It is arguable that Mulgor is the most beautiful stretch of land in Kalimdor. Rolling plains of golden green, wandering herds of kodo, majestic mountains, and sky extending forever in all directions. It was the sheltered heart of the Tauren people. And if Mulgor itself had a sheltered heart, it would be Red Cloud Mesa.
The plainstrider squawked and preened. Wynden pressed against a thin tree, thanking the Earthmother that they were such stupid beasts. No boar would fall for this. Wynden opened herself, reaching upward into the sky. It was a struggle not to laugh as electricity rippled through her, making her fur stand on end. It tickled, it burned, it was life, it was appetite, she was powerful, she was a conduit, she was a spear of light connecting the Earth and the Heavens, she- had spooked the strider with her glow. But lightning can strike over great distances, and the strider's loping run couldn't even hope to outdistance her. The lightning crackled as it exploded from her hands, a fierce bolt of white-blue in the darkness. The strider cried out as tumbled in an ungainly heap of limbs. Wynden hummed as she lashed it to the others and set her sights on the camp.

The man turned back to her.
"Well, welcome then, 'faithful'. Allow me a moment to explain a thing or two before you decide it's time to seek whatever drives you forward: The Holy Light no longer concerns you, the spirits of your forefathers are fairy tales, and the creatures of the Nether don't want you. Do you understand so far?" Melva's mouth trembled.
"No!" He ground his teeth together.
"You are Forsaken. That is the end of the lesson."
"But-"
"Go!" And, whimpering, she did.

-IDK-
Deathknell was the name of the town. It had almost certainly not been called that originally, but that was what it was called now, and as far as the Forsaken were concerned, that was all that mattered. They had a strange way of doing things. Most of them had lost some or all of their memories during the change, and thy had patched together a society based on the scraps they still had. Those, and a burning hatred for the things they had once been. They were bitter. It was understandable. Melva wasn't. She was aggravating the hell out everyone.
They found work for her to do- mostly scavenging for supplies and patching together wounded guards. And thinning the herd.
When she had been sent to kill undead past the fence dividing the town, she had gone willingly. Undead were victims of necromancy, and needed to be freed from this life to move on into the beyond. The necromancers that controlled them were of the Shadow, and were by definition enemies of the Light. Both were motives pure in the eyes of the church and its members. So she had gone out past the gate, and found that the hideous monsters she had been taught to fear looked- well, alot like her. And everyone else she had seen. The guards were watching her, hooting and catcalling while they took bets. Apparently, no one sensible and well mannered had made it here yet.
They didn't look all that different from everyone else. And nothing that shambled in confused circles like that could be especially dangerous. But... they were probably suffering. And she should put a stop to it. She took a deep breath (Not because she needed to, but old habits die hard) and lifted her hands, inviting The Light to fill her, working its will on the trapped soul, smiting the flesh until the spirit could escape. Nothing happened. She reached back, behind and to the left, fingers questing for the place The Light's power came from. Nothing happened. One of the wandering horrors spotted her, standing there with her hands in the air and her jaw slack, and decided it would eat well tonight. It was slow, but she never saw it. The Light... It was gone! She was alone! She was- Forsaken. The zombie hit her. She reeled, and looked to the walls. The guards were laughing. The bets had gotten steeper. They would be no help. She grabbed the little used mace from her belt, and when the creature swung again, so did she.
It was a lucky shot, the sort only players and the completely inexperienced can manage. The charging monster's arms were flailing wildly at her, and she planted the mace into its unprotected face. It wailed, wobbling forward and back as she swung again. And again. The guards stopped laughing. The crying beast tripped over its own feet and toppled. Melva went down with it, swinging. She heard screaming, and it took her several minutes to realize it was her. There was blood and brain matter flying in wild arcs, flung by her frenzied blows. The zombie was dead, and had been since the blow that shattered its face and exposed its squishy grey brains. But Melva did not stop. For the first time, she truly felt forsaken, in every sense of the word, and someone was going to pay for it.
It wasn't until the mace was coming down on dirt that Melva stopped hammering. She looked around. She did not see the entire populace of Deathknell standing along the fence. She saw another shambling zombie and gathered herself to her feet. She reached for The Light, and found nothing there. She screamed again, and charged the monster, howling and swinging the mace.
Someone was going to pay for this.

