The Chromatic Chord

Blood Debt

The sickness that falls on a body when vitality borrowed from its own future by a working comes due, bringing sudden weakness, ageing, and collapse long after the spell is done.

Overview

A courier rides through a mortal wound, delivers the warning, and three weeks later cannot rise from bed. That is blood debt: the bill for life spent before it was earned. It is feared less for its pain than for its timing, since it comes when the danger is past and everyone has stopped watching, and because no one can say beforehand how large it will be.

Cause

Some workings do not heal or strengthen a body; they lend it its own future. Vital Debt holds off a lethal consequence, Lifeline Mortgage trades later vitality for present output, and Years to Flame spends longevity outright. Nothing is created: the vitality is moved forward in time, and the body pays when the loan ends, as every spending of lifeforce is paid (see Costs and Side Effects).

Gods lend in the same way. Tamsel's "season" of life and Anvelle's season of vigour are borrowed from the future, and those who misuse them repay it as a "winter" of sickness.

Who It Strikes

Those who took the debt, or had it taken for them. Most are soldiers, couriers, guards, and war-healers who chose the loan in a crisis. Some are the dying, carried by kin through one more season; some are children given a Halfling "winter" of protection who meet their "long winter" later. Old bodies repay worst, and the starved and the wounded have least to repay with.

Signs and Course

The debt falls due on its own schedule, from later the same day to some weeks after. The first sign is a heaviness that sleep does not lift, then cold hands, a slow wound that had seemed closed, and breathlessness on the stairs. Where the loan was small, that is all: a few days to a season of weakness, and then recovery.

A large debt comes as a collapse. The patient greys within days, the hair whitens, the skin loosens, old injuries ache, and the body looks years older than the week before. The turning point is the first fortnight: a patient who is eating and sleeping by then usually lives, older than before. One who still sinks is paying more than they have.

Contagion

Blood debt does not pass between people, though a debt carried by a Lifespan Bridge can fall on both ends of it.

Treatment and Its Limits

Nothing cancels the debt. Rest, food, warmth, and quiet let the body pay without breaking. A healer can carry a patient through the worst nights with Lifeline Bridge or a stored reserve, but every such gift is a second loan from someone else: the healer greys in turn, and kin of the same people give most for least loss. Herb-teas for strength and sleep help the patient endure.

Forced transfers between people are worse than the debt. A Lifespan Bridge taken without consent is notorious for leaving its recipient unstable or mad.

Mortality

Small debts seldom kill. Great ones, paid by the old or the already wounded, often do, and those who live keep the years they spent: early grey, a slow heart, a body that tires before its time. A healer who saved ten lives in one night may wake old.

Lore and Belief

The peoples speak of it as a creditor. "The blood remembers," say Human soldiers, and many believe the debt is collected by a god or by the dead the borrower outlived. Halfling folds hold that Tamsel takes back only what was lent, and that a child's "long winter" is no punishment but the year coming round. Basin farmers say that whoever will not rest when the season demands it will be made to.

Garrison tales keep the champion who borrowed ten years of strength to hold a gate for one night and walked off the wall an old man at dawn, and the lords who paid sorcerers to borrow on their soldiers' blood.

In the Medieval Era

Blood debt is a soldier's and a healer's sickness. War-camps know the pattern well, and the hospices of the Red Mercy treat it as part of the cost of a battle. Many peoples count a debt-working laid on someone without consent a wrong, and punish it when the worker is weak enough to punish. Village healers meet it mostly in its seasonal forms, as the elder who aged suddenly after a good summer or the child sickly after a blessed one.

Where It Appears

See Also