Blood-Fury

Overview

Blood-Fury, which the plane's own account also calls the Rage, is the madness of the Scourge. A traveller who stays there long enough stops choosing whom to fight. They strike at anything that moves, friend or foe, and go on until their body gives out. The few who come home bring part of it with them, and their households learn to step softly.

Cause

The Scourge is the plane where safety is absent, and every moment there is a moment under threat. A mind held at that pitch for long enough gives way: fear and readiness fuse into rage, and the rage stops answering to judgement. The crossing adds its own harm, because the Veil at the Scourge takes away the memory of whom to trust.

Who It Strikes

Anyone who stays. The usual victims are soldiers, since the Scourge is reached through War-Gates, battlefields where the Veil is thin, and a wounded or lost man can stumble through one in the smoke. Seekers of glory and relic-hunters go on purpose and take it as often. No people is known to be spared; those used to hardship hold out longer, not for ever.

Signs and Course

On the plane the fury comes on over days: shortening temper, sleeplessness, a habit of keeping the blade drawn, then the first fit, in which the traveller fights without seeing whom. Each fit ends only in collapse, and each comes sooner.

A traveller who comes home still in the fury needs holding until it burns out. After that the course is long. For months they wake ready to strike and lash out at a sudden touch or a raised voice, then weep or sleep for a day. They trust no one fully, and accuse the people nearest them. Most settle over a year or two into a lasting watchfulness; a few never stop having fits, and are kept apart or bound.

Contagion

The fury itself does not pass from one to another. A raging traveller does spread fear, and fights, through a camp.

Treatment and Its Limits

The care that helps is plain: hold the sufferer safely through a fit, then give rest, quiet, food, and the same few faces day after day. Healers of mind and breath help with the fits. Breath Steady slows panicked breathing, Quelling Voice lowers a frenzy enough to approach, and Circle of Mercy makes a sickroom where panic eases. Each spends the caster's reserves and buys an hour, not a cure, and many soldiers fear a working that bends the mind more than the fury itself. On the plane, healing is risky as well: it draws the Scourge's predators.

Mortality

On the Scourge the fury often kills, by exhaustion, by the plane's predators, or by companions who had to defend themselves. At home it seldom kills the sufferer directly; the deaths it causes are of others, in a fit, and of sufferers who wander or take their own lives. Survivors keep a startle, a short temper, and a guardedness that rarely leaves.

Lore and Belief

Soldiers call it the red fit and say a man who has it has been to the war that never stops. Many believe it is a curse of the battlefield dead, or a punishment for cruelty in war, and veterans who have it are sometimes shunned as bad luck in a company. Some hold that a sufferer who sheds blood in the fit is cured by it; it only frightens everyone more.

Sellsword captains who hire a veteran of the Scourge put him at the front and keep him away from the camp, and their warning is the berserker who won a battle alone and killed his own shield-brother when no enemy was left.

In the Medieval Era

Blood-Fury is rare, but it is a soldiers' sickness and known wherever there is war. The Red Mercy Hospices see it among battlefield casualties and take care to tell it from ordinary shock after battle, which looks much the same and is far commoner. Most cases are never named: a man comes home from a campaign changed, and his village keeps him fed, watches him, and keeps the children away from him on bad nights.

Where It Appears

• The Scourge (the Rage, the Veil's paranoia)
• The Material Plane (the pull of a thin spot towards the Scourge)
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Planes