The Chromatic Chord

Wound Rot

The festering of dirty wounds, from a hot red swelling to blackening flesh, blood fever, and the locking jaw, which kills more of the wounded than the blows that made the wounds.

Overview

Wound rot is the sickness that follows a wound. A cut that should have healed swells hot and red, oozes, and stinks, and from there it mends or goes deeper. On a battlefield it kills more men and women in the weeks after than fell on the day. Every healer knows the rule it taught: clean before you close.

Cause

Dirt carried into a wound brings rot with it: soil, splinters, cloth driven in by an arrow, the filth on a blade or a tooth, a dirty dressing, an unwashed hand. A deep, narrow puncture, from a nail, a thorn, or a bite, is the most dangerous, because it shuts over the dirt.

Who It Strikes

Anyone wounded can take it. Fighters, farm workers, smiths, the bitten, and the poor, who cannot keep a wound clean, take it most; so do women torn in childbirth (see Childbed Fever). Ogres heal ordinarily and rot ordinarily. Trolls shrug off most wounds, but their flesh closes so strongly that a dirty wound can seal over the rot inside it. The Wrought are spared.

Signs and Course

Festering. After a day or two the wound swells, reddens, and throbs, and grows hot to the touch. Thick yellow matter gathers and drains. Most festering wounds clear once they drain, leaving a broad scar.

Blood fever. From a bad wound, red streaks creep up the limb, the knots in the armpit or groin swell, and fever, chills, and a racing pulse follow. The sick become confused. Without help many die within days.

Blackening. Flesh around a crushed or neglected wound turns grey, then black, and gives off a sweet, unbearable stench, sometimes crackling under the fingers. It spreads by the hour. Only cutting away the dead flesh, or the limb, stops it.

Contagion

Wound rot is not caught from the sick by breath or touch. It is carried from wound to wound by hands, instruments, and dressings, which is why it runs through a crowded hospice tent as if it were a plague.

Treatment and Its Limits

Cleaning comes first. A healer washes out dirt and rot with Cleanse Wound and flushes a puncture clear with Scour Channel before sealing it, or opens and drains the wound by hand. Only then is it closed: Close Flesh is poor on filthy wounds, and closing a dirty wound seals the rot in. Bark grafted on with Graft Skin carries its own risk of infection. Dressings of clean moss and linen help (see Moss and Lichen).

Blackening flesh is cut away or burned. Purging Flame can burn out a spreading rot that nothing else stops, at serious cost, and can kill the patient. A priest's Cure Affliction can turn blood fever. For the locking jaw little helps but a dark, quiet room and luck.

Mortality

Most festering wounds heal. Untreated blood fever kills perhaps half of those who take it, and spreading blackening kills nearly all who are not cut free of it. The locking jaw kills most who take it. Survivors keep broad, puckered scars, stiff joints, and lost limbs.

Lore and Belief

Many healers hold that thick pale matter is a good sign, the wound "cleaning itself", and some leave dressings on for days to bring it on; thin, bloody, stinking matter they fear, and they are right to. Healing pressed hard and fast is believed to breed rot, and stories of the Flesh Weaver, whose forced healing breeds infection, say the same. Troll kin, who decide by rite which wounds may close, are wary of any healer who closes fast.

Sellswords fear a festering cut more than a clean death, and the camp surgeon who will cut off a rotting arm without being asked is the most valued man in a company; every company knows the tale of the captain who took his own leg off with his sword rather than wait for one.

In the Medieval Era

Wound rot fills the hospice tents of every war. The Red Mercy Hospices of Vital Magic and battlefield medics clean, drain, cauterize, and cut, and the best of them wash their hands and boil their linen out of a habit whose reason nobody knows. Rites of many small bloodlettings, such as the Sacrificial working Feast of Knives, leave a crop of festering cuts behind them.

Where It Appears

In the Writers’ Guide

See Also