The Black Gift

The 'Black Gift' occurs in only a hundred or so individuals in a lifetime. Though its name sounds like scornful mockery, there are those who actually consider it a gift rather than a curse.

Symptoms

Curse...

Common symptoms include mild to severe migraines, in the worst cases these have reduced adults to writhing about on the ground in tears. Vision will be blurred in varying degrees for minutes or hours after the migraines have dissipated. Feelings of nauseousness sometimes end in vomiting fairly voluminous amounts of bile, sometimes blood. In childhood, fevers and rather violent convulsions are common and this can lead to premature death if left untreated. There are reports of sufferers experiencing an acute pain in the shoulders and upper back that feels like being 'stabbed with hot knives'.
Other common symptoms include nose bleeds, mild to severe joint and muscle ache, insomnia, sleep paralysis, a mild to severe sensitivity to light, fatigue and depression.
Uncommon symptoms include painful growths either inside the ear or on the gums. They can make hearing and eating very difficult, with 1 in 3 will becoming deaf. Aggravating them even slightly can cause them to bleed profusely.
Finally, the rarest symptom is a condition called 'venting'. This happens to 1 in about 30 people within a few years of reaching adolescence. It is theorized the growth changes during puberty aggravate the condition and this results in the prior mentioned symptom, or more accurately, symptoms. Firstly, your skin will bruise and tear much easier than before and hot white liquid will seep out of the wounds. At this point, sufferers may be too afraid to go outside and become hermits.
Within nine months or a year, joints become increasingly stiff until eventually you are immobile and you become bed-bound, needing assistance to get up. At last the final and horrific 'venting'; the hot white liquid will pour out of your nose, ears and against the back of your eyes, destroying them and making you blind.

...Or Gift?

A minority of those with the condition acknowledge that while the symptoms are quite dire, it is a price worth paying for the benefits. All those born with the 'Black Gift' have a great potential in developing their 'divine inheritance' and often mature into extraordinarily accomplished sorcerers and spell casters, achieving a mastery of the arcane most of their peers could only dream of.

Treatment

Bloodletting - chiseling a small hole into the skull is still widely practiced in some cultures for treating fevers.

Bathing in freezing cold water to treat fevers is believed by more advanced cultures to aggravate the condition further.

Saint Gerallée's potion: a remedy created to treat fevers and fatigue.

Cultural Reception

The way sufferers are treated varies greatly depending on the culture or individual. Observers of the Faith will typically have great empathy for sufferers and communities will often band together to help an individual with the condition, though it largely depends on the gods they follow. Followers of Antiropp may view them with scorn and will go out of their way to make sufferers feel unwelcome, considering them feeble of body and mind; everything they stand against.
More isolated and primitive societies often regard them with fear or mistrust. Anyone unlucky enough with the condition to be born among these peoples will face harsh persecution, often forced into exile.

Type

Supernatural

Origin

Divine

Cycle

Chronic, Congenital

Rarity

Extremely Rare