The Blight

Name: The Blight
Type: Disease
Description: The Blight becomes noticeable only after it has seeped into an object. Earth and stone show signs of violet corrosion, water turns slightly black, living beings develop necrotic flesh and violet, pulsating cysts. The sickness is partially magical in nature, and can be perceived with powerful magical lenses. It is not transmitted by the air directly, but ingestion of anything infected with the Blight is almost assured to lead to infection.
Rarity: Common in the Blighted Vale. Almost impossible to find elsewhere.
Location(s) Found: Blighted Vale - nearly everything here is infected, from the ground to the creatures to the swamps and plants. Most things living there have adapted to the virus by becoming abominations which can not leave the Vale.
Legality: Attempting to smuggle something infected with the Blight is a punishable offense in Cieria, often being punished by death - the danger is so severe that any attempt to bring it outside of the land is seen as treason.
Notes: The Blight is a deadly disease which broke out in Darkhaven when it was still called Lighthaven, the old capital of Cieria. It wiped out the city over night, and the spread of corruption turned the Blighted Vale into what it is today, while burning away the areas in Cieria which are now covered in desert.

While its origin is unknown, the Blight seems completely alien compared to normal diseases. After infection, the magical virus does not multiply - it simply corrupts and destroys, creating toxins and venom that inflict hellish pain on the victim. Besides driving any living being insane from pain, the virus then collects into the cysts which develop and eventually burst to spread to the next victim. After infection, it takes only hours for the Blight to kill a grown man. It can only be healed through powerful magic, mundane cures do nothing against it - angelic magic works incredibly well against the Blight.

Even the Blight virus is not immortal, though. It grows weaker the longer it exists, before dying. New Blight is only created in two places: Darkhaven and the Blighted Vale. Sometimes, when a being is infected, the Blight does not kill them, but becomes a parasite instead. While still driving creatures mad with pain, it also causes them to wish to lash out and spread the Blight, not killing them, and furthermore, converting part of anything they eat into new Blight. Any animal normally encountered within Cieria also exists in a blighted form. Humans and elves can not become carriers, they always perish from infection.

Blighted creatures can not leave the Blighted Vale for long. The cause is unknown, but any attempt by them to do so causes their bodies to give out and die. Since the Blighted Vale is spreading - at an incredibly slow pace, but it is growing - it means that the carriers are not the cause, but benefit from it.

Saltwater doesn't carry the Blight for long. The oceans around Cieria are only contaminated right at the shore of the vale. Therefore, saltwater is a natural barrier against it. Any possible medical treatment without magic would possibly also require large amounts of salt.

Perhaps the scariest part about the Blight, though, is that its victims do not stay dead for long. It is unknown how it happens, and can not be replicated - but everything that dies on blighted ground, or gets brought there dead, absorbs some of the energy of the sickness, becoming an animated construct made of rotting flesh under the control of the Blight. Besides sometimes carrying the virus, Blight corpses are NOT true undead like vampires - they possess no soul, no will, no spark to drive them forward, they are controlled solely by the Blight. As such, they are to be considered the same as a golem - an arcane construct. They just use a very grotesque material.

As for the will of the Blight, this is the most mysterious part, together with its origin. Despite being a scattered virus-like magical disease, it is intelligent. The Blight does not communicate, it doesn't make deals, and it shows only hatred for the living, but it definitely IS intelligent - it works to spread itself over all of Cieria, and after that, all of Aurora.

So the Blight is radioactivity and Darkhaven is actually Chernobyl. Got it.

Approved!