Ailments

The ailments are everything that sickens a body or a mind short of a plain wound: the fevers, fluxes, coughs, and wasting of everyday life; the poisons of plant, fungus, mineral, and the poisoner's craft; the venoms of beasts; the plagues that empty a town, a herd, or a field; and the unnatural afflictions of magic's cost, of curses, of the planes and zones, and of the Dark Entities.

Illness · Wound sickness · Poison · Venom · Plague · Herd plague · Crop blight · Magical disease · Curse · Zone sickness · Plane sickness · Dark Entity blight · Magic's toll

Illness

• Biting Madness AilmentA madness passed in the bite of a sick dog, fox, or bat, which waits weeks in the body, then brings dread of water, rage, and death.
• The Black Gums AilmentThe wasting sickness of those who live for months on dried and salted stores, in which the gums blacken, old wounds reopen, and fresh green food cures in days.
• Childbed Fever AilmentThe fever that follows a birth, carried in by unclean hands and cloths, which kills mothers in the days after a hard labour.
• Childhood Spots AilmentThe spotted fevers that run through the children of a town or village every few years and are never taken twice: the red spots, which can kill, and the water spots, which seldom do.
• Cold-Bite AilmentThe harm cold does to a body: chilblains in damp houses, frozen fingers and feet on the passes, and the creeping chill that kills travellers who stop to rest.
• The Drying Sickness AilmentThe cracking, festering, and fever that take a Thaluren kept too long out of water, and in lesser measure a Kavari kept from the river.
• Elven Fading AilmentThe slow dimming of an Elf thrown out of rhythm by grief, exile, or loss of place, in which colour, scent, and appetite fade and a long life can wear away.
• The Falling Sickness AilmentFits that throw a person to the ground, stiff and jerking, from birth, after a blow to the head, or after a working that the mind resisted, and that no healer can cure.
• Famine Sickness AilmentStarvation and the swelling hunger, with the fluxes, fevers, and coughs that follow a failed harvest and kill more than hunger alone.
• Heat Sickness AilmentThe cramps, fainting, and burning collapse that heat brings on harvesters, smiths, desert crossers, and bodies made for cold.
• The Itch AilmentThe lice, burrowing mites, ringworm, and scald-head of crowded bodies, which seldom kill but torment camps, ships, and poor houses and carry worse sickness with them.
• Lung Fever AilmentA fever that settles in the lungs, most often after a winter cough or a chill, fills the chest, and comes to a crisis within the first week, when it breaks or reaches the blood.
• Marsh Fever AilmentThe recurring fever of warm, still waters, carried by biting gnats and flies whose larvae lodge in the body and, left alone, work towards the spine and lame or kill.
• Miner's Lung AilmentThe slow ruin of the chest from years of breathing stone dust and furnace smoke, with the other wear of the mine and the forge, which no healer can undo once it has set in.
• Nursery-Water Sickness AilmentThe failing of Kavari young in their nursery beds when the water warms, silts, or is stirred, which can take a whole bed in a bad season and is the reason the Kavari guard their nursery-water so…
• Pattern-Fray AilmentThe unsettling of a Wrought person's inner pattern when rest is denied or the body is driven, refitted, or altered against its will, showing as tremor, repeated motions, and slips of memory, and…
• The Summer Flux AilmentThe loose and bloody fluxes of the bowels that come with fouled water and food in the warm months, which empty a body of water and kill the young and the old by drying them out.
• Tooth Rot AilmentThe decay of teeth and the swellings of the gums and jaw that follow it, an ache nearly everyone knows by old age, ended most often by the tooth-drawer's pliers.
• The Wasting Cough AilmentA slow sickness of the lungs that passes in close, damp rooms, wastes the body over years with cough, night sweats, and blood, and kills most who reach its late stage.
• The Winter Cough AilmentThe colds, sore throats, and coughs that pass through every household each winter, harmless to most but the road by which lung fever reaches the old and the newborn.
• Worms AilmentThe worms and flukes that live in the gut and the body, taken in with dirty water, unwashed hands, and undercooked meat and fish, which thin and stunt more than they kill.

