Food Sickness
The sickness of spoiled, turned, and ill-cooked food, from the gripes after bad meat or raw beans to the rare stillness of a sealed jar gone wrong, which can stop the breath.
Overview
Food sickness is what every household knows best and fears least: the night of cramps after the meat that smelled a little off, the purge after half-cooked beans. It strikes all who shared a dish together and is over in a day or two. Its rare and dreaded kin, the stillness, comes from a sealed jar and can stop the breath.
Cause
Most food sickness is rot. Meat and fish kept too long or too warm, milk turned in the heat, and the bottom of a barrel gone sour carry a foulness that the stomach throws back. Beans eaten raw or undercooked sicken the eater, and a few people sicken from them however they are cooked. The stillness is different: a poison that breeds unseen inside sealed jars, packed fish, and close-wrapped meat put by badly, often with no smell at all.
Who It Strikes
Anyone who eats. Travellers, soldiers on the march, and sailors at the end of a voyage take it most, for they eat what is left. Halflings, whose keen smell tells a turning barrel or a damp grain bin from across a storeroom, catch spoilage before it reaches the table. Goblins, with their strong stomachs, eat much that would lay others low. The Wrought do not eat and are spared.
Signs and Course
The common kind comes within hours of the meal: cramps, sweating, vomiting, and a loose purge, often everyone at the table together. It runs a day, sometimes two, and leaves the sufferer weak and thirsty.
The stillness comes later, after a day or more, and does not look like food sickness at all. The eyes go first: blurred or doubled sight and drooping lids. Then speech thickens, swallowing fails, and a weakness creeps down the arms and body while the mind stays clear. At the turning point the breath grows shallow; one who keeps breathing through it recovers over weeks or months, slowly.
Contagion
It does not pass from person to person. When a whole household falls together, it is the pot they shared.
Treatment and Its Limits
The common kind is nursed: rest, small sips of water and broth, a clean bed. Purge Poison hastens the end of a bad case. The stillness wants more: Breath Recall and Organ Steady can hold the breath through the worst nights, at a heavy and repeated cost to the healer, and Cure Affliction can clear it, though deep cases need it more than once.
Prevention does more than cure. Households keep stores by smell, salt, smoke, and cold. Salt Ward keeps rot from food stores, and Chill Arrest pauses spoilage for a day, delaying rot without curing what is already in the meat.
Mortality
The common kind seldom kills except the old, infants, and those already sick or starved, who can die of the drying purge. The stillness kills many of those it takes when no healer is near, and the living may keep a weak voice or a tired body for a season.
Lore and Belief
Households say meat turns in thunder and milk sours under a full moon, and some blame a jealous neighbour's eye on the pot. Bad air in the cellar is blamed as often as the meat. The stillness is often thought a curse or a laid sickness, since it strikes days after the meal, and an unlucky cook has been accused of poisoning.
In the Medieval Era
Every people knows the common kind. It is commonest in summer, on the march, and on long voyages, where ships' surgeons keep medicinal stores and food under Salt Ward and hunters bring meat back under Chill Arrest. Halfling households of the folds live by counted stores and a trained nose, and their store-keepers are trusted to say which barrel goes to the pigs. The stillness is rare enough that a village healer may see it once in a lifetime.