Crimson Horrors

Origin

Its origin is a wound. "When Aezithis had his heart pulled, the heart was sullied by the void, but as time passed it became a mutation of itself, thus creating the Crimson." It pours from his corrupted vein network, greatest in the mountains and hills, and runs in rivers of Crimson Blight, and any species affected by it is a Crimson horror.

Then the line that turns a hazard into an antagonist. "This developed a consciousness, a refined opposite of Aezithis, yet still him. The Do'urrsan have been feeding this abomination conscious species since its beginning, thus allowing it to consume all genetic codes, becoming the seed of all life." The Do'urssan were ordered to contain the Blight. What they have done across their whole history is feed it every genetic code in the world.

It has woken, and it said so. "The Crimson... It- It speaks... It has awoken. It knows what we have done." And: "The Crimson knows too much." The architecture beneath that is one line long: "There is a Crimson hive with a shared memory."

Body

Fungal, vascular and architectural. "A web of intricately woven terror opens up on the ceiling." "Blight spores and clusters spreading like a fine, pulsing webbing across the floor." "Air sacks on its massive form pulsing, mesmerizing." "Rounded bulbs let loose the air born crimson." "The Crimson flesh growing off of the wall." "The Crimson waters are rising."

In a body: eyes gouged out, "mouths salivating red crimson saliva," a stare that is "melted-eyed." A severed Crimson hand "melted into the floor" and then moved. Its soldiers chant. "I am rot, I am doom."

The material itself has three states and the world meets all three. Molten, it is the magma of this planet: red, heavy, and alive in the sense that matters. Cooled, it is blight, a dense red-black tissue that grows on stone and through flesh and keeps its own circulation. Airborne, it is spore and ash, and it travels for hundreds of miles and settles on everything a country eats.

What it does inside a body is the part every hold learns by heart and no scholar has written down, and it goes in six stages that anyone in ash country can name.

The first is the seeding, and it is painless. Filaments enter through the lung, or through a cut, or through a mouthful, and for eight to twenty days nothing shows. The first sign is the breath, which goes sweet over rotten, and a red line under one nail bed.

The second is the plumbing. The blight has no interest in building new roads and every interest in the ones already there, so it grows along the vascular tree, and the veins it takes stand proud of the skin and darken to red-black. It moves fastest where the blood moves slowest, which means scar tissue first. This is why Mother Acasia "pulses red along seams of old scarring" and why the physicians of the ash country ask to see a patient's old wounds before anything else.

The third is the taking of the eye, and it is always the eye. The eye is wet, rich, undefended and directly connected, and it is gone within a week of the plumbing reaching the face. That is the whole reason this class is described everywhere by the eyes: gouged out, melted-eyed, one eye full of blight-spores. A person in the third stage can still work and can still talk and can no longer see, and the hold has a word for the sound such a person makes moving along a gallery wall.

The fourth is the conversion of the soft organs. The lung is taken and rebuilt as a bellows for spore, which is the origin of the air sacks pulsing on a massive form and the rounded bulbs letting loose the airborne crimson. The gut is taken and simplified. Muscle is not destroyed, and this is the crucial difference between the Crimson and every other rot in the world: muscle is kept, maintained, fed and driven, and so is whatever the muscle knew how to do.

The fifth is the taking of the person, and it goes from the outside in. The trade goes last. A smith loses his name, then his family, then his speech, then his fear, and is still forging, and will still forge for years. Everybody who has worked a blighted level reports the same thing and nobody can bear to write it as a general rule, so the record sets it down here: the Crimson takes the person and keeps the worker.

The sixth is the spread, and only the long-held reach it. Past a certain point a body stops being a body and begins to be structure: flesh growing off a wall, webbing across a floor, a web of woven terror opening on a ceiling. A host that has gone to architecture is where the hive puts its rooms.

The blood is blightblood, which is sold, and which does not clot. It webs. Cut a late-stage host and what comes out reaches, strings, and sets into a fine red lattice within the hour, and that lattice is alive and is why a severed Crimson hand melted into the floor and then moved: the hand had already stopped being the unit. Nothing in this class is an individual below the level of the hive.

The hive's senses run on the spore. A blighted hold knows what has walked through its air, because its air is its organ, and this is why the Great Blight Hive feels attentive rather than infested and why everyone who has come out of it describes hearing themselves being thought about. What it is poor at is anything beyond its own drift: dry air, hard cold and open water are all blind to it, and the hive's picture of the world stops at the edge of where its spores will go.

Life

Three laws govern contact and they are the whole of what a person needs to know.

First, molten crimson. A creature touched by pure molten crimson, the mutagen in its unspent state, is bound into the hive mind of the great crimson god beneath the ground. It is consumed by that mind and becomes an extension of it, and to call the event an injury or an infection is to describe something else entirely. There is no recovery, no rite and no cure, and the creature keeps walking and keeps working and is no longer anybody. The flesh does not burn. It is recruited, in the time it takes to fall over, and what stands up is the hive's. A survivor of molten contact carries the stuff circulating in it as a second blood, visibly moving under the skin and crusting where it cools, and the Kiln Sow is the largest such survivor anyone has recorded.

