The Chromatic Chord

Venoms of the Zones and Planes

The bites, saps, pollens, and nectars of the Blood River and the Verdant Expanse that numb, drain, choke, sleep, and dissolve, some of them binding too deeply for a healer to draw.

Overview

The places where the dying go to be healed are the places where the living are most easily taken. The venoms of the Blood River and the Verdant Expanse are seldom deadly in themselves. They numb, slow, choke, and lull, and the place does the rest.

Cause

On the Blood River, Blood-Spinners bind their catch in webs of blood and bite, and the bite numbs. Blood-Eels carry no venom in the ordinary sense: they draw lifeforce through the wound, and leave the victim cold and weak for days. In the Verdant Expanse the air is heavy with pollen that can choke (see Verdant Expanse Flora), the nectar of Flower-Stalkers is a powerful sleeping draught, and the pools of the carnivorous plants dissolve flesh. Many of these carry their plane's own vitality, which is why some magical venoms bind too deeply for simple extraction.

Who It Strikes

Travellers who reach these places, most of them the sick and their carers come for the cure, and the herbalists and gatherers who come for rare herbs, nectar, and web. Those who wade, ford, or kneel to drink at the Blood River meet the eels; those who stop moving in the Expanse meet everything else.

Signs and Course

A Blood-Spinner bite spreads a dead, cold numbness from the wound up the limb, so that a caught traveller cannot pull free. It wears off over hours once out of the web. A Blood-Eel's bite leaves the victim pale, chilled, shaking, and slow to rise for days, as after great blood loss. Verdant pollen thickens in the throat and chest in a cough that will not clear, and a traveller who breathes too much of it chokes. Flower-Stalker nectar brings warm drowsiness and then deep sleep within minutes. A carnivorous pool burns and blisters skin, and a limb held in it is eaten away.

Contagion

None of these passes from one person to another.

Treatment and Its Limits

The first treatment is to leave. Out of the web, the numbness passes; out of the pollen, the cough slowly clears. Toxin Draw and Purge Poison reach the plainer venoms, but some bind too deeply for extraction, and then only Cure Affliction or time will serve. A Blood-Eel's victim has lost lifeforce, not taken a poison: food, warmth, rest, and same-species healing restore it. Some healers keep dried Blood-Eel teeth for drawing poison from a wound, with mixed success.

Mortality

The venoms seldom kill. The Blood River and the Expanse do: a numbed traveller in a web is fed on, a sleeper in the Expanse is grown over before morning, a drained wader is dragged into the flow. Survivors may keep a numb patch, a weak chest, or a fear of still water.

Lore and Belief

River-valley folk say a Blood-Eel will not bite someone who has never drunk from the river, which is untrue. Herbalists claim dried Blood-Spinner web stanches bleeding, and sell Flower-Stalker nectar as a sleeping draught to the rich. Healers tell of travellers who came back from the Expanse cured and carrying a piece of it growing inside them.

In the Medieval Era

Few in the medieval present ever meet these venoms. The Expanse lies across the planes, and the Blood River wakes only now and then, in a fertile valley or on an old battlefield, and does not stay; every cure found in either is dearly paid for. Those who meet them are pilgrims of the desperate sick, their carers, and the herbalists and alchemists who gather there and bring back nectar, web, and teeth that pass through healers' hands at high prices. Most healers at home have only heard of them.

Where It Appears

See Also