On the Oily Pestilence

From a pre-print of an almanac, Heroldsdruckerei

Beneath the Western seal, which was the third to be opened, lay Aquas Nemesis. “Oily Pestilence”, they called it, but in fact this name does not capture the true essence of the matter, for it suggests that this Oily Pestilence would indeed be just a disease, albeit perhaps a particularly bad one. However, it is much more than that. It is all diseases. The sheer idea of pestilence and wasting away, the core of what constitutes every conceivable disease.

The story of how the Forsaken of the Oily Pestilence came into being, which continues to this day, is a strange one:

From time immemorial, the mortal people have been plagued and ravaged by many a disease. There were old and new epidemics which plagued the living beings from time to time. Where they came from, whether they were sent by powerful rulers or gods as punishment for disobedience or sinful behaviour or were merely blows of fate without meaning and justice, was usually not known. Both were probably true sometimes. Healers at all times strove to triumph in the battle of miracle cures and spells against diseases and to alleviate the suffering of the afflicted and save lives. With greater or lesser success.

One of those healers during the age of the Ancient Rulers was the charitable Larog Tal. He always took his pupils and assistants to where the need was greatest, sought out the sick who had no hope left, entered plague areas from which all others fled, and there he tended to the desperate. It was said that there was no herb, no medicine, no medical art and no healing spell which Larog Tal did not know. He was the greatest healer in Mythodea.

But one day, he came across a disease he could not cure. It was a plague which raged terribly among the people, covering its victims with black bumps full of oily slime and causing the unfortunate ones to waste away in feverish dreams. Countless died in agony and more and more became infected. There was no cure to be found.

When all his knowledge and craft failed, the desperate Larog Tan resorted to means he should have never used. Using his knowledge of the nature of every living thing, and his studies of the deep secrets of the Mitrasperan cosmos, he tried to do something which could not be in this world, which went against the laws of creation.

He tried to tear the disease itself out of the fabric of reality in order to destroy it once and for all. There is no legend about how exactly he achieved this; he succeeded in only one of these endeavours, but in a different way than Larog Tan had wanted. The disease was torn from the world, but it was not destroyed, it was set free. Detached from the laws and forces of the creation, but still attached to the reality of its afflicted, it became something of its own, a constantly proliferating wild force, without a substance of its own, yet contagious and capable of infecting everyone. This is how it sustained and nourished itself.

In an attempt to cure a common disease, Larog Tan had created the plague of all plagues, later called the Oily Pestilence, named after the disease from which it originally arose.

Pestilence was extortion, and aimless growth, eating and multiplying, devouring and being devoured. As a free force in the world, it was no longer part of the original creation, but just as a disease can only exist in its infected hosts and has no body of its own, so, too, the Pestilence for a long time had no plane of the world of its own, that is, what the scholars call a “sphere”. Rather, it lived dispersed and hidden in the sphere of Aqua, as dirt lies at the bottom of a pure ocean, or a poison spread thinly, lurking invisible in clear water.

Those infected by the Pestilence and wasting away often succumbed to the misguided temptation of making a kind of “pact” with the plague in order to prolong their lives. Some of these were also obsessed with the idea of finding a cure. They used diseases, were masters of alchemy and tinctures. They called themselves “biothaumaturges” and in their madness created many a cure, but at least as many new plagues.

The insanity which the fevered dreams of the sick carried into the dream world (the sphere of dreams which our minds wander through in sleep) contaminated it, so deeply it became almost a sphere of nightmares in some places. Some of the infected knew how to control these night terrors, to use the power of madness to send dream images and whispers of evil along these nightly paths. But then came the World Fire and the Oily Pestilence was banished in the West. Much time passed.

After the time of sealing, when the long imprisoned biothaumaturges and dream weavers were released again, they continued their activities. They achieved success through the treachery of Archon Elkantar and S’lay Nuvensill, through the carelessness and recklessness of the settlers and the tireless work of the biothaumaturges; the Oily Pestilence finally succeeded in turning part of the dream sphere into their own sphere, the “Plane of the Fever Dream”. Thus, the long journey from a spherically degenerated disease to a true Forsaken element was complete. More deadly than ever before. The latest plague of the biothaumaturges destroyed the entirety of the Linesti people. What may their next depraved move be?

Woe to you, Mitraspera, if the dream weavers and biothaumaturges should one day lose control, as Sephistikos once did over his Black Ice. For you should remember the lesson from these days of old: a power, free in its own sphere, tends to its own will and soon the formation of its own personality will follow.