Dark Corruption
The slow degradation of body, channels, and feeling in those who practise predatory magic, which deepens in stages and can pass in altered form to their descendants.
Overview
Dark corruption is what predatory magic does to those who work it. It is a state of the body's pattern, not a thing that gets into it: the channels bend towards the methods used on them, and the person bends with them. It is feared for what it makes of a caster, and it is misunderstood more than any other magical condition, because a whole people may confuse it with sin.
Cause
Magic that takes from the unwilling, through sacrifice, coercion, corpse abuse, or curse-work (see Dark Magic), loads the caster's channels with residue and wears them into feedback loops that reward the next taking. This is no mystical punishment, but the natural consequence of repeated predatory practice. Where the alteration persists across generations it becomes heritable: a biological and energetic condition of the line, not of any one person's conduct.
Who It Strikes
Those who practise, in proportion to how much and how long. It strikes casters who practise in secret hardest, because nobody watches them. Its inherited form strikes their descendants, who have done nothing: they carry a heightened susceptibility to contamination, sudden spikes of affinity, and instability under strain.
Signs and Course
Temples and schools grade it in four corruption bands, from Taint to Irrecoverable. A watcher sees the stages in the person.
At first the feelings go blunt. The caster laughs less, mourns less, and begins to want the stronger working where the weaker would do. Friends notice a coldness before anything shows on the body.
Then the habit sets. The caster reaches for the predatory method without thinking, needs a ritual to do what was once easy, and starts to avoid company. The body starts to show it: grey skin, poor healing, wasting, and aches that settle in the joints and do not leave.
In the late stages the appetite rules the person. Some casters become open to the pull of certain Harmonics and dark entities, which find in them a ready channel. The turning point is between the second stage and the third: before it, abstention and help bring most back; after it, few return.
Contagion
It does not pass by touch, breath, or company. It passes only down a lineage, and not to every child.
Treatment and Its Limits
Cleansing is staged: halt the harm and isolate the corrupted channels, draw off the residue and break the loops, rebuild safe practice under supervision, and test before release. Early cases often recover cleanly, and later ones recover only under lasting conditions. The last stage is usually contained rather than cured. A failed cleansing does not prove moral failure; the channels may simply be past repair.
Sanctified rites such as Cure Affliction and the Crucible's Purging Flame burn corruption out, at a cost to patient and purifier alike. Ignis purifiers take some of the corruption into themselves and grow darker with the ash of it (see the Ignis Resonants). Descendants with the inherited form often tolerate particular cleansing rites badly, and a careful healer does not force one on them.
Mortality
Corruption rarely kills by itself. It wastes the body and shortens the life, and those in the last stage die in confinement, at the hands of a lord or a mob, or by their own workings. Those who recover keep scarred channels and a long temptation.
Lore and Belief
Most peoples take corruption for a visible sin, and believe a corrupt caster can be known by a grey face, a cold hand, or a smell of iron. Many hold that it is catching, and shun the households of condemned casters; the schools say otherwise. Where curse-work is an ordinary punishment, the same signs are honoured rather than feared.
Witch-hunters ride on the strength of that belief, and the songs of the hunts are dark ones: the grey-faced sorcerer burned in the market square, and the grey-faced old woman burned beside him who had only been sick.
In the Medieval Era
A few temples ask for signs before judging a person corrupt, and tell a person's lineage from their conduct; most lords and villages do neither, and families of corrupted lineages are persecuted. Temples and the Halls of Consecration of Sanctified Magic do most of the cleansing, and a village with no such help shuns or drives out the suspect.
Where It Appears
- Dark Magic (personal corruption, corruption severity bands, inherited lifeforce alteration, cleansing and containment)
- Biological Affinity (magical mutation from dark practice)
- Overview: Resonants of Ignis Prime (the purifiers' ash)