The Eceron Blight

The Eceron Blight was a magically engineered disease, created by the mad Arch-Mages of the Elven Hegemony Of Tar'Iss, that was rampant on the continent of Eceron from the year 1980 until 1987. Their aim was force all the peoples they viewed as 'Lesser Races' to leave Eceron by destroying their crops and natural supplies with a magical blight. However, the blight took on a life of it's own and evolved to infect people as well as plant life, driving it's sentient hosts insane, before killing them. After their death, the blight would then reanimate their skeleton, using it to further spread itself.
The Blight ravaged the entire continent, laying waste to countless acres of farmland, forest, and meadow, as well as decimating entire populations. It was stopped by The Eightfold, also known as the Heroes Of Eceron, who stormed the very heart of Tar'Iss to find the original strain and used it to render the whole disease inert. Their efforts succeeded, and The Blight was halted, but the continent is still struggling to recover from it's effects, and evidence of The Blight still remains visible to this day.

Transmission & Vectors

The Blight was spread through initially airborne particles, magically engineered to phase through conventional means of protection such as masks and other physical barriers, but it evolved rapidly to spread via touch, fluid, and, in areas of extreme infection, the touch of semi-sentient tendrils and creepers created by the disease itself.

Symptoms

In plants, the Blight manifested as a grey colouration on stalks, leaves and flowers before, within a matter of hours, the entire plant crumbled into an ash like substance that would spread on the wind, infecting more plants. 
In Sentient Species, the Blight had three distinct stages. In stage one, known as the growth stage, it would present initially as a bad cold, or flu, accompanied a few days later by greying of the skin and loss of colour from the irises. In Stage 2, known as the Infection Stage, the disease would reach the brain, driving the host insane, requiring them to hunt down and pass on the disease to as many people as they could before, after a week or two, the disease destroyed the nervous system entirely, killing the host. After a few hours of death, a host body entered stage three, The Animate Stage, where the flesh of the host would begin to slough off the skeleton entirely, revealing the skeleton below coated entirely in a solid layer of Blight particulates, giving it an almost black colour. The Blight would then puppet the skeleton to attack living beings and attempt to spread the disease further. In this final stage, while not as immediately threatening as the still living hosts of the Infection Stage, the Animate still pose a large threat that, in the case of any impact against them, huge clouds of Blight particulates are released from the skeleton's coating.

Treatment

The cure for The Blight was never found. Being magical in nature, it kept changing rapidly enough to avoid any such attempts to work on a cure. Magical Healing and Restoration could subdue it's spread in the body for a time, but this was limited by the power of the spell used.

Prognosis

Anyone infected by the Blight was a lost cause. Unless they had access to daily magical healing, their descent into madness and eventual death was inevitable.

Prevention

The only sure fire way of stopping The Blight affecting an area was specifically tuned magical barriers. These barriers were tuned to match the rapidly changing magical nature of the Blight particles, and keep them from passing through. Cities eventually began to ward off whole districts with large scale barriers. However, the barriers could not detect and stop particles already within a host, so, if an infected person passed through the barrier, the Blight could run rampant within it. This led to at least one case of a protected town being completely lost to the blight within it's protected bubble.

Type

Magical

Origin

Magical