((Melva haz becomez Undead. Action, mah minionz!))

It was difficult to say what happened after that. Dead people, even the ones who don't lie down and accept the inherent quiescence of death, do not generally forge new memories, at least not in the sense that live people do. Later on, Melva would learn of the terrible carnage that came in that long darkness between death and unlife. But in that darkness, she hung suspended, her mind only aware that there was nothing to be aware of. Her thoughts, slow and few though they were, generally revolved around The Light and the Beyond. This was no sort of haven for eternal peace. Was this empty nothingness a punishment, then? Had she done so poorly in life as to be left in this vast prison? Or was this what happened when you became an undead creature bent to the will of another? What, then, when that zombie died, slain by adventurers or other monsters? Did the soul pass on to the reward the human had been intended for? Or did their actions as a fiend determine what happened after their final death? What if, instead of being killed, they simply rotted apart? Would she be released, or would she be trapped in this timeless limbo forever? Would it matter? Did anything? What if this really was all that happened when people died? What if The Light had simply-
Melva woke up.

-n-
She was in a crypt. Not the temple crypt. Another crypt. It was filled with bodies. Some were old, skeletons, from long before the plague would have dragged them back to their feet. Some were fresher. It was dark, but there was a light. Melva dragged herself to her feet and froze. There was a strange clattering noise from somewhere on the floor. She took another step and heard the noise again, sighing in relief when is occurred to her she was just stepping on something- loose stones or scattered bones. She hiked up her skirts to look and collapsed with a thump that was really more of a click.
Her feet were gone.
Well, they weren't gone gone. The bone parts were there. It was the flesh part that was gone. Her hands were bony, too. And her knees. And her elbows. She felt at her face, swallowing a scream as the tips of her flesh-less fingers touched her skin- which was there. Mostly. The sores were still there, places where the flesh was worn away to show the bone beneath. But mostly, she was still there. Still whole. Still alive. She looked around the crypt. It was filled with death. She looked at the light. It was a torch, burning at the top of the stairs. From somewhere behind and to the right, a grim voice whispered. She turned her head, but there was no one behind her, and the voice moved. She turned, slowly, in a full circle, listening to the voice move with her. There was no one else in the crypt with her. No one alive, any way.
No one Undead, Melva thought. There's no one alive here at all. She tried to shudder, but her shoulders wouldn't cooperate. Apparently, she was going to have to work on that. The smell in the crypt was stifling, and from the stairs came a faint breeze. It smelled like rain.
The choice seemed simple enough.
The stairs were harder to get up than they had been before. She was clumsy, and slow, but the more she moved, the better her control got. She turned, awkwardly, at the top of the stairs, and found herself looking up another flight. But there was no torch at the top of this one. There was a square of sky, and fresh air spilling down onto her rotted face. The world had never smelled so clean. There was a man standing at the top of the stairs. His lips had rotted almost completely away, and he was carrying a rake in one skeletal hand. He laughed when she staggered out into the open.
"We didn't think you were going to wake up! We were going to toss you onto the pyre later today. Good to see you out and about. Head on down the hill and into that building there. They'll give you something to do." He wandered off among the gravestones without another word, raking away leaves and righting tipped over candles. Melva blinked. That seemed- awfully cavalier. Then again, perhaps being dead had given him a somewhat skeewed world view. One in which telling someone you had been planning on burning them later that day and shipping them off into service in the same breath was a perfectly rational statement. There was just no telling. Lacking better instructions, Melva stumbled along the path down into a small town. It was in a state of hideous disrepair, much like its inhabitants. A cluster of guards whistled and catcalled as she went past. She stared at them, baffled. She hadn't been any great beauty before most of her rotted off.
The building the grave keeper had pointed at was a church, although it was in the sorriest state Melva had ever seen one in. The roof and walls were rotting away, and the stained glass windows were shattered. The pews had been dragged out, and the room was filled with undead, and one small goblin-looking little creature. Many of them were deep in conversation, and in one corner an aggravated man was demonstrating a spell for a student, who looked absolutely befuddled by the intricate latticework of flames in his teacher's hands.
"Who were you?" She spun around, and saw hidden behind the door, clinging to the shadows, another undead. He wore the robes of a priest, a Brother of no little consequence, but they were tattered and stained, and the holy symbol on his chest was nearly obliterated.
"Oh, Brother, you-"
"NEVER CALL ME THAT!" The room fell silent as they turned to stare at the screaming man. Melva quailed, cowering under the force of his wrath. He struggled to regain control, glaring at the audience.
"Go about your buisness, you nosy bags of bones!"

