Stoneskin Sickness

The Stoneskin Sickness is a slow and insidious thing. One doesn't know that they have contracted the chronic illness until it is far too late.   It is transmitted through steady contact with the minerals that can be found underground and the plants and fungi that manage to grow there. If someone ate one or two things that are capable of causing this condition, but then never ate such things again, they would not be affected. But it is the long and repetitive consumption of such things that eventually leads to the Stoneskin Sickness, as the minerals and essence of what causes it are allowed to gradually build up like heavy metals.

The Stoneskin Sickness begins with the consumption of certain plants and fruits that grow within the caves that were discovered and populated during the Epoch of Snow. Most of these caves, small biomes located under the rock, were known to the dwarves before the impact, while others were discovered as the caves were modified for habitation. These caves are filled with greenery and several different fruit-bearing plants and mushrooms, and depending on what is in the ground below the greenery, no one is able to determine if they will develop Stoneskin Sickness when they eat something or not.   Some plants are more likely to cause the sickness, even if there are negligible levels in the soil and stone. The Cave Lettuce plant is one such plant and what makes it so dangerous is that it takes in the source of the sickness and holds onto it until it wilts and dies. One should never consume Cave Lettuce lest they wish to develop the sickness.   What exactly the plants take in and what causes the Stoneskin Sickness isn't exactly known. Both Dwarven and Elven healers and scholars have studied and searched for it at length, but the answer still escapes them. All they can tell is that it exists in the earth, down at the levels where the caves are, and cannot be found on the surface.

There is no treatment for this sickness, only prevention.

1. An infected individual will begin to notice that their skin is greying after a period of weeks eating the contaminated food.
2. Around a week after they notice that their skin colour has changed, they will begin to develop a patch of stone-like skin. It hasn't been determined if it is actual stone or a hardening that simply feels like stone.
3. More and more patches appear over time.
4. Slowly, after years (a span of time that varies between individuals) the patches slowly merge together until every square inch of the skin has changed to this hardened version.
5. The next stage begins: the skin develops new splotches, these ones even thicker than the ones that came before. They are noticeably more raised and take on a distinct hardness and stone-like texture and speaks of the truly-stone like nature of the patches.*
6. As the patches grow and multiply, mobility begins to decrease. Healers and scholars believe this is because the skin is now truly transforming into stone, taking on the nature of the mysterious mineral at the source of the sickness. They believe that the change penetrates all the way to the bone, and as more and more muscle is turned into stone, the more limited the sufferer becomes. They are unable to move.
7. This sickness eventually leads to death as the body is slowly turned to stone. This stops them from being able to breathe, eat, or drink during the final stages.

  At some point during the process, the sufferer needs to chose what position they wish to spend the rest of their life in, as they soon won't be able to move at all.

The most prevalent and certain way to not contract the Stoneskin Sickness is to not eat anything that was grown underground or in those underground gardens. There is no other preventative measures.

This illness does not move through populations, instead it crops up in populations that are living underground and eating from the underground gardens.