The Qzoth Incursion

Overview

The last of the three Incursions on Caeldon. The Bloom of Qzoth broke out in a wooded farming valley in the south-eastern foothills of the Headwater Marches, swallowed its towns, and was burned back by Ignis's current and the first fire-orders. It left the Wrongwood.

By then the Headwater valleys had long been settled along the roads of The Headwater Exchange Roads (c. 16,000-c. 8,000 BR), and predecessor-frames worked their fields (The Spread of the Predecessor-Frames, c. 16,000-c. 2,000 BR).

The Bloom in the Valley

It began as a warm patch of ground in a woodlot and a calf born wrong. Within a season the Changing Fever was running down the valley, and the Bloom followed: orchards that grew eyes, a river that turned to vein, towns that ran together into one mass. Beasts in the woods around it bore Kindless Broods, and frames carted out of the valley carried its spores to the next.

Burning It Back

Healing fed it. Fire stopped it. Bands of Humans from the valleys round it, the first fire-orders, burned whatever changed, their own sick and their own houses among it, praying as they did to the Steward of Purifying Fire, and Ignis bore on the Bloom through its current beside them. The valley's last town was burned by its own people with the Bloom inside it. Some of the fire-bands were broken by what they hunted: a band that went into the orchards at dusk and was found at dawn grown into the trees, and burned there by the next. When the Bloom had shrunk back to its breach, the Primes drove Qzoth out through the Boundary.

Historical Significance

The fire-orders outlived the Bloom, and their practice of burning what changes and nursing the rest made them the forerunners of every later plague-burner, the Red Mercy Hospices among them (see Vital Magic). The valley was never resettled, and the town that burned itself is how most people still know the Changing Fever. The burners are honoured as heroes in the Headwater valleys, and nobody there pretends they were kind: a valley toast names the girl who lit her own mother's house, and the band that held the last ford for a season so that nothing changed would cross it. Their heirs, the brood-hunters, still hunt the Kindless Broods in the Wrongwood with torch and spear for a lord's bounty, never alone and never after dark, and the ash-mounds of the burned towns are the one ruin in the Marches that no treasure-seeker will dig.