Wound sickness

• Wound Rot AilmentThe festering of dirty wounds, from a hot red swelling to blackening flesh, blood fever, and the locking jaw, which kills more of the wounded than the blows that made the wounds.

Poison

• Bad Air AilmentThe foul, stale, and overheated air of mines, deep holds, ruin underlayers, and dead chambers, which dulls, chokes, and kills those who breathe it before they know it is there.
• Burning Bread AilmentThe poisoning that follows a wet harvest, when black spurs grow in the ears of rye and barley and are milled into the bread, setting fire in the limbs, blackening fingers and toes, and bringing fits…
• Deathroot AilmentThe poisonous wild roots of the deep weald that look like the tubers the Elves gather, which kill untaught gatherers within hours, and the lesser sickness of bitter roots eaten unsoaked.
• Food Sickness AilmentThe 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.
• Fouled Shellfish AilmentThe poisoning by mussels, oysters, and clams taken from fouled water, from the purging sickness of the black water at the Tidelace river mouths to the numbing rust water of still summers, which can…
• Furnace-Ash Sickness AilmentThe slow poisoning of those who disturb the ash, slag, and glassed ground of the ash-furnace ruin belts, which greys the skin, loosens the teeth, opens sores, and leaves the barren years.
• Made Poisons AilmentThe poisons prepared on purpose from herb, root, fungus, venom, and mineral, often strengthened by magic, and the slow and sudden deaths they are made to look like.
• Metal Sickness AilmentThe slow poisonings of the metal trades and of those who drink from lead and glaze: the smelter's gripe of lead, the gilder's shakes of quicksilver, and the sores of smelter's smoke.
• Poison Herbs AilmentThe poisonous wild plants of field, hedge, and wood, and the healing herb given too strong or to the wrong people, which sicken and kill those who eat or are dosed with them.
• Poisonous Fungi AilmentThe deadly and maddening wild mushrooms of wood and cave, from the pale cap that kills days after the eater seems to recover to the mad-cap of visions, and the harmful spore strains of cultivated…

Venom

• Stings and Bites AilmentThe venomous stings and bites of bees, wasps, hornets, spiders, scorpions, jellyfish, and sting-fish, mostly painful and passing, and the sudden swelling that kills a few of those stung.
• Venoms of the Zones and Planes AilmentThe bites, saps, pollens, and nectars of the Blood River and the Verdant Expanse that numb, drain, choke, sleep, and dissolve, some of them binding too deeply for a healer to draw.
• Viper Venom AilmentThe bite of the adders and vipers of heath, rock, and dry slopes, which swells and blackens the bitten limb and brings faintness, and kills children and the small peoples more often than grown adults.

Plague

• Camp Fever AilmentThe spotted, stupefying fever of armies, sieges, prisons, crowded holds, and famine roads, carried from body to body by lice.
• The Egg Blight AilmentThe 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.
• The Red Pox AilmentThe spotted plague that runs through the towns once a generation, kills about one in five of those it takes, and leaves the living pocked and never to take it again.
• The Swelling Plague AilmentThe great plague carried by rat-fleas that raises black swellings in groin and armpit, passes on the breath in its lung form, and every few generations empties whole quarters of the towns.

Herd plague

• Cattle Murrain AilmentThe running plague of cattle and oxen that passes from herd to herd along the droving roads and can empty a village's meadow in a season.
• Sheep Rot and Fly-Strike AilmentThe liver rot, foot rot, and fly-strike that take sheep in wet years, which shepherds know as one trouble of wet ground and dirty wool.
• Soured-Well Sickness AilmentThe scouring flux that takes the herds and then the people of a Windscar camp that has stayed too long at one well and fouled its water.