Blah, blah, blah. The Scourge overruns Lorderon. Melva, hunting for a cure, lasts longer than most. She eventually sorts out that the plauge is being transmitted via the foodstuffs, the cheese in particular. It is, of course, to late to stop, and Melva becomes a member of the Undead armies of the Lich King.

Maybe I'll write this part later. Right now, we are with the boring. MOVING ON!

Melva pressed her cheek against the woman's mouth, feeling for breath. There was none. She pressed her head against the now bony carapice of her chest, and listened for a heartbeat. Silence. When Ealvin, worried by the long silence, slunk up the stairs several minutes later, he found Melva sitting in the floor with a corpse in her lap, spattered and smeared with blood. Ealvin took a set of sheets off the line and brought them to Melva. In a daze, she began the ritual of death, cleansing the body, wrapping it in the (sort-of) white sheet, and singing the Chant of Release to send her soul into the Beyond. Ealvin gathered the poor woman up and took her down to the flat-bed cart. The pony fussed in his traces. Melva sat by the well again, baffled and confused. There was blood on her skirts.
"Melva? It's time to go." She looked up at Ealvin but did not recognize him.
"There's blood on me."
"Melva-"
"I don't want to go back."
"You don't- what in blazes do you mean, you don't want to go back?"
"If I go back, they'll put me on a detail caring for the other plague victims. Day in and day out, possibly for months or even years, watching people rot alive and go completely mad before they die. I can't do it. I can't. I'm not a strong person, Ealvin. I'm not strong enough to do that."
"Your Light will protect you."
"The Light made me a silly little filly, easily frightened and easily overpowered. It is what I was intended to be."
"Your Light made you a small bright spot in a very dark place. Now we are going to get on that cart and take you back to those other lights, and once you're with them the world won't seem so dark anymore." Melva just stared at him blankly. Ealvin sighed and picked her up.
"When you're back from the Great Dark Beyond or wherever it is you've gone, we are going to have a very serious talk about me carrying you all the time."

-2-
The ride to the massive temple in Lorderon was silent.

