Diseases and Afflictions:

In Everwealth, illness is not a misfortune, it is an inevitability, a silent inheritance stitched into the marrow of its people, more feared than famine and more constant than war. While blades and beasts may kill swiftly, it is sickness that lingers, starves, maddens, and unspools. Illness here wears many masks. Some come cloaked in grime and squalor: the Lungspore plague, fungus eating your lungs like a maggot does a corpse until your final choked breath, or Witherblain, which melts limbs like wax in summer. But these are the kinder ones, if such a word can be used. Others are whispered of in ruined libraries and plague-wards where no priest dares enter, arcane-born afflictions twisted from shattered magick, divine abandonment, or forgotten sins. These are the horrors that rewrite the body. Glasspox, which erupts in crystalline bloom across the flesh, hatching pain like frost on fire. Vampyrism and Lycanthropy, curses disguised as infections that turn kin into predators. Curses themselves are now endemic: untraceable, often terminal, passed on in hateful words or relics best left buried. Each affliction, no matter how obscure, bleeds into Everwealth’s worn psyche.   Healing is rare, trust is rarer. Most suffer in silence, swaddled in talismans and superstition, muttering bargains to bones or stars. For in this kingdom cracked by Schism and soaked in arcane runoff, sickness does not mean misfortune, it means transformation, exile, or something worse. Disease is the uninvited guest that never leaves, and each step forward is taken on borrowed health and borrowed time. These wretched afflictions often go unnamed or denied by local lords who fear panic or divine reprisal, healers that dabble in curing them are watched closely by The Arcane Coalition, lest they grow too skilled, or too curious. For most, illness is endured in silence. Doctors are distant, priests are costly, and alchemists are unreliable at best. In slums and border towns, the afflicted often wear charms, bind themselves in salt-twine, or mutter pleas to the bones of long-dead saints. To be visibly sick in some regions is to be feared, pitied, or driven out, not for cruelty, but survival. And so Everwealth limps forward, sick in its marrow, held together not by medicine, but by the brutal persistence of those who’ve learned to suffer without end.