Grave Rot

Overview

A sword arm goes numb in mid-swing and is black to the elbow by nightfall. Grave rot is decay laid on the living: a curse that sets in living flesh the failure that comes to a body after death. It is rare, and feared out of proportion to its rarity, because it looks like a corpse's rot at work in someone still breathing.

Cause

The cause is the Necromancy working Grave Rot, fed by decay-pattern and trace-pressure. It is laid by a touch or by a curse-mark rite, and it does not bring rot into the body from outside; it turns the body's own repair off and its dying on. Plague and rot magic of this kind is counted among the dark practices in most lands (see Dark Magic).

Who It Strikes

Whoever the caster reaches. Those already wounded, weakened, or old go fastest, since their repair is weakest; strong, well-fed bodies hold out longer. The Wrought, who have no living flesh, are spared.

Signs and Course

At the touch or mark there is cold and numbness, then a dull ache. Within the hour the skin greys and the flesh goes soft and slack. The colour darkens through purple to black, the smell of old meat rises, and the limb can no longer be moved. Spreading from the place it was laid, the rot moves towards the trunk; fever and confusion come as it goes.

The course runs from a short while to several days, depending on care. The turning point is the first cleansing: a case cleansed before the black reaches a joint usually stops there. Untreated, a case on a limb ends in the loss of the limb or in death; laid on the chest or face it kills quickly.

Contagion

Grave rot does not pass from patient to healer by breath or touch. Its taint can stay in the dead flesh, in dressings, and on the knife used to cut it, and a careless healer who reuses them can carry a lesser rot into a fresh wound.

Treatment and Its Limits

Speed decides it. Cure Affliction reasserts healthy order over the invaded flesh, and the Crucible's Purging Flame burns the rot out but can kill a weakened patient. Cleanse Wound washes the taint from opened flesh without closing it. After the cleansing, strong healing must restart the body's repair, and it costs the healer more than an ordinary wound does.

Without magic, a surgeon cuts the black flesh away, and if it has passed a joint, takes the limb above it. Hot wine, honey dressings, and herbs keep the wound clean but do not halt the curse. Healers who have met it burn the dressings and pass the knife through fire.

Mortality

Untreated, grave rot kills perhaps half of those it strikes and maims most of the rest. Cleansed early, it seldom kills. Survivors keep a withered or missing limb, deep grey scars, and numbness where the rot stopped.

Lore and Belief

Folk call it "the corpse's touch" and say the dead have taken hold of the victim. Many believe the victim is already half dead and will draw the grave's attention to the household; some burn the dressings and the bed. Since it looks like ordinary wound rot gone mad, a healer who mistakes one for the other is commonly blamed for the death.

Grave-robbers are its commonest victims, and in many villages a man with a black, stinking hand is assumed to have been robbing graves and is driven out before he can explain.

In the Medieval Era

Grave rot is rare in ordinary life and known mostly from war, from the feuds of frontier lords who hire grave-thieves, and from the judging of necromancers, where a blackened limb is proof enough to burn one. Temple healers, the Houses of Mercy, and war-hospices are those likeliest to have met it; a village healer may see it once in a lifetime and treat it as wound rot.

Where It Appears

• Necromancy (Grave Rot)
• Dark Magic (common forms of dark practice)
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Schools of Magic