The battle between a mage's will and the Curse of Blood, Melissa told me, can only last for the time between the sun setting on the third night after the infection and until midnight on the same night, yet Hilde's battle against the Curse of Blood seemed to take an eternity. I shouldn't have been so invested in her battle. After all, I only met these people, and our meeting was far from friendly. And yet, I found myself on the edge of my metaphorical seat, together with Melissa, watching the dwarven woman's struggle.

I didn't notice when Jared came back to the fire. I think it was sometime during Melissa's tale. He sat away from the two of us, but still within the circle of firelight, and was watching Hilde with just as much intensity.

As midnight drew nearer, I found myself more and more restless. I came from a different world, a world were magic and curses were nothing but stories, and yet it seemed as if I should be able to do something for Hilde. My vision kept switching between its normal mode and the mode which, I now suspected, allowed me to see magical forces. The spell Hilde was casting hovered on the edge of my understanding. I felt like I was looking at a drawing of an electrical circuit, but with all the symbols for electrical components switched with unrecognizable symbols that looked like Herr Morgenstern's runes. I knew that I could short circuit Hilde's spell with ease, just like I now understood that I did to that skeleton. But disrupting Hilde's spell would doom her, and I had no idea how to do something that would help.

I considered, for a few moments, trying to short circuit the black markings inside her, since I assumed that they were at the very least related to the Curse, but I had no idea how to get to them without hurting Hilde and destroying her spell.

I tried asking Melissa about it, but just to my surprise, she told me that she couldn't actually see magic the way I could. In fact, she never even heard of such an ability before.

"How do you use magic without being able to see it?" I asked her.

"Learning magic is a lot like learning to read, except in reverse," she answered. It was clear that she was once again looking for something to distract her from her companion's struggle. "You start by memorizing combinations of words and movements that cause a spell to happen, and eventually start to understand what the individual sounds and motions mean, and how to replace one with the other and eventually create your own spells."

"Why are you even talking to this fool?" Came a derisive question from Jared. "It's clear that he knows nothing of magic, and just trying to puff up his own importance."

"And yet this fool managed to kill a skeleton without damaging its bones." Answered Melissa.

"Or he found the skeleton, got scared by the bones, ran away, and lied to us about it."

I don't consider myself a violent man, but at that moment I seriously contemplated punching Jared's nose. Of course, he was armed, and obviously knew how to use his weapons. All I had was the folding blade on my multi tool.

"Oh, just shut up, Jared. Hilde is fighting for her life, and all you do is whine." Melissa sounded as fed up with the man as I was, and Jared just huffed and turned his back to us.

I already knew that their words and movements created the woven circuits I could see, and that those circuits would in turn cause various effects, but that did nothing to help me understand the circuits themselves, and from everything Melissa told me, I already knew that there was nothing her own method of spell casting could do to help Hilde. My frustration grew the closer we got to midnight. I knew, somehow, that I should be able to help Hilde subvert the Curse, but I also knew that trying anything with my nearly nonexistent knowledge would be more likely to hurt than to help.

The only way I had to tell time was the size of the black marks of the curse inside Hilde, but I judged it mere minutes before midnight when her chanting changed tempo, and started to crescendo. Her voice kept rising for about a minute, and the last words came out in a shout, which coincided with her arriving at the center of her circle and standing still.

Magic surged inside the circle, visible now even to my normal sight, and swirled around her in a bright white vortex. The magic vortex span faster and faster, drawing closer and closer to the center point where Hilde stood, eventually drawing into her body. My vision switched to magic mode again, and I saw the intricate white strands that were Hilde's spell wrap around the black marks of the Curse and slowly force them to take on a new shape. The marks fought back against the spell, and Hilde started screaming, her already raw voice expressing the pain of having two opposing spells wrestling inside her.

The fight continued for long minutes, but eventually I could see that one by one the black marks bending under the onslaught, and being forced into the shape Hilde's spell chose for them. And whenever a black mark lost the fight, it would merge with Hilde's white magic and take on a bright copper color. With each black mark that lost the fight, the rest would visibly weaken, and before long it was clear that Hilde was winning the fight against the curse. Eventually, the last black mark was Subverted, and my vision switched back to normal as Hilde staggered towards the edges of her circle.

"Hilde?" Asked Jared fearfully, "Is that you, or…" he couldn't finish the sentence, as Hilde turned towards him.

"Thirsty…" She moaned in a ragged voice that bore little resemblance to her rich chanting from the beginning of the evening. "So thirsty…"

"Give me the liquid of life!" croaked Hilde as she started to stagger towards Jared, and he backed away from her in fear, and I thought I interpreted the magic vision wrong. That Hilde had fallen to the curse and was now a vampire.

Jared fumbled with his weapons, his obvious terror interfering with the weapon skills I knew he had. Melissa rose and took lifted her staff, getting ready to blast the undead creature that used to be her companion with her magic.

And then, Hilde knelt next to a cloth sack, and rummaged inside it. When she rose again to her feet, a ceramic jug was clutched in her right hand, and she bit of the cork, spat it to her side, and drank deeply from something so alcoholic that I could smell it from across the fire.

"Good dwarven mead!" Laughed Hilde after she finally took the jug away from her mouth. "Truly, the liquid of life itself!"

Jared slit down to the ground, his relief at finding out that Hilde wasn't after his blood evident. Melissa, however, seemed to be more angry than relived.

"Hilde!" She yelled as she walked towards her friend, staff still clutched tightly in her hand. "You… you… you… Agh!" she raised her hands in disgust. "How could you?"

"I’m sorry, Mel. You know I can never resist pulling Jared's leg. And I truly did need a drink. More than I've ever needed one before."

"Foolish dwarf." Melissa started sobbing, the tension of the previous hours brought to a head by Hilde's practical joke. "Don't you ever scare me like that again!"

"I'm sorry Melissa. I should have thought about how terrible it must have been for you, watching me fight the Curse and preparing yourself to killing me if I failed. Come on. We could all use something to eat and some rest."

"Something to eat" turned out to be dark travel bread and jerked beef, which they gladly shared with me. There wasn't a lot of night left, so Jared went to the edge of the forest and started his own magic, eventually coming back to the fire light with a different walking tree in tow. With the tree ordered to guard us, we all quickly fell asleep.