The Quiet Plague

Overview

The Quiet Plague takes sound out of a person, one layer at a time. The voice fades first, and last the breath. Its first sign in a district is what stops: birdsong, the wind in the grass, a neighbour's footsteps on the stair. Its treatment is the plainest of any Dark Entity blight: make noise, and keep making it.

No Incursion of the Silence Seed has ever reached Caeldon; this is what its plague would be.

Cause

It is the work of the Silence Seed, a Beyonder from a cosmology of contagious silence, which hears every voice as pollution. Its silence eats vibration, from a word or a heartbeat to the idea of sound. Those who fall into it and are not unmade walk out as the Seed-Hosts, and carry it on to others.

Who It Strikes

Anyone who hears the silence, of any people. The quiet are taken most easily: the hermit, the sleeper, the lone watchman, the hunter who has learned to move without a sound. The sick are at risk as well, since they lie still in hushed rooms. The Kobolds, alert to airflow and vibration, are said to notice the dead stillness in a tunnel first.

Signs and Course

• The voice. Speech grows thin and hoarse, then breathy, as if the sufferer were shy. Singing is hard. Written letters they carry begin to fade.
• The footsteps. Their tread makes no sound on boards or gravel, and doors close behind them without a click. Kin first notice it at night.
• The heartbeat. An ear laid on the chest hears nothing, though a faint pulse may still move at the wrist.
• The breath. Breathing slows and then stops, without a gasp.
• The Quiet. The sufferer is unmade into the silence. Where they lay there may be nothing, or a pale stillness that drinks the light.

The whole course can run in a night for a sleeper alone, or over days for someone kept among noise.

Contagion

It passes from the silenced to those near them, and on air and water and through the silence itself. A mute hamlet can silence the travellers who stop there, and a single Seed-Host can begin a new outbreak far from the first. Those who keep quiet beside the sick take it fastest.

Treatment and Its Limits

Noise is the treatment, the louder and messier the better. Bells are rung at the bedside, drums beaten, and whistles blown. The family shouts, sings, and argues around the sufferer in shifts through the night. The sufferer is made to hum whenever they can, and to keep humming until the voice comes back.

Workings of hush and stillness backfire. A Quiet Room ward laid so the patient can rest feeds the plague, and so do soothing chants and sleep-draughts. Workings of sound and speech hold. Breath Recall can force breathing back into rhythm for a while, at the healer's cost, but the Quiet takes it again unless the din is kept up.

Mortality

A sufferer whose breath has stopped is lost, and the unmade leave no body to bury. Of those reached by the second stage and surrounded by noise, most come back. Survivors often keep a thin voice and a fear of quiet rooms, and sleep with a bell by the bed.

Lore and Belief

Singing does protect the singer. Many would take the plague for a god's punishment on the boastful and the loud, and those who hushed their households in penance would die of that belief. A Cult of the Final Quiet would sew its mouths and cut out its tongues, and to plain folk a tongueless stranger would mean that the plague was near.

In the Medieval Era

The plague has never broken out on Caeldon, and no custom guards against it. Where it came, the customs would be loud: a bell at every door, children taught to scream, night watchmen singing on their rounds, temples ringing through the night, and a healer called to the quiet sick bringing a drum before any herb.

Where It Appears

• Silence Seed (the Incursion, the Contagion, the Cult of the Final Quiet, Travel Notes for Mortals)
• Seed-Hosts
• the Writers' Guide chapter What Waits Outside