down towards his jaw. From the nascent crack, a fine, grey dust, like desiccated earth, began to weep.