Time-Sickness

Overview

Time-Sickness is the healers' name for what the zones of time do to a body. Travellers' accounts speak of rapid, catastrophic ageing, of decay, of the Slowing, and of centuries lost outside. A gatherer comes back from the deep water grey at thirty; a guardian walks out of a timeless spring and does not walk far; a keeper of sealed things comes home slow of hand and thought to a village of strangers. The root is the same: time inside was not time outside.

Cause

In some Resonant Zones time obeys a Harmonic instead of the Material Plane. The Ageless Spring halts ageing and the body's mending; leaving lets the held years rush back. The Drowning Garden heals but runs faster, faster with depth, and the Tidal Mirror can trap a traveller in a reflected time that ages or decays them. The Forge Deep and the Time Lock run slow, so that a week inside may be decades out, and the Lock can slow a mind and body for good. The Veil around the Stopped Clock steals hours and days unnoticed.

Who It Strikes

Herbalists after Drowning Garden plants, which grow deepest where time runs fastest; the sick who go for the Garden's healing water; seekers of long life at the Spring, and the Lingerers who later leave it; artefact-makers at the Forge Deep; and those who lodge or fetch sealed things at the Lock. Short-lived peoples, Goblins and Kobolds among them, feel lost years most.

Signs and Course

The rush of years. Hair greys and thins, skin loosens and spots, joints stiffen, teeth go, sight dims: ordinary ageing, compressed into days or an hour. After the Garden it stops when the gatherer leaves the water. After the Spring, a Lingerer of many years may age decades in a short walk and die; a brief visitor feels only a little of it.

The held wound. A cut taken at the Spring stays open, neither scabbing nor festering, until the bearer is outside; then it begins to heal, or to go bad, like any fresh wound.

The Slowing. After the Lock, and less often the Forge Deep, the sufferer moves and thinks slowly, answers late, and cannot keep pace with a conversation. In some it eases over years; in the worst it does not.

Contagion

It cannot be caught; it is time spent, not anything carried.

Treatment and Its Limits

No treatment gives back years. The aged-young are cared for as the old are: warmth, soft food, a stick, a seat by the fire. Held wounds from the Spring are cleaned and dressed as soon as the bearer is outside, since healing magic does nothing in the zone, and then mend as ordinary wounds do (see Wound Rot). Age Quiet slows visible wear on a small subject and cannot stop a rush already under way. The slowed need patience and work they can do at their own pace. The displaced need kin, if any are left, and records: a roll, a tally, a stone with a name.

Mortality

Leaving an Ageless Spring after long stillness often kills, and the deepest gatherers of the Garden sometimes die old within the hour. Most other sufferers live, older than their years, slow, or strangers in their own country. The Tidal Mirror's Time-Stranded seldom come back at all.

Lore and Belief

Herbalists hold that a Garden herb is stronger for every year it cost its gatherer, and price it so; in their trade, a grey young head is a mark of skill. Folk believe a Lingerer who leaves will be young again, which is the opposite of what happens. Families of those gone to the Lock keep their names alive in case they come back.

In the Medieval Era

Time-sickness is met most among the herbalists of the Drowning Garden, reached through deep lakes, flooded caves, and coastal grottos, whose trade knowingly spends years; and in the village beside an Ageless Spring, where the old never die and where people know what happens to one who walks away. Healers further off see a returner as an old person and treat the age, which is all that can be treated.

Where It Appears

• The Ageless Spring (the Trap, the Injury)
• The Drowning Garden (the Acceleration, the Depth)
• The Tidal Mirror (the Displacement, the Time-Stranded)
• The Forge Deep (the Time Lag)
• The Time Lock (the Lag, the Slowing, the Slow)
• The Stopped Clock
• The Lingerers
• Drowning Garden Flora
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Resonant Zones