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!"