Crop blight

• Grain Blight AilmentThe rust and smut of standing grain, carried on the wind from field to field and worst on tired soil, that thins the ears and can halve a basin harvest.
• Granary Mould AilmentThe mould and heating of grain put away damp, which spoils a granary from inside and sickens those who eat the bread or breathe the dust.
• Wet-Year Rots AilmentThe root rot, leaf blight, and bunch rot of wet summers, which take roots in the ground and grapes on the vine and are often mistaken for darker things.

Magical disease

• Hushvale Fog-Sickness AilmentThe sickness of the Hushvale's deep fog, in which the hungry remnants take warmth, breath, names, and the power to know a face, and the changed living are overwritten by a predator's will to survive.
• Ley-Warp AilmentMagical mutation, the lasting change that long pressure of magic works on a body's pattern and flesh, sometimes a gift, sometimes an unstable trait, and sometimes a slow decline into pain.
• Remnant Contamination AilmentThe chill, dread, dulled senses, and draining weakness that cling to the living who work among the restless dead, handle necromantic residue, or are fastened on by a hostile remnant.
• Trace Possession AilmentThe occupation of a living mind by a foreign trace, an Echo of the dead or a pattern forced in by a working, so that the host speaks, moves, or remembers as someone else while still present beneath.

Curse

• Grave Rot AilmentA necromantic curse that sets the decay of the dead working in living flesh, so that a limb numbs, blackens, and withers within hours unless it is cleansed in time.
• The Ill Wish AilmentThe luck-curse or evil eye, a working that weights a person's chances towards their worst likely outcomes, and the far larger body of ordinary misfortune that the peoples blame on it.
• Laid Sicknesses AilmentFevers, chills, brittleness, seizures of the blood, and phantom pains laid on a body by a hostile working, which mimic ordinary sickness but come suddenly, spread to no one, and break when the…
• Oath-Sickness AilmentThe pain, choking, burning, and weakness that fall on someone who knowingly breaks a magically bound vow, lasting until the promise is kept, released by the one it was made to, or the binding is…

Zone sickness

• The Blood River's Surfeit AilmentThe craving that follows a drink from a Blood River, which heals the drinker and binds them to the water, so that going without it brings rapid ageing and death and drinking too deep swells the body…
• Spire-Ring Sickness AilmentThe nausea, headaches, false sounds, and cracking bones that the clashing frequencies of the Crystal Spire work into a body, which go on ringing for weeks after the visitor has come down.
• Memory-Fixation AilmentThe sickness of the zones and planes of memory, which fasten a mind on the past until it forgets to eat, sleep, or live in the present, and which can leave it holding a past that never happened.
• The Pull of Extremes AilmentThe slow, low sickness of those who live for years beside a Resonant Zone or a thin place in the Veil, whose bodies, sleep, and tempers drift towards the nature of the plane that presses through.
• Time-Sickness AilmentThe harms of the zones where time runs wrong: years that fall on a body all at once, a mind and body left slow, wounds held open, and the return to a world that has moved on.
• Wind-Madness AilmentThe madness of the voice-carrying winds, in which a listener can no longer tell their own thoughts from the voices of the dead, is moved by them, and may be spoken through; and its kin, the madness…

Plane sickness

• Blood-Fury AilmentThe berserk rage the Scourge works into those who stay in it, which turns a traveller on friend and foe alike until they drop, and leaves those who come home quick to violence and slow to trust.
• Dream-Sickness AilmentThe harms a dreamer brings back from the Dreaming Veil and its zones of fear: sleep that will not end, nightmares that wound the waking body, a waking that will not feel real, and a weariness left by…
• The Fade AilmentThe slow erasure of the Silence, which takes a traveller's memories first, then personality, then the will to live, until what is left is a Hollow; those who come back early bring home its gaps.
• The Freeze AilmentThe cold of the planes and zones of lack, which drains a body's warmth until it stands as a statue of ice and ash, and leaves those pulled out in time with a chill in the marrow, lost fingers and…
• Stagnation AilmentThe loss of the will to move, change, or want, which the planes and zones of stillness and perfection work into those who linger, and which can end in a body that stands like a statue.
• Thirst-Madness AilmentThe obsession with water that the Parched works into those who stay in it, which drives a traveller past all other thought and can turn them on their companions for their blood, and which leaves…
• Veil-Sickness AilmentThe cost the Veil takes from those who cross it, chiefly the erosion of memory, with lost time, confusion, and frayed Pattern, and at its worst the drift that breaks a mind.
• Verdant Overgrowth AilmentThe growth of the Verdant Expanse that a traveller carries home inside them, often as the price of a cure, which roots in the flesh, clouds the mind with the plane's green calm, and in the end takes…