-3-
Ealvin was right. As soon as she was inside the city walls, Melva's spirits lifted. By the time she spotted the bell tower, the second highest point in the city, the whole grisly mess seemed washed from her thoughts.
The city was quieter than it should have been, but apparently reports of evacuation had been greatly exaggerated. The market bustled, the rogues hustled, and the guards and the petty criminals tussled. The world was as it should be.
The pony's clip-clops echoed wildly in the stone passageway into the temple. They were greeted on the other side by a sea of ragged children, capering wildly as they danced the dances of small children. Dolls and wooden swords were fought over, large leather balls soared through the air, and various sweets were divied up and negotiated over with more enthusiasm than some ambassadors could muster over countries. They bounded over the the cart, clamoring with questions and complaints, petting the frightened little pony and bouncing the cart on its wheels. They did, until they spotted its grim cargo. As if by magic, a hole opened up around the cart. The chattering stopped, the playing stopped, the capering stopped. Their dirty little faces went stony and solemn as the let the death cart pass. Suddenly one of the children started to chant:
"Don't ever laugh as the cart goes by or you will be the next to die; don't ever laugh as the cart goes by or-" Others joined him, until they were a symphony of superstition. A haggard looking man carrying a battered helmet and a load of wood waded into them, barking about keeping quiet and orderly or they could just live on the streets with the other urchins, by The Light. The children obediently scattered across the courtyard, disappearing into little shelters they had obviously made themselves of discarded linens and broken planks. The grass, full and lush and healthy a week ago, was already showing signs of wear from the sudden strain of having an army of children constantly traipsing across it.
"What do you want?" asked the haggard man. "We've no more room for refugees, no money, no medicine, and no food. So get on with you."
"Hey now! She's a priestess!" The man brightened somewhat.
"More hands we'll take. Where were you, little Lightbringer? Off on some epic quest to save souls and thwart evil?"
"I was sent to heal a woodswoman. She had a fever that drove her mad, and seeping pustules that smelled like death itself." The haggard man's face darkened a good deal more than it had brightened.
"Well?"
"She's in the back of the cart. She was briefly lucid, but died imediately afterward." He took the pony's bridle and lead it deeper into the compound.
"Any ideas about what caused it? Or how to cure it?"
"When it was just one, I thought it was a bite from an animal. I don't see how an animal could have bitten all those people, though." The man made a noise in his throat that could have been negative or affirmative. He stopped the cart and whistled. A pair of scrawny boys spilled through a doorway. There was a brief conference, and they took the woman's body inside. The
haggard man led the pony on again, this time to a stable.
"Ours just started dying today. They wake up, start talking to people, ad for a few minutes it looks like they'll be fine, the whole thing was just a fluke, and it will all be alright in the end. Then they spew blood everywhere and go toes up. Beg pardon for the language, miss."
"How many?"
"I stopped counting after ten, and decided to settle for 'a heap'. But one of the priests is keeping a record of the thing, and he'd know. Spends all his time scribbling away in that book of his. You can ask him if you want to know that bad."Melva left Ealvin and the pony with the haggard man and went looking for Olivia.
Olivia was the priestess in charge of training the new priests who came to the temple to study. She had been Melva's superior for many years, and had nominated her from the ranks for the trip into the woods. She was a darkskinned woman with a face that looked as if it had been made by a blacksmith rather than an artist, and an attitude to match it. The young warriors who came to the temple seeking succor after their own trainers had beaten them bloody took one look at Olivia and spun on their boot heels. At the moment, she was deep in conference with a number of other ranking Brothers and Sisters of The Light. She was attempting to out scream a baby-faced paladin, whose fingers kept creeping to the mace in her belt. Brother Jervis, a fat, jolly looking man, spotted her through the fray and cheered. The squabbling stuttered to a halt as they stared in confusion at the smiling priest. He pointed at Melva triumphantly.
"She's back."Immediately she was bombarded with questions.
"What happened?"
"Is she alive?"
"Do you know what caused it?"
"How long did she live?"
"Give us the details."
"No time for details, just give us the basics."
"In the details lie the subtle nuances of the disease. So piss off!"
"We need to know everything!"
"We need to get moving!"
"She doesn't know anything."
"She might have the keys to the thing!"Melva sighed. So often the Lightblessed could be so Lightblinded.

-4-
Eventually, she gave two reports. One to the impatient, and one to the obsessive. Neither one lead to a cure. They did not know it, but already Lorderon was well past being cured.

