The Chromatic Chord

The Blood River's Surfeit

The craving that follows a drink from a Blood River, which heals the drinker and binds them to the water, so that going without it brings rapid ageing and death and drinking too deep swells the body until the river takes it.

Overview

The Blood River's Surfeit is the name healers give to what the water of a Blood River does to those who drink it: those who know the zone call it the Addiction, and its last stage the Bloated. A sip closes a mortal wound or ends a disease at once, and that is why people go. The price is a craving that does not leave, an ageing that falls on the drinker when the water runs out, and for those who drink too long, a swelling that ends in the river.

Cause

The river is a leak of the Surging Deep's lifeforce, and every healing it gives was taken from the land around it. A drinker's body takes in that borrowed life and comes to run on it. Without more, the years the water held off come due together. With too much, the body stops being its own and begins to turn to the river's substance.

Who It Strikes

Anyone who drinks. The usual drinker is a dying patient brought to the bank, or given water carried home in a sealed flask, and the second is the one who fetched it and tasted. Seekers of long life drink on purpose. The Hemophages live on the water and are not sick of it in any way a healer would recognise. The Wrought do not drink and are spared.

Signs and Course

The first days are a wonder: the wound gone, the fever broken, the drinker stronger than before. Within a few days comes the craving, a hunger that is not for food, with restlessness, flushed skin, and a habit of touching the flask. Drinkers who keep a supply and take it sparingly can hold here for years, looking younger than they should and thinking of little else.

When the water stops, withdrawal begins. Over weeks the hair greys and thins, the skin loosens, the teeth go, and the drinker ages as though years were passing in a season. Deep drinkers die of it; a single sip often ends in survival, years older.

Contagion

It does not pass between people. Valley lore holds that eating River-Beast meat lets the river's hunger in.

Treatment and Its Limits

Healers who must use the water give the smallest draught that will serve, then wean the patient by smaller and smaller sips, so that withdrawal comes slowly. Nursing through withdrawal is warmth, broth, company, and someone to hold the flask. Cure Affliction eases the craving for a time and must be repeated, but no working gives back the years the water held: any healing moves life from the healer or a donor, and the river's debt is larger than one healer can pay. Healing worked at the bank is stronger and may drain the caster (see Costs and Side Effects). Nothing is known to bring back one who has begun to swell.

Mortality

Most who drink deep or often die of the surfeit in the end, by withdrawal far from the river or by joining it. Survivors of a single sip keep the lost years and, often, a longing that wakes at the smell of blood.

Lore and Belief

Valley folk say the river remembers every mouth that drank and calls it back. Many believe a drinker can be bled of the water; bleeding only weakens them. Aqua-aligned healers teach that the river is lifeforce without balance and that its cures are loans; ordinary people say only that it gives with one hand.

In the Medieval Era

The surfeit is rare, because a Blood River is ephemeral and wakes where it will, but every valley that has lost fields to one has a story of it. Healers of the Red Mercy Hospices and the College of White Vessels (see Vital Magic) know it as a last resort for a patient no other care can save, and some will bargain with the Hemophages for water at a cost paid in other lives; many refuse on principle. The water does not empty sickbeds: it is far, rare, and paid for twice.

Where It Appears

In the Writers’ Guide

See Also