Furnace-Ash Sickness

Overview

The elder Ash-Furnace Civilization burned itself out long ago, and its ground still poisons the living. Furnace-ash sickness is the slow sickness of salvagers and crossers who dig, camp, or drink on that ground. It works over seasons, not hours, and by the time a salvager knows it, it has been at work for years.

Cause

The overburn left vitrified ruins, slag belts, and glassed ground, and bound into the ash and slag are poisons of the furnaces' work. Lying still, most of it does little harm. Disturbed, it rises as fine dust that is breathed, settles on hands and food, and leaches into water held in slag-lined cisterns. Some furnace ground does worse than poison, changing those who disturb it; that is the work of remnant craft (see Remnant Contamination).

Who It Strikes

It takes those who stay on furnace ground and work it: the Salvage Peoples of the ruin edges, Kobold crews hired into the old works, and caravan crossers who camp in the scars. Children and women with child suffer it soonest. Households far from the ruins take it when ash or slag is carried home as a curiosity or a charm. The Wrought, who neither eat nor breathe, are spared.

Signs and Course

A heavy breath of dust brings a cough, a sick stomach, and a headache that pass in a day or two. The true sickness is slower. Over a season or more of work the sufferer tires easily and the skin goes grey and dull, as if ash had settled into it. The gums bleed and the teeth loosen; small cuts open into sores that will not close; hair thins. Women stop conceiving or lose what they carry, and men father fewer children, the barren years of salvage families. Taken away from the ground early, a sufferer slowly mends over a year or two, though lost teeth stay lost. Left on it, the sickness worsens into wasting.

Contagion

It does not pass from one person to another. It passes in what is carried: ash on clothes, slag in a pack, a cooking pot scoured with furnace sand.

Treatment and Its Limits

The first cure is to leave the ground and wash it off, clothes and hair and pots. A recent heavy dose can be driven out by Purge Poison. The slow sickness, settled through the body over years, is a deep-rooted condition: Cure Affliction helps only when repeated over a long course, with clean water and rest, and few salvagers can pay for that. No healing restores the barren years already lost.

Mortality

It seldom kills outright. Those who work furnace ground for many years die before their time, of wasting, of sores gone foul, or of the next sickness their bodies cannot fight. Salvage families count fewer children and fewer old people than their neighbours.

Lore and Belief

Salvagers say the fire is still in the ash and burns slowly, and they keep the old warnings: do not speak the name of Ozhar the Pyre-King near a furnace, and do not carry ash or slag out. Many take the sickness for Ozhar's hunger, still feeding. Kobold memory of the furnace world keeps a plainer account of shafts and furnaces fired against warning, and few outsiders ask for it.

Treasure-seekers who carried slag-gold out of the scars against the warnings are the subject of the salvagers' grimmest songs: the crew that came home rich and died one by one through the next year, coughing ash.

In the Medieval Era

In the Glassbelt Interior crossers go over the furnace scars only when they must, and salvagers who work them keep the warnings. Along the ruin belts the danger-marks first cut on stone by the circuits of the Walking of the Unkept Roads (c. 175,000-c. 140,000 BR) still grade which ground may be touched. Healers are scarce at the ruin edges; salvage families nurse their own, and a salvager who can afford it goes to a Sanctified shrine in the settled lands and is told, as often as not, to stay away from the ruins.

Where It Appears

• The Walking of the Unkept Roads
• The Glassbelt Interior
• Salvage Peoples
• Ash-Furnace Civilization
• The Vent-Houses of the Furnace World