Veil-Sickness

Overview

Veil-Sickness is the crossers' word for what scholars of the cosmos call memory erosion: the toll the Veil takes from everyone who passes through it. Most crossers pay a little and come out with a gap, a lost day, a headache, and a name they cannot recall. Some pay more. A few lose their way altogether, and the Veil keeps them.

Cause

The Veil answers intent, and charges for passage. The price may be bodily, in exhaustion or lost time; mental, in lost memory and confusion; or resonant, in a memory, a promise, or a piece of one's Pattern coherence. The harder the crossing, the higher the price. A traveller who loses intent drifts, and drift ends in being lost for good or in a mind that breaks.

Near each plane and zone the erosion takes a local form: severe at the Ashen Wastes, total at the Silence, brittle at the Parched, turned to distrust at the Scourge, to forced recall at the Radiance, to forgetting how to move or speak at the Frozen Moment, to hunger at the Blood River, to lost hours at the Stopped Clock.

Who It Strikes

Everyone who crosses. The uncertain, the frightened, and those who cross alone pay most; a traveller who knows where they are going and believes they will arrive pays least. Veil-Walkers, the Veil's guides and toll-keepers, are immune to its disorientation.

Signs and Course

After an ordinary crossing the traveller is tired, chilled, and a little lost: unsure of the day, fumbling names, missing a stretch of the road. This clears in a day or two, except for what was paid; that stays gone. A heavy crossing leaves wider gaps, whole seasons blurred, a forgotten child's face, a vow the traveller no longer remembers making, and sometimes a sense that they are not quite the same person.

The drifted who come back are rarer and worse. They repeat steps, stare, answer slowly or not at all, and may stay so, as the Lost of the Veil do; some recover over months, and some break.

Contagion

A crosser's losses are their own, and nobody catches them.

Treatment and Its Limits

Prevention is most of the care: a clear purpose, a companion, a "focus anchor" such as a map, a mantra, or a keepsake, and the old rule to remember one's name. Afterwards, rest and warmth for the body; for the mind, kin who tell the traveller what they have lost, and letters and tallies written before the journey. Name Retrieval and Recall Thread help with what still lies at the edge of memory, at the caster's cost; they cannot find a memory the Veil took as payment. Lost Pattern coherence is the province of Pattern-Fray's healers, and lost years of life cannot be given back.

Mortality

Ordinary crossings seldom kill. Drift does: the Veil keeps many who lose their way, and their families never learn where. Of the drifted who return, some never recover their minds. If the Boundary is breached, travellers in the Veil are the first to be unmade.

Lore and Belief

Crossers say the Veil takes "the fare", and argue over whether it chooses what to take or the traveller offers it. Many believe a memory freely paid to a Veil-Walker hurts less than one the fog steals, and some pay that way on purpose. Most peoples honour Ennor the Grave-Watcher at the threshold under their own names, and some crossers say his name before entering. A common belief holds that the Veil takes a piece of the soul; what it takes is memory, time, and pattern.

Smugglers who use the thin places as hidden roads come home missing more of themselves every season, and the boundary roads laugh, uneasily, at the one who made a fortune on his crossings and could not remember, at the end, where he had hidden it.

In the Medieval Era

The Veil is crossed by the few who dare, at old shrines, boundary roads, oath places, and thin places, so Veil-Sickness is familiar to shrine-keepers, mystics, couriers of strange roads, and the communities that live at a crossing (see Medieval Species Contact Zones). Where a thin place is near, households keep a returning crosser in for a day, feed them, and tell them their name and the date.

Where It Appears

• The Veil (the Law of Cost, the Law of Drift, those lost in the fog, the Drift, the Cost, the Breach)
• every plane and zone page under its The Veil bullet, for example the Silence and the Stopped Clock
• Knowledge of the Cosmos
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Veil and the Outside