Dark Entity blight

• The Changing Fever AilmentThe plague of Qzoth's protean spores, a crawling rash and fever that sets the body changing without end until the sick are no longer one creature.
• Crystallization AilmentThe painless, irreversible turning of living bodies into flawless crystal under Krystallis, in which the victim stays aware inside the stone.
• The Ember's Grip AilmentThe Ashen Child's hold on the dying, which fixes a mortal wound or fever so that it neither heals nor ends, and the grey wasting that settles on those who keep watch.
• Gilding AilmentThe slow turning to gold of those touched by the Weeping Idol's tears, and its kin the stone-sleep of the Idol's gaze, which leave the faithful aware, kneeling, and unable to doubt.
• Inherited Rot AilmentThe Rotting Crown's lineage-poison, which runs down a bloodline so that heirs age decades in years, repeat their forebears' failings, and die of old age young, while their house rots around them.
• Ossification AilmentThe Bone Singer's painless turning of flesh to bone, in which muscles stiffen, blood thickens, and skin hardens until the sufferer is a statue that still sees and hears.
• The Quiet Plague AilmentThe contagious silence of the Silence Seed, which takes first the voice, then the footsteps, the heartbeat, and the breath, until the sufferer is unmade into the Quiet.
• The Red Dust AilmentThe sickness of the Rust Flower's rust spores, which settle as orange spots that crack the skin, thin the bone, and wither a living limb, as they rust iron and rot wood.
• The Rooting AilmentThe grafting sickness of Xylos, in which fine fungal threads grow from skin to skin and join bodies until blood mingles and a wound in one bleeds in all.
• Slumber-Sickness AilmentThe heaviness of the Great Slumber, which settles over the exhausted until limbs, thought, and at last the heart are too heavy to move, leaving the sufferer awake and unable to act.
• The Thread of Dependence AilmentThe Shadow Stitcher's binding sickness, in which those sewn together share pain, memory, and thought, cannot act apart, and wither when one of them dies.
• The Unwriting AilmentThe erasure of memory by Mnemosyne Null, which takes a sufferer's recent past, then name and kin, then speech and walking, then self-awareness, until they cease to be.
• The Weaver's Mending AilmentThe sickness that follows the Flesh Weaver's healing without consent, in which wounds closed too soon fester beneath, mended flesh changes and wants things, and the healed come to depend on the…

Magic's toll

• Backlash AilmentThe sudden harm a failed or overreached working does to its caster and those nearby, when the spell loses its guided path and its force rebounds into the body.
• Blood Debt AilmentThe sickness that falls on a body when vitality borrowed from its own future by a working comes due, bringing sudden weakness, ageing, and collapse long after the spell is done.
• Channel Scarring AilmentThe slow, lasting damage that years of overcasting leave in a caster's body, from tremor and exhaustion to narrowed power, barrenness, and a shortened life.
• Dark Corruption AilmentThe 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.
• Failed Mending AilmentA distorted healing pattern in which lifeforce repair overcorrects, closing wounds too strongly and preserving harm in altered form; it became heritable in the Trolls.
• Lifeforce Depletion AilmentThe grey weakness of a body whose vital reserves have been spent or stolen, by healing, overcasting, starvation, disease, or a draining working or being, ending in recovery, early age, or death.
• Vow-Scarring AilmentThe lasting strain that years of channelling a god's power leave in priests and holy casters: a narrowed self, crashes after miracles, intruding dreams, and in the worst cases collapse.