Hushvale Fog-Sickness

Ailment

Kind	Magical disease
Cause	Deep fog of the Wake-Seal, in which the vale's hungry remnants feed on the living and the living can be overwritten by predatory survival
Strikes	The people of the Held, the lone, the lost, the sleeping, and the frightened above all; outsiders who enter the fog
Contagion	Not passed by touch or breath; fear spreads the change through a household
Mortality	Often fatal to those caught alone in deep fog or out at night; the drained who are brought in mostly live, with gaps
Treatment	Bringing the sick in, warmth, watching, binding through the night, calm, and the quiet-rites; nothing known from outside
Regions	The Hushvale (the Held), deepest on its old roads, in its burial caves, and at the field edges by night

The 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.

Overview

Hushvale Fog-Sickness is what the deep fog of the Hushvale does to the living. Some of the Held put it in words of their own: a person "sick with the fog, to be watched, bound, and nursed till morning". It takes two shapes. The fog's hungry dead drain a body of warmth, breath, a name, or the knowing of faces; and a person caught in it may be overwritten for a night by a hunter's will. Outside the vale it is almost unknown, because almost nobody comes out.

Cause

Around c. 1,200 CR a landslide woke the Sepulchre-Kin Record-engine beneath the vale, and the survivors hid from it with the concealment rite of the Wake-Seal (c. 1,200 CR), which thickened into the fog. In it gather the hungry remnants of the vale's unsettled dead, which take from the living what the dead lack. The same catastrophe shaped the changed living, whose bodies can be overwritten by predatory survival when the fog is deep, fear is high, or the moon is dark. The fog is a rite's work and an engine's reach, not bad air.

Who It Strikes

Anyone in the deep fog: the lone traveller between ward-villages, the child who wanders, the sleeper by an open shutter, and anyone afraid. The people of the Held, ordinary communities of mostly cradle-web Human descent, are its usual sufferers, because they are the ones there.

Signs and Course

The drained are found or come in cold and grey, breathing shallowly, sometimes with a cough that will not clear. Some have lost a name, their own or a child's; some cannot tell a familiar face from a stranger's, and stare at their mothers. Warmth and breath return over days. Names and faces return slowly, if at all.

The changed go low, quick, and silent in the fog, with slack faces and eyes that follow only warmth and movement. Held at home through a night, they strain, catch in the throat, tear their nails on the bindings, and towards morning or as the fog thins they come back to themselves, often with no memory of the night and nothing to show but scratched hands. A changed one turns more easily each time, and some stop coming back.

Contagion

It does not pass by touch or breath. Fear passes it: a frightened household is more likely to turn than a calm one, which is why the Held hush a frightened child quickly.

Treatment and Its Limits

The Held's care is the care of a long night. The drained are brought in, warmed, and kept talking; their names are said to them, softly. The changed are watched, bound, and nursed till morning, never left alone, never shouted at. Doors are barred at dusk, and nobody goes alone into deep fog. Beyond that the Held keep the quiet-rites of the Echo-Mother without knowing whose they are. A rite that breaks a remnant, or a healer from outside, might do more, but none has come in more than a century, and remembrance itself is what the engine finds.

Mortality

The fog kills most often those caught alone in it, and travel by night is close to certain death. The drained who are found and brought in mostly live. The changed who are held through the night live; those who are not may be killed by neighbours, or not come back. Survivors keep lost names and faces, a dread of the dark, and the suspicion of their villages.

Lore and Belief

The Held argue over the changed. Some say a changed one is a person still, sick with the fog; others that the person died in the fog and something wears the body home, and that it should be burned; a third view holds that the fog takes back those the old rite never fully hid. Many lay a pinch of gravesalt on a sickroom threshold, believing it keeps a name from leaving the house.

In the Medieval Era

Fog-sickness is a daily danger in the Held and nowhere else. Outside, the few who make the Glassbelt crossing know the vale only as fog on the horizon and a danger-mark. Healers of the cradle-web have never treated a case, and their schools hold only rumours of a fog that takes names.