The Stabilization of Failed Mending

Overview

Over a long span, Failed Mending stops being a rare curse on single bodies and becomes the inherited way a Troll body heals.

Failed Mending is a twisted repair of lifeforce that answers injury too much. It closes, regrows, knots, scars, and keeps harm in altered form instead of restoring the body as it was. Trolls are the one people in whom it has become fixed and inheritable rather than incidental.

A Dated Change Without a Named Cause

The change has a span. Its cause has no name.

No one knows what first set Failed Mending loose. Some blame healing magic gone wrong, some the Verdant force, Echo memory, a change worked in living flesh by elder craft, failed restoration rites, or a catastrophe in one forgotten country. None of the stories can be proven.

The span is broad because the change was slow. It was a long turning over many generations rather than one night of horror, and nothing else that happened in the same age should be taken for its cause.

From Anomaly to Inheritance

Trolls descend from the threshold elder field, the deep ancestry of peoples shaped by seams, margins, and broken ground, and they were a people long before this span. Failed Mending was laid across a people who already existed; it did not make them.

What changes is how they live. A twisted healing in scattered bodies is a misfortune. One that passes to every child is a shared fate, and a shared fate breeds shared answers: customs about wounding, about who may be struck and how, about which injuries should be let close and which kept open. From those answers the place-bound crossing customs of later Trolls eventually grow.

Historical Significance

Where Trolls come from, the threshold elder field, and what marks them, this condition, are two different things. The stabilization sets the condition long before the crossing houses that later live by it, so those houses are an answer to an inherited fate, not its origin.

The rule of Failed Mending itself is set out in Lifeforce; this span marks when it became heritable. What it leaves in the world is the Troll body itself: the fighter who gets up from a wound that should have killed him, the scars kept as a record of every blow, and the old fear of the thing under the bridge.