Viper Venom

Overview

On warm days the adders lie out on heath and stone, and a bare foot or a hand in the bracken finds one. Viper venom rarely kills a grown Human, but it lays the bitten limb up for weeks and can kill a child within the day. It is the venom every field healer is expected to know, and the one the schools of healing use as their plain example.

Cause

Adders and vipers are short, thick-bodied snakes, grey, brown, copper, or sand-coloured, most with a dark zigzag down the back, that bask on sunny ground and hide in heather, scree, sand, and dry-stone walls. They bite in defence, when trodden on, grasped, or cornered, and drive venom in through two fangs. The venom spoils the blood and the flesh around the bite.

Who It Strikes

Those who work and walk on heath and rock: herders and their dogs and sheep, harvesters and haymakers in the warm months, scouts and soldiers lying in cover, and children who turn over stones. The dose that sickens a grown Human gravely endangers a small body, so Kobolds, Halflings, Goblins, and Gnomes fear the adder as Humans fear a much larger snake. Giants and Ogres feel it as a bad sting.

Signs and Course

Two small punctures, sometimes one, and a burning pain at once. Within the hour the bitten hand or foot swells and the swelling climbs the limb, dark and bruised, with the skin tight and hot. Then comes the danger of the first day: faintness, cold sweat, vomiting, a weak quick pulse, and in bad cases a falling down that looks like death. A patient who comes through the first day mostly recovers; the swelling goes down over a week or two, the bruising yellows, and the limb stays weak and sore for weeks more. Sometimes the flesh around the bite dies and leaves a pitted scar.

Contagion

It does not pass from person to person.

Treatment and Its Limits

The patient is kept still and carried, not walked, and rings and tight boots come off before the swelling closes on them. Folk cut the bite and suck it, bind it hard, or lay the split body of the killed snake on it; none of these does good, and binding too tight can cost the limb. Magic does better. Toxin Draw drains a viper's venom into a blackening poultice, and a field healer can save a bitten scout with Purge Poison, forcing the venom out before it reaches the heart; both draw on the healer's reserves or the patient's own. Cure Affliction clears what remains. None of them restores flesh that has already died.

Mortality

Few grown Humans, Dwarves, or Orcs die of a single adder bite, perhaps one in many dozens. Young children die far more often, and the small peoples more often still. Dogs die of it every summer. Of the living, some keep a stiff hand or a wasted calf.

Lore and Belief

Herders say an adder is deaf and must be warned by stamping, which is half true: it feels the ground, not the voice. An adder stone, a pebble with a hole worn through it, is hung in byres against bites. Some say an adder will not die until sunset however it is cut, and that killing one brings its mate.

Assassins' tales tell of an adder slipped into a lord's boot, and every great household on adder ground has a servant whose task is to shake out the boots each morning.

In the Medieval Era

Adders are met wherever there is heath, scree, or dry slope, in the uplands of the cradle and on the far side alike, and bites come with the warm months and the harvest. Every village healer has a way with them, and most of the ways do nothing; the patients mostly live anyway. Field healers of the Red Mercy Hospices of Vital Magic and the healers of Surging Magic carry the viper bite as their first lesson in drawing venom.

Where It Appears

• Vital Magic: Toxin Draw
• Surging Magic: Purge Poison
• the Writers' Guide chapter The Schools of Magic