Who: Valen What: Another episode. Where: Clifty Falls State Park When: Evening, 10/6 to morning 10/7 Warnings | Status: Mentions of sickness, disease and drug addiction | Narrative | Complete
The smell of cooked bacon wafted through the air from the campfire. It tormented and tantalized Valen's senses precisely because it wasn't the lucrative smell of nivat seeds. A hole burned in his stomach in the oval shape of nivat, and floated before his waking eyes and even when he slept. When he'd first turned to the Doulon to control his damnable sickness, Valen had sworn that he'd not work his life around his cravings and for the most part that held true. He'd never worried for his supply of nivat or where it would come from until a few days prior to an episode. The small aches and pains of daily life he could ignore, reducing his need for the Doulon to once a month.
The Doulon was a damnable spell that converted pain to pleasure, and he'd used it to curb the sickness that had haunted him since he was seven years old. The only trouble was that Valen couldn't tell the remedy from the disease anymore. It was a sickness of its own.
His disease had been a damnable thing that had eaten away at him for the last twenty years. Every day since he was naught but a boy in the nursery he'd suffered through restlessness, but it wasn't merely the eagerness of an excitable child. It was a restlessness that ignited a torrent of fire in his veins and flooded his senses with over stimulation. Everything he heard, looked on, smelled or otherwise sensed left him overexposed and raw to his core, so that by night's end he was left senseless. By the time he'd turned ten, the attacks happened far more frequently and grew worse so that they left him mewling and sobbing for hours, and as the years progressed, days. Things as simple as candlelight blinded him, whispers ripped at his nerves, and touch was like hot iron on his skin.
Twenty-eight days. His sickness struck him down every twenty-eight days, but since he'd been abandoned by Boreas on the damnable goat track to die, it had struck at a mind numbing twenty-one day. And another twenty-one had passed since then. Valen had found no sign of nivat, and no suitable replacement had come to the fore since his arrival in this damnable land. That was why he lay on the blanket in the lean-to, looking skyward at the tarp without truly seeing it. The need for the nivat burned, but it wasn't even that that was troubling him. His last episode had seen his addiction to the nivat burned out, and all that was left was the pain of his disease.
The knot in his stomach had burned early in the day, it had tightened considerably more though all he'd done to avoid it. It was the tell-tale sign of an attack. He'd moved camp, set up his shelter, built a fire.. set new snares.
You don't need it, you fool. It'll pass, if you'd think on anything else.
Only it hadn't, now as the hours moved on and the sun arced across the sky to settle on the horizon, the knot had boiled down to a tiny shape the size of nivat, and his skin prickled like goose flesh. Sweating, Valen pulled his shirt off his body and wiggled out of his trousers, throwing both away as he rolled over and buried his face in the blanket laid out beneath him.
Holy Mother.
He'd gone four days without nivat the last episode, he'd sooner drop off a cliff than endure that misery again. But what choice did he have?