Veil Bloat
Introduction
"I know it looks tempting, but if it casts no shadow, don't eat it."
At first, they called it a blessing.
The groves appeared overnight: places unnamed, unplanted, full of impossible bounty. Nature arrived uninvited to reclaim what mortal ambition and hubris had devoured for centuries. In lands where the ash ran deep and even rats were starving, suddenly there were orchards. Vines coiled through the ruins. Roots cracked through stone like memory through bone. And hanging from their branches: fruit swollen with life.
The water ran clean and cold in streams that gleamed in the wastes. It dripped through the fractures of the broken world - clear as glass, sweet as hope.
They called these places a miracle.
A new promised land, birthed from the corpse of the old one.
People believed a merciful god had finally heard their desperate prayers.
But then they had a taste.
Where the Veil Cries
The light of the stars has abandoned this world; driven off by the mayhem monsters and men have wrought.
Perhaps it's better this way.
Their beauty would only hurt now, a reminder of escape forever out of reach.
The sky is different. Like everything else.
It hangs low. Hazy. Fevered. Dying.
And yet, here and there, something spreads across its surface: a new, tainted beauty. Ripples of color, stunning like the northern lights, but deeply wrong.
They shimmer with hunger.
And when you get close enough for your breath to catch and your blood to whisper, you see it:
a Veil Tear -
not just a fracture in the world, but a wound in our reality.
The Veil Tears
People have many names for them.
Mages call them Hollowgates.
The Immortals know them as Eyes of the Beyond.
To survivors, they’re simply rifts or reality splits. Another haunting mystery threatening to swallow what little is left.
No matter the name, one truth holds: Veil Tears are fractures in the world’s fragile skin. Ruptures in the weave of existence. Places where the world grows thin, and the rules it once obeyed begin to falter.
A Veil Tear might drift above a shattered field like a ribbon of still lightning, or stretch jagged across a mountainside like a scar in the stone. Some hang vertical in the air, defying gravity. Others bloom outward in slow pulses, rippling across the sky like veins.
They are not portals. Not exactly.
They are phenomena where the elsewhere leaks into here. Where natural laws unravel, and reality forgets what it’s supposed to be. Where something foreign - not malevolent, not benevolent, just other - drips into our soil, our air, our living things.
Stand too close, and you may smell rain that never falls. Watch shadows bend away from the sun. Hear echoes of thoughts you haven’t had yet. Some who study the Tears say they are the breath of another realm. Others claim they are the lungs of this one, slowly collapsing.
Overgrowth
Around the Tears, the world blooms with life. Nature returns fast, as if it’s racing to reclaim something it was long denied. From a distance, these places look like paradise. And that is the gravest danger they pose. They don’t scream their wrongness.
They whisper it in a language that desperation cannot comprehend.
Shadows that don’t follow the light.
Fruits with no scent, and others with far too much of it.
Flowers that bloom in patterns which never repeat.
Water that glows for a heartbeat. Then doesn’t.
Animals that look at you, and it feels like they truly see you.
But to a starving traveler, a wounded caravan, a mother with no food left in her satchel, these groves look a lot like salvation.
Some say the land is dreaming itself awake through the Veil Tears. Others claim it’s adapting; remaking itself to survive in this ruined world.
The desperate see relief.
The careful know better than that.
As for the wise?
The wise do not linger at all.
The Taint
Not everything in a veil grove will kill you.
Some fruit is harmless. Some water is clean. The challenge is knowing which is which, and how long it will stay that way. What is safe today might betray you tomorrow. The rules are blurred, as if rewritten with a trembling hand.
The signs aren’t always clear. A bitter aftertaste. A warmth that lingers in the chest. At first, nothing feels wrong at all. And then, slowly, the change begins. What the veil touches, it doesn’t destroy.
It inhabits.
It folds itself into the body; quiet, curious, and patient.
This condition is known as Veil Bloat. The afflicted swell from the inside. Magic seeps from their pores. When the change completes, they burst unleashing chaotic Wyld Surges of magic that can level camps, twist the weather, or ignite the air. Mages fare worse. Their deaths are not endings, but beginnings. Some rise again: warped, ethereal, and hungry.
But until then, they live. And in the wastes, sometimes that’s enough.
The promise of one more day. One full belly. One taste of something that still grows.
That’s all it takes.
Marks of the Veil
Symbtoms
Veil Bloat begins quietly.
