The magic watched the brokenness of time for moments and years and seconds. It found the wild unpredictability of time beautiful. It longed to know the way time devoured up all the magic creatures into ash and nothingness.
It yearned and desired. The magic wanted. And so it became---
The magic took upon itself a name (many names, many hungers): Contagion. Taint. Virus. Pestilence. Parasite. The magic curled into the bones of a horse and multiplied into a sea of cells. The mind of the horse changed, grew unsteady and violent and vicious. The horse needed as much as the magic did.
The horse wanted everything. All the others called him the first, the first ruined one, the first to pass along the plague, monster of magic.
They all learned to dread what the first brought to their shrines of blood and bone-- for the antidote is nothing.
There is nothing to save once the infection sinks deeps into the heart-- nothing, nothing, nothing.