Oath-Sickness

Overview

A caravan guard who sold the route to bandits wakes choking, with a band of fire across his chest. Oath-sickness is the body's penalty for a broken bound vow, worked into the vow on purpose. It is the one magical ailment the peoples count as just, and much of what order there is rests on the fear of it.

Cause

Binding Magic ties promises to consequence. Burden of Promise binds a vow to the body, so that a knowing breach brings pain, weakness, choking pressure, or burning tension. Oathfire arms a fresh, explicit vow with a burning backlash against betrayal. Contract Brand only marks the bound, but a hidden or reluctant contract makes the mark painful to bear.

Some places enforce oaths themselves. In the plane of the Binding Song, a spoken curse cannot be dispelled, and a liar's body warps to match the lie. In the Name Bound, breaking a contract cuts out tongues or shatters bones; in the Silent Court, the chain of a broken promise tightens.

Who It Strikes

Only those who swore and broke the vow knowingly. An honest mistake usually does not trigger a well-made binding. Guards, caravan crews, envoys, debtors, sworn retainers, and bound apprentices are the commonest sufferers; any people that swears can suffer it.

Signs and Course

It strikes at the breach, or as soon as the breaker acts on the betrayal. Under Burden of Promise the signs follow the binding's wording: a tightness in the throat, a weight on the chest, a burning in the hands that signed, a weakness that makes the knees give. They come in waves and grow worse whenever the breaker moves further from the promise, and ease when they move towards keeping it.

Oathfire is sudden and violent: a flash of heat through the body, blistered skin, and collapse. A badly worded or impossible vow gives a confused, shifting pain, as the binding punishes itself.

Ordinary oath-sickness does not wear out on its own while the breach stands. The turning point is a choice: the breaker keeps the vow, seeks release, or endures.

Contagion

Oath-sickness does not pass between people. A bound party who breaks a shared vow suffers alone.

Treatment and Its Limits

The cure is in the vow. Keeping the promise, late or in part, eases the pain at once. A binding can be dissolved by Revocation Rite, which names its grounds and who allows it; this needs the agreement of the holder, or of a lord or temple strong enough to overrule them, and costs a price as well as the caster's effort. A flawed binding may be taken apart with Unpicking, though deeply anchored oaths resist it.

Healers can soothe burns and give herbs for pain and sleep, and a Vital healer can ease the body, but none of this lifts the binding. A curse laid in the Binding Song yields only to fulfilment of its condition or a break in its syntax.

Mortality

Under ordinary bindings, oath-sickness is a torment, not a death, and most breakers give in or seek release. Oathfire can kill outright. In the Name Bound and the Silent Court, broken oaths maim and kill. Survivors may keep burn scars and a brand, and a known breaker keeps the shame.

Lore and Belief

Most peoples say an oath-sick person is "held to their word" and expect little sympathy for them. Many believe the gods or the dead enforce the oath; the schools hold that the binding enforces itself. Tales tell of oath-breakers who wasted for years rather than yield, and of honest folk who suffered for a promise worded by someone cleverer. Scribes say even a god pays for misused words: Iskel the Scribe of the Silent suffers pain or blindness when a true name he revealed is misused.

Sellswords sworn by binding to a company are said to be the most loyal in the world and the most dangerous to cross, and a ballad is still sung of the deserter who rode three days burning with oathfire to warn the enemy he had once sworn to fight.

In the Medieval Era

Bound oaths underpin trade, service, and testimony where Binding Magic is practised, and every lord's hall and caravan knows the signs. Lords and temples keep oathwardens of their own, and most towns have a binder who seals bargains for pay. Village people meet it most often in a returned guard or debtor who cannot stop choking until they make amends.

Where It Appears

• Binding Magic (Burden of Promise, Oathfire, Contract Brand, Revocation Rite)
• The Binding Song
• The Name Bound
• The Silent Court
• Iskel the Scribe of the Silent (semantic dissonance)
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Schools of Magic