-5-
It was good to be back in her own bed, tucked under the eaves in an awkward little corner of the priestess' quarters, which is to say the attic over the library. Melva pulled the heavy blankets over her head and fell asleep to the scent of wool with a hint of decay. And she dreamed.
The dining hall was filled with people. They were packed in together shoulder to shoulder, standing on every horizontal surface. They were all talking at once, in a thousand different languages. And they were eating cheese. It was the cheap yellow stuff that even the poorest of farmers could afford. Melva hated that cheese. It tasted strange, somehow uncheese-like. And hundreds of people were gatherd here to eat it. A man offered her a plate. She took it, and when she touched the cheese something black began to ooze out of it. She screamed and threw the plate. At once, everyone in the hall began to scream, the blood curdling shrieks of damned souls.
Melva woke up screaming. She stuffed her fingers in her mouth to keep from waking up the other girls. It took a long moment to realize that there was still screaming. The other girls were thundering footsteps and a coarse grating noise as the curtains over their one window were pulled back.
"Oh, Blessed Light preserve us!"Melva threw off the covers and ran to the window. The doors of the building where the corpses of the dead had been housed were open. That was not a cause for alarm. But the courtyard was filled with those corpses, staggering around in lopsided circles. The children ran from their hiding places, call in for their parents as they ran into the waiting arms of the undead. The monsters scooped up the children and, with the same studious concentration the woodswoman had studied her bound wrist, began eating their dirty little faces. The children screamed. The priestesses screamed. From high above them, the warning bells tolled. One of the girls took charge of them, taking her mace in one hand and a lantern in the other as she told them to do likewise and herded them downstairs to the battle ready older priests and paladins.
The grass was red with the blood of children. The monsters, having eaten the children, seemed to be clumsily seeking an exit. With a roar, the Lightbringers spilled out into them, weapons gleaming in the torchlight, holy power surging in wild bursts of color. The animated dead turned toward them with a confused groan. Melva somehow wound up with her back pressed against a tree and her fingers over her mouth. Her mace had gotten lost somewhere. She was terrified. The battle raged around her, and everywhere she looked someone was commiting the sort of bravery that made stories and songs. A trio of acolytes, no more than thirteen, were pouncing on one of the corpses and smashing its skull with a wooden disk. It probably had a holy symbol on it, but the blood and brains covering it made it hard to tell. One of the paladins, an old, grey headed man, swung a sword as tall as she was and three heads toppled to the ground together. A man she didn't know fell at her feet, intestines spilling out. The zombie lurched at him, slavering. From somewhere behind and slightly to the left, Melva felt white heat pour into her. It raced down her arms and exploded out of her hands, enveloping the monster. A second pulse poured through her, spilling into the downed man. His innards slurped back inside like noodles into a mouth, and the flesh knit over them. Someone nearby laughed. It was Olivia, her hair slicked against her head by gore. Her eyes burned with a terrible light. She was enjoying this.
"There may be hope for you yet!"