At first, there’s a subtle warmth beneath the skin. Then, a restless itch that no amount of scratching can soothe. Soon the infected begin feel bloated, yet hungrier than ever before.
It’s a maddening contradiction. Confusing. All-consuming.
By the time this stage sets in, if left untreated, there are rarely any safe paths to recovery.
The swelling begins inward, from the organs, before it spreads.
Limbs puff. Joints burn. The skin begins to pale until it turns almost translucent. Beneath it, a faint unnatural sheen stirs: veins expanding, pulsing visibly with the hues of the Veil Tears: deep indigo, bruised violet, ghostly silver.
Then the mind begins to unravel.
The infected hear things no living soul should.
The pulse of ionized air before a lightning strike.
The stretching of cells as a leaf unfurls.
The hush of unseen movement beneath the soil.
Paranoia takes root. At this stage, some descend into fevered rage. Others go still - eerily calm - resigned, as though waiting for something that already calls their name from afar.
Stages of Veil Bloat
Stage I: Within Hours of Consumption
A strange warmth begins to spread just beneath the skin. Most dismiss it as exhaustion or fever.
Stage II: After 24 Hours
An uncontrollable itch takes hold. The body begins to swell. Hunger intensifies.
Stage III: After 48 Hours
The skin begins to pale or discolor, sometimes becoming faintly translucent. Veins swell and pulse with unnatural hues. Joints ache. Movement becomes strained and irregular.
Stage IV: After 72 Hours
The mind begins to fracture. Paranoia roots deep. Some experience vivid hallucinations, others fall into quiet delirium. Victims may turn violent or eerily catatonic.
Stage V: After 96 Hours
The body can no longer contain the corruption of the disease. It ruptures violently, releasing a Wyld Surge of magic. The final effect depends on the nature host.
The Final Stages
While the disease progresses similarly whether the host is a simple mortal or a mage, the final stages of Veil Bloat diverge sharply.
Both, however, are equally disturbing.
For mortals, the end comes as a terrible crescendo. The body swells beyond control, bloated with unstable energy, until it ruptures in a violent burst of raw magic. The blast warps everything around it: trees snap, stone fractures, and the air distorts in unnatural waves. What remains of the body is often unrecognizable, consumed entirely by the veil's hunger.
For Mages, the fate is darker still. Their attuned souls respond violently to the intrusion. When they burst, the eruption shimmers in violet and shadow, ripping at the edges of reality in a Wyld Surges that can echo for miles. Some are obliterated in an instant.
Others are not so fortunate.
Few of them return as specters, twisted remnants of will and broken magic, bound to the Veil, echoing the agony of their final moments.
What about the Immortals?
Vampires are immune to diseases of the flesh, but not to the Veil's taint.
Though their bodies do not bloat or burst like those of mortals, they are not invulnerable to the touch of this condition. Veil Bloat infects them through blood. A single taste of tainted vitae is often enough to let the corruption take root. The symptoms though are different for them.
Stranger even.
The vampiric condition is, according to most accounts, a Wyld Surge made flesh; a magical anomaly held together by will, blood, and an undying refusal to decay. When the Veil touches that fragile storm, it does not unravel it.
It intensifies it.
Each of the four curses every Immortal suffers begin to flare:
The Hunger becomes erratic, no longer tied to reason. Even the scent of ash may trigger bloodlust.
The Morning Madness, once a fever dream at dawn, takes shape: hallucinations become real, paranoia festers into violence.
The Heart, once a symbol of power and stasis, becomes a glass weakness: a stake does not paralyze, it kills.
The Sun, long their bane, stretches its reach. Even moonlight begins to sear.
This condition rarely lasts longer than a week.
If the vampire survives it.
Few do.
Variants
For reasons no one fully understands, a rare few can harbor the Veil Bloat without collapsing. Their veins hum with the disease, their breath faintly cold, their dreams long and hollow, but they remain intact. If they live within a settlement, they are rarely left in peace.
They are made tasters, whether they want it or not. Their bodies offered to the unknown, one bite at a time. They are considered neither cursed, nor blessed.
Just useful.
But there is one final variant; the worst of all.
Some of the infected don’t explode when the Veil Bloat completes its course. Instead, they implode, folding inward with no sound, no light, no time to scream.
What remains is not a body, but a wound.
A new Veil Tear is born.
And the world frays just a little more.
Of Cures and Consequences
"Show those apples to the light, one of these is not quite right..."
If discovered early enough, Veil Bloat can be cured.
