Beautiful!!! So's the tale behind this pic by Linda Bergkvist called Calamity of Touch. Here's the story: In the dead of the night, they had surrendered to their attractions. Ivory skin to ivory skin in the darkness of the temple - lips like dew-moist petals meeting for the first time.

But their tryst did not go unnoticed - the God they both worshipped did not approve. And she, judged a seductress, was cursed.

At first, they did not know what was wrong. The first few people who succumbed to the plague went unnoticed. Then more died, and then he died... and she, a healer, fought desperately to save the others in the city. Corpse after corpse piled up, blackened skin like her grieving heart, and then one day... they were all gone. Desperate, she fled to the next city - to warn them of the plague. To warn them to -flee- before it would come to take them, too.

It was they, not she, that made the connection. It was they - the people of the city - that understood what was wrong when the emissaries that met with her were the first to be struck with the plague. She was cast out, spat on, and cursed by young and old alike... but not before having infected yet a city with the pestilence.

She realised then her punishment. He had merely died... she had become, instead of a healer, an infectious monster. A plague spreader. All who touched her, and talked to her, were taken by a sickness of rot and destruction.

She fled back to her fallen home, and waited there for her own demise. Little did she know then, that the God had also cursed her with eternal life.