Infection
“Most don’t die of swords or spells. They rot, sputter, starve, and fade.”
In Everwealth, infection is not an ailment, it is the inheritance of every wound. There is no clean cut, no harmless scrape. Blood meets air, and death begins its slow negotiation. From the battlefield to the bog, infection claims more lives than any warlord or witchcraft ever could. A soldier may survive the spear, the frost, even the famine, but not the fever that follows. Surgeons call it the creeping death, the rot that seeps under bandages and prayers alike. It begins in heat and swelling, a red halo around a cut, and ends with delirium, blackened veins, and the stillness that follows the last shiver. In the poor quarters of Everwealth, infection is simply called “the rot,” and it is spoken of with the same resignation as rain.Transmission & Vectors
Every cut, puncture, and tear is a doorway. The enemy is invisible, filth from soil, sweat, stagnant water, rust, or the unwashed hand of a healer. The worst outbreaks follow floods, when waters from rotten, refuse-laden lands like The Bog of Lies seep into open wounds or storage barrels. Even a scrape rinsed in those black tides can fester before nightfall.
Rot spreads by:
- Dirty knives, nails, or arrows.
- Reused cloth or twine.
- Flies landing on wounds.
- Water drawn from still bogs or canals.
- Flesh contact during tending of the ill or dead.
Causes
Infection arises from unseen life, tiny invaders that feed where flesh is weak. Superstitious folk call them blood-spirits, though in truth they are nothing divine, only the crawling inheritance of filth. When they breed, the wound swells and weeps; When the body fights, the fever comes. Most die not from the wound itself, but from this invisible feast that follows.
Symptoms
Early:
- Redness, swelling, and tenderness around wounds.
- Heat and pulsing ache; thin, foul-smelling seepage.
- Restlessness, fever, or thirst.
- Streaking red veins up the limb or neck.
- Sudden chills, sweating, shaking teeth.
- Swollen glands, vomiting, blackening of flesh.
- Delirium or fainting.
- Death within days if fever worsens or reaches the heart.
Treatment
There is no cure, only discipline and pain. The only hope is to cut early, burn deep, and pray the blood runs clean.
Common treatments:
- Boil all instruments and cloth; Cauterize wounds with flame.
- Wash with hot spirits or salt.
- Keep wounds open to drain, never sewn closed if unclean.
- Amputation when the red lines rise.
Prognosis
A clean wound might mend. A dirty one mends the grave instead. Fever claims most within a week, sooner if the wound lies near the heart or spine. Survivors remain marked, scarred, trembling, or forever in pain when the rains return.
Sequela
- Chronic fevers and weakness.
- Gangrenous tissue; loss of fingers, limbs, or eyes.
- Night sweats, hallucinations, shaking fits.
- The smell of rot lingering long after healing.
Affected Groups
Everyone. From beggar to baron, infection honors no class. But the poor die quicker, without spirits, without fire, without clean water. In the marshlands, even children grow up with pus under their nails and scars that never stopped oozing. Even soldiers fear the sawbones more than the swords; for his knife cuts slower, and his bottle never lasts long enough.
Prevention
- Keep wounds washed in boiled water or spirits.
- Burn dressings after use.
- Boil the hands of the healer as surely as his blades.
- Never wash in the bogs.
- Never close a wound that smells sweet.
Epidemiology
Infection follows every war, every flood, every famine. It thrives where corpses are left unburied and tools go unwashed. Every outbreak of Mirebone or Lungspore begins the same way, with a wound that should have been boiled. No walls keep it out; no magick keeps it away. Infection is not a plague. It is the rule that all flesh rots by. After the Schism shattered organized medicine, infection became the quiet, endless war, one that no healer has truly won since.
History
Among the oldest, and deadliest killers in all of history. Few are as ancient, fewer are as lethal, and none have had more of a presence since time first began to scream forward. Far too many stories of those taken by the rot to ever forget. Workers oozing pus from their teeth until they succumb to a violent seizure after being recklessly exposed to noxious chemicals in the air by their superiors; Travelers met with a wolf's jaws and narrowly escaped death,m only to find it haking and vomiting mere days later. There is no good infection, there is no sure way to stop it once it has you; There is oinly treating your oozing wound with rags and clean water, praying through pain-grit teeth that it will be enough.
Cultural Reception
Infection is seen as punishment for carelessness, or as the marsh’s reminder that flesh was never meant to last. Peasants leave open wounds to the air at night, whispering to the wind: “Take the heat, leave the hand.” Surgeons whisper back their own creed, short, sharp, and final, “Cut early, or dig later.” In the taverns of the wounded, they joke bitterly that Everwealth has only three medicines left, fire, spirits, and luck, and none are in steady supply.
Origin
Natural
Cycle
Chronic, Acquired
Rarity
Common
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