Melva would never understand why some people liked to live so far away from civilization. Sure, the forests and meadows were green and lush, the rivers and ponds clear and blue, the wildlife docile and people-shy, but who would choose all of this appallingly pastoral tranquility over the soothing clamour of a busy Lorderon market? More importantly, living alone in the wilds meant that you could lay dying on your own front step for days before anyone noticed you were missing and sent a handy adventurer after you.
Unfortunately for this woman, the handy adventurer had been a hunter, rather than a priest or a paladin, and the poor man had been unable to do more than move her inside out of the sun and race back into the small town of Brill to get a healer. The traveling druid he found there had immediately declared that the woman needed more than her rudimentary skills, and sent a letter to the temple at Lorderon for a priest to come and provide their more advanced healing powers. Melva had been sent.
The woman was dying. The fever that had ravaged her body had left her weak and vulnerable. The priestess had tried, but her medical prowess, both magical and mundane, had had no effect on the woman. Melva planted her hands on the stone wall of the well and sighed. Her patient was in pain, excruciating pain that left her crying out at all hours of the day and night, and no amount of persuasion had convinced The Light to save her. She couldn't even ease the pain.
People died all the time. In a kingdom the size of Lorderon, several citizens a day went on into the Beyond, and left their friends and families with heart-hurt and questions for the priests and priestesses of The Light.
There was another tortured scream from inside the house.
"People shouldn't have to die like this."
"People always die like this." Melva clapped her hands over her mouth to smother her squawk as Ealvin dropped onto the well beside her. His pack thumped against the stones with a metallic ring.
"Ha. Scared you."
"Of course you scared me! I'm keeping a death watch!"
"Shouldn't you be inside the house for that?" Melva stared down the well.
"I'm waiting for the screaming to stop."
"So this is the benevolence of your blessed Light?"
"Ealvin!" He jumped to his feet.
"It's senseless! It's cruel! If a person were doing this to her, you'd be the first person to smite him!"
"Remember that The Light has a purpose for all of us, Ealvin. She's in pain now, but-"
"Why is she in pain? What possible purpose could that have? If she has to die, why can't it be quick and quiet in her sleep? Why this screaming spectacle? Why is she in pain your potions and poultices have no effect on? Why doesn't The Light hear her? Isn't that what It's there for? To help and heal? WHY IS SHE DYING?"
"WHY ARE YOU YELLING AT ME?" The glared at each other across the small grassy yard.
"Talk to me, Ealvin. Tell me what's wrong." He rubbed his gauntleted hand across his face.
"When was the last time you were at the church?"
"I've been here for days. Why?"
"Because she's not the only one." Suddenly, the whole conversation felt worlds away. There couldn't be more. Not more people suffering like this.
"How many?"
"For every ten people in Lorderon, six have fevers that can't be controlled and are in screaming pain at all times. The best anyone can do is put them to sleep and keep them there."
Another shriek from inside.
This isn't happening, Melva thought. This is a dream. A horrible nightmare. I've fallen asleep against the wall in the church kitchen, I've slipped in the mud and knocked my head, I've had my mind stolen by murloc sorcerers, anything so long as this is not happening. Ealvin was still talking.
"-epidemic. People are evacuating as fast as they can get their oxen yoked and heading to Stormwind."
"The Stormwind priests won't let them in." He stopped.
"How did you know-"She laughed bitterly.
"Are you even listening to yourself? Lorderon is plague ridden! The citizens of Stormwind can't let them across the border until they know they aren't infected. Which means they will get infected, setting up shanty towns all along the roads and living off of what they can scavenge. If not with this strange new plague, then with one of the usual ones." She laughed again. "Those might be the lucky ones. If they recognise an ailment, the priests might let the person across to be treated." Ealvin gaped.
"Have you lost your mind? Lucky?"
Another blood curdling howl.
"We may all want to get lucky very quickly. How many have died?"
"None, yet." Melva began ticking off days on her fingers.
"She was out here for at least a week before people came looking for her. Conservative estimate of five days. Took three to get me through red tape and out here to her, eight days. I've been here for nine days, so she's been down for a total of seventeen days. Are children or the elderly getting it?" Ealvin was looking a bit panicked
"Yes to the old folks, no to the kiddies."
"Noted. We take off four days for the aged and we have thirteen days plus however many more she lives to find some kind of a cure. If the children aren't catching it, they may be where we need to look. I want you to-"
There was a crash from inside the house. Melva lunged to her feet and raced inside, Ealvin on her heels with blade drawn. She threw open the door into the bed room and heard Ealvin retch and reel back into the other room. He had a point. It reeked in there.
The woman's body was covered in hideous sores, seeping pus onto the sheets and filling the air with the aroma of rotting flesh. The fever had burned away at her body, leaving her skeletally thin. Her eyes were dark and sunken, and goop from the sores on her face dripped into them.
