Acquisition
The Blight is magical in nature and seems to infect creatures only within the area of the Blightlands -- ever expanding though they are. It is unclear how exactly the disease is contracted within the Blightlands and no succesful countermeasure has yet been devised to protect people from becoming infected.
Luckily, creatures infected by the Blight are not contagious. Neither is the disease carried outside the Blightlands by wind or water.
Symptoms and progression
The fundamental effects of the Blight manifest in several terrible symptoms. Additionally, the Blight is often accompanied by other diseases and ailments. The disease progresses from a slow start to a gruesome end in a matter of days. Durations of reported cases in humans have ranged from four days to twenty.
Pallor and Apathy. The first stage of the Blight in creatures is a pallid change in physical appearance and the lapse of the creature's psyche into a state of depressed disinterest. The skin of the diseased goes pale, their stare becomes empty, their movements are tired and their posture sickly. Moreover, they might suffer from insomnia, loss of appetite and other psychic symptoms typically associated with depression. In plants this first stage of the disease is apparent only by a faint touch of wilting.
Sapped of Life. The Blight manifests itself irrefutably when the diseased starts visibly withering away towards the middle stages of the disease. People lose their hair by the handfuls, the color of their eyes turns to grey, their skin becomes thin enough to almost see through, their nails and teeth start coming off by themselves, and their limbs start showing signs of necrosis. Usually by this point the diseased are severely depressed, some of them being so apathetic as not to be even alert. Such patients are unreachable with communication and oblivious to stimuli that would cause great distress to a healthy person. Death by starvation is common for untreated patients at this stage. Plants on the other hand simply wither away, slowly becoming shriveled, dry and lifeless.
Secondary Diseases. As the diseased is drained of the very essence of life, they become more susceptible to other diseases. Patients in the middle stages of the Blight often contract flus, poxes and plagues very easily, and any chronic diseases they might already carry get worse and worse as the Blight progresses in their body. Such secondary diseases can prove fatal for the patient even before the Blight has run its full course.
Blight Tumors. During the middle stages of the Blight, the diseased is afflicted with pustulent growths on their skin and sometimes even on the inside. On the skin, such growths begin as a nasty rash but quickly develop to pustules known as "blight tumors", filled with foul liquid and glowing with magical light. Blight tumors are exceptionally dangerous when growing inside the patient's body, causing damage to organs and being difficult to treat. Moreover, the tumors are astoundigly resilient, requiring tremendous force and sharp instruments to pierce, and can grow to abhorrent sizes. Rare reports have described glowing pustules the size of a human head. Blight tumors appear in plants and animals alike.
Blight Crystals. In the late stage of the disease, blight tumors turn into crystalline shards. As a pustule grows older a shard of crystal matures inside it, becoming revealed after the pustule inevitably bursts. These crystals are not safe to remove, for they are usually embedded very deep in the patient's tissues. The crystals glow with a faint magical charge that diminishes slowly over time. The formation of crystals occurs to all victims of the Blight regardless whether they are alive at this stage of the disease or not.
Death by Crystallization. As more and more pustules mature into crystalline protrusions, the victim is little by little turned from living matter into crystal. This process is made all the faster by the fact that mature blight crystals can grow by themselves even outside the cocoon of a blight pustule. If the diseased is somehow still alive at this final stage, they are sure to perish in short order due to organ loss as their bodyparts are replaced by lifeless mineral.
Nothing Is Spared. The Blight infects not only living things but also matter. As the Blightlands slowly expand, all contaminated terrain is invariably covered in shards of crystal. Forests turn into gardens of prismatic statues as the trees succumb to the Blight, but even plant-free environments like arid wastelands are not left untouched. Deserts, mountains, city streets, ancient ruins -- everything is slowly but surely covered by an unbroken carpet of blight crystals.
History
The Blight did not exist before the Age of Apocalypse. Sometime in the several decades of disaster, war and genocide that followed the reincarnation of the goddess
Louhi in 2502 ER, the north-eastern corner of Amanor was struck by a magical calamity. Earthquakes of divine magnitude tore asunder the entire region of the
Shadowlands as well as all of the
Underdark beneath.
Seldaroth, the ancient realm of the
red elves that had remained isolated beneath the Shadowlands for millenia, was utterly destroyed and its people eradicated.
From the shattered desolation of the Shadowlands the Blight was born, rising from beneath the broken ground via yawning ravines, vast sinkholes and former mountains now turned to bottomless pits. The first shards of crystal grew undiscovered until they soared higher than the mountain peaks that had once been.
It is unknown what exactly created the Blight: Was it an unlucky byproduct of the destruction of Seldaroth? Or was the Blight in all its horror designed by some dark god? Is it the creation of one of the
Four Horsemen, perhaps, or one of Louhi's Furies? Or maybe of the Eternal Sovereign herself?
Regardless of its origin, the Blight is now referred to by scholars as the "final fate of all creation". Since the progressive expansion of the Blight cannot be stopped, the Blightlands will one day cover the entirety of Amanor. Surely mortals can only be delivered from such a fate only by unwavering faith in the Eternal Sovereign.
Impact
By the end of the first century of the Age of Apocalypse, the Blightlands extend some 500-1000 kilometers from where the Shadowlands were once bordered by the Forbidden Mountains. By this rate of expansion the Blight will reach the north-eastern edge of the
Heartlands in the next 100-200 years. The continent of
Gargantia should have its first contact with the Blight in the next 300-500 years as the Blightlands slowly creep across the
Dead cities and over to the northern regions of the Great Plains. Areas already swallowed up by the Blightlands include the desert realm of the fallen Magocracy of
Ankur, the northern half of the human kingdoms of the
Rubian Desert, much of the eastern edge of the
Borean Tundra and the entirety of the Drakenfel Salt Plains.
As the Blight continues its expansion ever onwards, droves of refugees flee before it to unblighted lands in a mass migration of unprecedented scale. Resources are spread thin, trade routes are clogged, cities are crowded and anarchy runs rampant in any civilized regions that border the Blightlands. Survival is anything but guaranteed for people that abandon their homes before the Blight. Dispossessed as they are during the darkest period of history the world has ever seen, refugees are as likely to die because of riots, banditry or martial law as they are of starvation or disease.
As living things flee their homes and their abandoned realms are absorbed into the Blightlands, there are some who stand to profit. Undead are immune to the Blight and can thus freely dwell within the crystalline wastes. In recent years, erratic invasions by rampaging undead have began adding to the many troubles that plague civilized lands in the edges of the Blightlands.
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