Slumber-Sickness

Overview

Slumber-Sickness begins as the feeling everyone has at the end of a long day: a sweet heaviness in the limbs and the wish to sit down. It does not lift with rest. Instead it deepens until an arm takes an hour to raise, a thought will not form, and the heart beats as if through mud. The sufferer stays awake inside a body that has stopped.

Cause

It comes from the Great Slumber, a face of the Unformed, the absence of wakefulness from before anything acted. Its Drowse Field slows everything within it. It makes bodies too heavy to move and minds too heavy to think, and it can sink a mind into a dreamless sleep while the eyes stay open. It settles the way weight settles, wherever effort has begun to seem unnecessary.

Who It Strikes

Anyone, of any people, but the exhausted first: reapers at the end of harvest, soldiers on a forced march, mothers with new children, those who have nursed the sick for weeks, and the long sick themselves. A people's endurance gives no shield, since an Orc or an Ogre can be worn out like anyone. A city sick with exhaustion can take it as a whole.

Signs and Course

• The heaviness. Limbs feel weighted and warm, and rest seems sweet. The sufferer sits down often and does not want to stand. Onlookers see only tiredness.
• The slowing. Movements take far too long.
• The waking sleep. The eyes stay open but nothing moves behind them, and no dream comes. The pulse slows to a beat every few long breaths.
• The stillness. The body lies or stands where it stopped, warm and breathing, aware of everything and unable to act on any of it.

Contagion

It does not pass from sufferer to nurse as a fever does. Like every Unformed field it rides on the air and the water and on the thoughts of whoever enters it, so a nurse who comes in weary may sink too. It cannot be filtered or shut out by ordinary means.

Treatment and Its Limits

The treatment is to act. Sufferers are got up, walked, and kept walking, and no one is allowed to sit down. Drums, bells, and marching songs keep time, and a shouted name or a sharp, urgent order can break a little of the stillness. Cold water on the face and strong smells help in the first stage. The rule is to assert the opposite: where the weight presses, move on purpose.

Sleep-draughts, soothing chants, and spells that slow, stop, or bring sleep feed it. Workings of motion and will hold. No herb wakes the deep sleeper. Carrying them out of the field is the surest help. It costs the bearers, who must keep moving under the weight.

Mortality

It rarely kills. Sufferers lie aware for as long as the field stays. The deaths come from what happens around them: a hearth fire that spreads, a winter night, a household too heavy to feed its sick. Those who are woken keep a deep weariness for a season, and many of them fear their own rest afterwards.

Lore and Belief

Most peoples take it for exhaustion, melancholy, or a sleeping sickness sent by a bad star, and put the sufferer to bed, which is the worst thing to do. Some call it a blessing of rest on those who have worked too hard. Other faces of the Unformed bring their own sicknesses of the mind, among them the forgetting of the Echoing Dark and the plague of identity of the Fractured Mirror, and the peoples often confuse them.

In the Medieval Era

Slumber-Sickness is rare, but it comes at the times ordinary life is hardest: in the last week of harvest, at the end of a siege, and after a long plague. Village headmen who know of it ring the harvest bell at intervals and keep the reapers singing. Captains do not let a column halt in still air. A folk healer who sees a whole household sitting quiet sends for the neighbours to drag them outside.

Where It Appears

• The Great Slumber (the Weight of Inertia, the Drowse Field, the Dream of the Unwaking, the City of Sleep)
• Overview: The Unformed (How They Operate, Travel Notes for Mortals)
• the Writers' Guide chapter What Waits Outside