The most reliable method - if it can be called that - is starvation. Fasting for several days appears to force the disease's influence to dissipate before it fully anchors itself in the host. This applies even to Immortals. Unfortunately, the early stages of the disease come with unbearable hunger.
Restraint is rare.
Success, rarer still.
Past Stage Two, hope fades. At that point, all that can be done is comfort.
Preparation. Farewells whispered silently like apologies
Many infected choose to leave their settlements and die alone, far from the people they love. Not out of cowardice, but mercy. It's just better to vanish in the wastes than risk taking a village with you.
Still… scattered through the ruins, in songs and scribbled margins there are whispers of other ways. Of other cures that carry heavier prices.
The Ghost Binding Rite
The spirit on the other hand, does not. Once touched by the Veil Bloat, it changes. The ghost twists, forgets itself. It becomes a thing of hunger and echoes, no longer a soul but a specter, cursed and bound to a pain it never earned.
These creatures haunt the sites of their rebirth, drifting in agony, their whispers carrying the weight of another’s salvation.
A life is saved, yes.
But a horror is born.
The Weight of Lead
The Purists - a fringe sect of cultists and self-taught alchemists - believe that lead is the only true shield against magic. Since the Cataclysm, lead has been known to absorb and mute magical resonance. The Purists, however, take it further.
They grind it into fine powder, mix it with rustwater, and drink it like sacrament. To most, it seems madness; fear distilled into poison. And yet, something in their obsession has proven unexpectedly useful.
When consumed in the earliest stages of Veil Bloat, lead appears to suppress the symptoms. The swelling slows. The whispers quiet. The hunger fades. But no one truly knows if this suppression lasts. Some say a single dose has cured the taint entirely, while others whisper of those who relapsed, their bodies betraying them days or weeks later. Yet, those who keep drinking lead risk another fate entirely.
Repeated doses are poison: slow, merciless, and certain. Unfortunately, whether the cure lies in a single drink or a deadly ritual repeated, no one can say for sure.
The Hungry Veil
The Veil is patient. It waits in the fractures of reality, silent and watchful, ready to claim more.
As long as the Tears remain, the veil bloat is an inavoidable plague. It whispers promises of life and renewal, but its gift is a lie. Veil Bloat is curse and sickness both, a reckoning that begins with a single taste.
It promises life and delivers oblivion.
Read Next
I....From start to finish. The symptoms tragic, deep, written with a skill that had my skin crawling a little as I felt what was described. The inversion, fitting the darkness of the setting. The world is dark and full of terror, however perhaps one of the most dangerous things is the thing that looks like safety and peace. For when struggle, violence and darkness is all you know, you become cautious of it, aware of it, heightened to it. How to disarm? Like a predator, create the illusion of safety. The belief of it. Monstrous. I adore it. It is twisted and beautiful and haunting. I love the implications that safety is an illusion, that light and peace do not always mean good and safe. I am staring into a mirror with Crux Umbra. The more I see the more its like a weird reflection. Valerick conceptually is a world fighting off the nightmares of darkness, despair and the Void. The darkeness of well....ending. Of the lights being shut out. Of nothing being left. Crux Umbra feels as if a world trapped within that heady concept almost. Its been consumed by it, darkness and danger and the slow end of all is what remains, and now.....because reality has accepted nightmare to be what is supposed to be real, the dream of safety or peace has become the danger. Become the thing that can truly destroy you. It isn't evil. It is just the reality of the situation you are in. The world and its natural and supernatural laws, its metaphysics and science and magicks do not care for heady concepts of good and evil for they do not feel. They simply are. And you immortal or mortal alike, have to live within those confines. Its wonderous, horrifying and beautiful yet heinous in its beauty to realize that beauty is at best a dangerous lie, at worst an active trap. For all these these reasons, for the moment of sudden reflection, of that feeling conceptually of looking in a creative conceptual mirror, seeing the inverse reflected back at me, for the sheer depth of your descriptive talents, the emotions you drew out of me, the sheer thrill and enjoyment every paragraph brought as I read, just swallowed whole by the concept, lost in it, narratively immersed to my core, this simply MUST have a favored seat in my collection. Immediately to the top of the list for week one. I adore this with every bit of my being, its my favorite article I've read for this wave and that is not hyperbole. Thank you for it, and for sharing your wonderous wild imagination with all of us and the community. :)
Once more, thank you so much for this comment! It's one I will treasure honestly <3 I am very happy you enjoy this world and I'll do my best to keep things interesting around here!