The sickness had drawn in every part of her as tightly as possible, leaving papery skin stretched taut across the shape of her bones and her hands and feet gnarled and curled into claws. Every part of her but her mouth, which gaped like a raw red wound, greedily devouring everything in front of it. The druid had been able to heal her wrist, and had only mentioned it thinking that some animal had tried to eat her, and that they sometimes carried diseases. She had been half right. The first night Melva was there, the woman stopped her wailing and began to gnaw on her arm. Blunt human teeth didn't do much damage with the priestess there to stop her, but left alone for days with her own madness, it was a simple thing to think that she had injured herself.
At the moment, that night was at the forefront of Melva's thoughts, primarily because the woman's hand was dangling loose in it's restraint, completely unattatched to the arm it had been born on. The thump had been her spilling out of the bed as she lurched for the door. She was ponderously studying the wrist that remained tied, patting the bloody stump where her left hand had been against the ground. It made a strange noise and Melva's mind took a brief vacation as it tried to catagorize it instead of coping with the madness.
The soft squelch of blood being pressed into reminded her of mud being walked on, the thick sort of mud where continual rain divided it into two parts- the bottom solid, and the top mostly water but solid looking. The flesh was making an odd rasping sound ans it dragged across the wooden floor, and the jut of bone did, too. But the sounds were different, the first like a broom across a dirty floor, and the second more like-
The woman-monster noticed Melva standing frozen in the doorway and screamed again. Melva did not move. The creature pounced, free arm flailing wildly at Melva's head. Two things saved her life at that moment. First, that the sickness had stolen the woman's control over her own limbs and her blows wouldn't have landed even if her hand had still been attatched. Second, she was still tied to the bed. That didn't stop her from trying, though.
Ealvin, recovered from the smell, lurched back into the room. Melva did not move. He poked the door closed with his sword. Melva did not move. He touched her shoulder. Melva did not move. He grabbed her around the waist and hauled her downstairs and set her on a wooden bench. Melva did not move. He fished around in his bag for some cheese and waved it under her nose. Melva did not move. Ealvin sighed and scratched his head.
"You'll forgive me for this later." And he upended a bottle of water over her head.
Melva, predictably, screeched like an irate cat and punched him in the ribs.
"Sorry, sorry! You wouldn't wake up!"
"And so you dumped water on me?" She pulled the pin out of her bun, sending soaked blonde hair spilling over her shoulders. "Blast and blast and blast! I'm soaked!" She twisted her hair between her hands, wringing out the water.
"Look, what happened up there? What's wrong with her?"
"She's sick. The fever's burning her brain, and it's making her crazy. She's attacking herself and everyone around her. Are the others like this?"
"Like I said, they've been putting them to sleep and keeping them there. Why does it smell like that?"
"The sores. I think they're rot."
"Dead things rot, Mel. Not live people."
"Apparently, that is not the case. Doesn't it smell at the church?"
"They have people washing away the gross all day, and windows open to let in the air. It smells some, but not that much."
"Well, she's been shut away with a sponge bath every other day and a linen change every four. Of course it smells."
"Why haven't you-"
"Because she's mad and she keeps trying to bite me. That's why."
"Are we just going to leave her up there?"
"I'll keep throwing food at her, but other than that yes, we're leaving her in there."
"That isn't exactly humane."
"She isn't exactly human anymore, now is she?" There was a series of thuds and the sound of something, probably the bed, being dragged. Melva swore and dragged herself to her feet.
"Melva?"
"I have to make sure she isn't hanging herself or something." She mounted the stairs wearily, and dragged open the door like a woman walking to the gallows.
Her patient was sitting cross legged on the floor, staring at her left arm. More specifically, she was staring at the end of her left arm, which was now about six inches closer to her body than it had been yesterday. Her eyes were clear and focused as she looked up at Melva.
"What happened to my hand? I can't find it."
"It's on the bed. Over there." She turned, slowly but deliberately, and looked over the edge of the bed.
"Well look at that. It is. I don't know how I could have over looked it. Say, do you have anything to eat? I'm so hungry."
"Well, I-" The woman choked, and began to vomit blood and gobbets of her own flesh. Melva, finally presented with a situation she knew how to handle, snatched the basin off the table and set it in front of her charge, tipping her over it and pulling back her hair. She automatically began spouting the comforting nonsense noises healers and mothers had used the world over to comfort sick patients and children.
"You're such a good girl, just let it com up, better out than in-" As quickly as it started, the vomiting stopped. Melva gently tipped the woman back against the bed and went to wipe her mouth.
But the woman was dead.

Well, I've got a number of ideas for my Nano. Zombies feature largely in all of them.

My original idea (Ok. The one I thought I was going to use through most of September and October.) was a Sci-Fi Cyber-Punk Zombie deal. Very Blade Runner meets early Heinlein. But without the misogyny.

The idea I'm pretty sure I'm using now is based in the WOW universe, using an Undead Priest character. I want to explore the personal ramifications of her becoming Forsaken and learning to live as an abomination against her own faith.

The drugs aren't helping.

This! This is my NaNo 07 blog. Fear it! FEAR!