Online:Gathiel's Diary

This wasting disease eats at me, taking a little more of me each day. It takes all I have not to give in to despair and self-pity. Why me? Why now? I am young, and I have done my best to treat my neighbors with kindness, support my clan, love my husband, and care for the forest.

It's worse when I see what this has done to poor Eranas. He does not sleep. He hardly eats. Day and night he is hunched over his workbench, trying new mixtures with the dead plants he's gathered from the forest floor.

I tell him he mustn't let his own health suffer on my account, but I can see how much it pains him to see me this way. Meanwhile, I grow weaker. My hand shakes as I write this.

This morning I woke to my husband sitting over me. There were tears in his eyes. He gave me a potion to drink, but once again, there was no change in my illness. It's useless. As long as he insists on keeping the Green Pact, the potions will never be potent enough, even if they are the right ones.

It seems my husband has had the same thought. While he was gone today, I searched through his workbench. I found a book on rare horticulture. It fell open to a tear-stained entry on Sanguine Alendil, the sacred blossom, and its association with cures for wasting sickness.

I know my husband. He would never cut the sacred flower, but I'm not willing to die when there's hope of a cure. The Green Pact can't be a suicide pact, can it? The forest is supposed to care for us. I am too weak to harvest Sanguine Alendil myself, but I will find a way.

It is done. I have arranged that my husband will find the plant, already cut, in the forest where he searches for dead flowers each morning. I have no regrets.