Blood Fever

Blood Fever is transmitted one of three ways:  

• The spell which induces the condition is cast upon you willingly

• You consume food which is contaminated with the condition

• If your biological parents carried the condition, you have a strong chance of inheriting it from them.

For a while, Blood Fever does not present many obvious symptoms. It can lay dormant for years with minor symptoms of frequent fevers and occasional bloody coughs. This makes it difficult to diagnose until more severe symptoms start to display. When Blood Fever starts to develop, the follow symptoms start to appear frequently:  

• High fever

• Blood appearing when coughing

• Bloody vomit

• Breathlessness

• Visual and auditory hallucinations

• Weakness in muscles

• Red sores around forearms

  These symptoms can manifest themselves in any order - except for the fever and coughing. These two symptoms always appear first, the rest follow on in different intensities.

Blood Fever unfortunately doesn't have a cure - instead, it is a condition that needs treatment in the form of two pills, once a day which help stem the spread of the condition throughout the body. This does not guarantee that Blood Fever will not affect the patient at all - it just manages the symptoms and the spread of the condition.

Without treatment, it is hard to say how long the condition will progress throughout a person's body. However, if the symptoms progress into severe - it's very likely that the patient will succumb and die from the condition within a few years. Respiratory failure is the most common form of death when carrying Blood Fever in a person's system.   With treatment, death is highly unlikely. A person may experience a few severe days with the condition which needs medical attention until it passes, but will otherwise have no further issues with their lives.

For more than two decades (around 752 F onward), the exact origin of Blood Fever was unknown. Many people theorised that it was a product of poor conditions, as it frequently appeared in small towns near the sea, or that it was a airborne condition that was enhanced by the sea-salt air.   However, in 776 F. Grifiya’s Inquisition discovered that Blood Fever was a magically induced condition created by the sirens of Sirelore as a form of biological weapon against land-dwellers. The sirens would infect their own kin with the condition as a form of 'medicinal treatment' for minor conditions and then send them on hunting missions with the intention of them being caught and consumed as food by land-dwellers. This is how the condition spread from sirens to land-dwellers and why families were hit hard as the years passed by.