The Egg Blight
The failing of Thaluren clutches in a spawning water gone wrong, which closed the First Nesting Confluence and still governs how every return-water is watched.
Overview
The egg blight is the oldest fear of the Thaluren: that a spawning water will turn, and the eggs laid in it with every rite kept will fail. It took their oldest sacred water, the First Nesting Confluence, and closed it to ordinary return. Because Thaluren continuity lives in the witnessed clutch, a blight is never only a loss of young: it questions whether the water and the rule of return still hold.
Cause
Nobody knows. What is known is that the danger lies in the water and not in the eggs or the conduct of those who laid them: clutches laid rightly, at the right season, with every rite kept, failed all the same, and the Reaches say of a blighted water only that "the water itself has gone wrong" (see the Reaches' hazards). Whether that wrongness is a sickness carried in the water, a poisoning of it, a failing of the water's own life, or something else again is not known.
Who It Strikes
Eggs and hatchlings, in the water where they were laid. The grown Thaluren who lay them are not known to sicken of it, though sickness among clutch-bearers has been reported beside a worsening water, as at the Late Closure Review (c. 147,000 BR), and nobody can say whether it is the same thing. The Kavari, whose young live in nursery-water, fear it as a thing a redirected run could bring them.
Signs and Course
The blight is watched in a water, not at a bedside. It begins as ordinary misfortune: one season's clutches do poorly, and low water or a cold current is blamed. A watcher sees eggs that should quicken stay dull, clutches that do not hatch in their season, and a count of young reaching the sea that falls short of the record; on the Second Channel such a season is called a thin count.
The turning point is repetition. A water that fails one season may recover the next; a water that fails season after season, under narrower timing and stricter inspection, is blighted. Past that point no water is known to have come back. The First Nesting Confluence has been closed for well over a hundred and sixty thousand years and never judged recoverable.
Contagion
Unknown. The Thaluren act as if it could travel, with water, with clutches, or with the runs that pass through, and keep quarantine on that belief; no one has shown that it does or that it does not.
Treatment and Its Limits
No working, herb, or rite is known to have saved a blighted clutch. Prayer for stillness to Ulaun the Stilled Hour held the clutches at the Confluence in a pause where they neither hatched nor failed, which cured nothing. What the Thaluren have instead is custody: watching a water, closing it, and sending the runs elsewhere. Each costs: closure cuts return-lines from their source, and redirection carries runs into waters others live in.
Mortality
In a blighted water the blight takes clutch after clutch, until hatchlings there are too few to keep a run alive. Its cost is counted in run-lines rather than in bodies: a line whose water is closed must find another or end.
Lore and Belief
The Thaluren learned from the blight that sanctity does not protect: the most trusted water turned. Ulaun's failure is their warning that stillness is not care, and both sides of every water-dispute cite her. The Way of Return kept the rule of return and refused the god. Failed clutches are named and recited at the water where they failed, as the Blightward Keepers keep it.
The Reaches' songs remember the custodians who stayed at the dying water through the whole blight season, reciting the names of each failed clutch, and the open-run war-bands who came to force the ascent anyway and were turned back at spear-point.
In the Medieval Era
No other water is closed as the Confluence is, but suspect waters are held under quarantine and every sanctuary is watched. The Concord's Sanctuary Custodians alone may judge a water contaminated, recoverable, or forbidden; the Blightward Keepers keep the quarantine and the names, and a sea settlement that calls them for a wrong-seeming water may find itself under quarantine before the season ends. The Open-Run Concords press to reopen suspect waters after seasons without a sign, and the argument over that never ends. Kavari bank councils call Blightward testimony against runs they fear carry blight risk into their nursery-water. The Returning Concord's offices, not healers, meet the blight.