Second, flesh still in mutation. Eating the meat of a creature that is still changing makes the eater feral and mutative. This is the answer to the question the world has been asking since the first red summer, and the world still does not have it. Crimson-touched meat is sold in every market in the ash country. Meat from a beast that has finished changing is merely strange. Meat from a beast in the middle of changing turns the eater into the same problem, and by the time anyone can tell the difference the meat has been eaten.

Third, ash and soil. Mutated ash and mutated soil work second-hand, slowly, over generations. They do not turn a person into a horror. They work through the breeding pool of the peoples who live on them and come up as unique variation: a strain of Nu'uman in an ash valley whose eyes are a colour nobody else has, a line of Torgai in the black country born without pigment, a hold of Do'urssan whose children are all a hand taller than their parents were. This is the quiet half of the class and by far the larger half. Most of the variety in the peoples of this world is downstream of an ash winter somebody's great-grandmother sat through.

Out of that third law comes the one hopeful thing in this class. A strain can stabilise, as the Iziakinie did, and the Iziakinie are the proof that the Crimson is not only degenerative. Given long enough a strain can settle into a people and the people can be beautiful. Four conditions have to hold together, and it is the conjunction that makes stabilisation rare rather than any one of them being hard.

The exposure must be second-hand. Ash or soil, never molten and never fresh blight. A population bound into the hive mind is finished; a population living on mutated ground has generations to work with.

The exposure must be continuous and level. A single red summer produces a burst of variation that mostly dies out. A valley that has taken ash every few years for two thousand years produces a breeding pool in which the mutation is no longer an event.

The population must be closed. Isolation is what lets a variation become a people instead of being diluted back into the parent stock. The Iziakinie were shy and rare throughout the whole process, and that shyness was a cause of it rather than a result.

The lineage must be long-lived. This is the condition that rules out most peoples. A stabilising strain needs the same individuals to carry the change through many cycles of exposure, and the Iziaka live for centuries. A people that turns over three generations a century burns through the variation before it can settle.

Where all four hold, the process takes something on the order of two thousand years, and what emerges is a people with the Crimson written into them as ordinary inheritance: no hive mind, no rot, no spread, and no way back.

What those two thousand years looked like is worth setting down, because the finished Iziakinie are admired by people who have no idea what they are looking at. The intermediate generations were not beautiful. They were soft-scaled, which in a scaled people is a death sentence in the first cold season, and they came out red in patches on a body that was still the parent colour, and a great many of them could not hold a clutch. The Iziaka culled them. Not the Alverians and not the Do'urssan: the Iziaka, quietly, clutch by clutch, for twenty centuries, drowning what came out wrong and keeping what came out red and whole, in valleys they closed to visitors for the purpose. Nobody ordered it and nobody wrote it down, and it is the longest sustained programme of anything in the history of this world. The shyness and the rarity recorded as their character are the residue of it. So is the fertility, which is poor, and which is the last unpaid cost of a line that spent two thousand years being narrowed.

Nobody in the world has drawn the obvious conclusion about what the other seven strains might become in ten thousand years, and the Do'urssan have every reason not to draw it aloud.

Frailty

The blight is not invincible and its limits are written all over the map, which is why anybody in this world is still alive.

It cannot take cold. Spore dies above the frost line and blight will not spread through stone that stays below freezing, which is why the high holds are clean, why a hard winter in ash country is spoken of as a mercy, and why the one reliable containment anyone has ever managed was achieved by opening a hold to the weather in midwinter and losing eleven hundred people to the cold on purpose.

It cannot take dryness. The blight is a wet thing and its spore needs damp to seat, so a true desert stops it and salt flats stop it, and the whole distribution of this class in the world is a map of where it rains and where it is warm.

It cannot cross cold open water at depth, which is why the sea is not blighted and why the Hof'mai, which took the Crimson from a submarine vent, is such a rarity and such a problem.

Fire makes it worse and everybody knows and everybody keeps doing it. Burning the blight produces "infectious crimson ash," which is to say the containment method of choice converts a local problem into a regional one on the wind.

And the deepest frailty is in the thing itself. Each strain degrades. A host body driven for decades loses precision, the fine trades go before the coarse ones, and a hold that has been blighted for two centuries is staffed by things that can still pump and can no longer smith. The hive cannot repair this from inside; it can only take fresh codes. That is why it has always needed the Do'urssan, and it is the exact reason the Do'urssan feeding it is not a footnote to its history but the mechanism of its whole existence. The Crimson's organ of variation is a people who were ordered to contain it.

Country

Crimson is this world's magma. There is no ordinary magma on Nu and never has been. What lies under the crust is the mutation, and it behaves as magma behaves and does what magma does not.

It erupts from the crimson volcano, and when it erupts, ash winters follow, and the colour of the ash depends on when in the cycle the volcano threw. That colour is read by everyone who lives under it, because the colour is the forecast: it tells the farmers what the following spring will produce and it tells the trappers what has changed in the woods.

Four ash falls are named by the peoples who live with them, and the naming is folk practice rather than scholarship. Red ash, the summer fall, is the richest and the most dangerous; it comes off the deep vent and it is the one that produces new life in a region within a season. Grey-rose ash falls in the turning of the year and is thin, and a grey-rose winter is a poor winter and a quiet one. Black ash comes when the volcano throws from the old cooled shoulders rather than the vent, and it is mostly inert and mostly just kills the crop. White ash is the rarest and the worst understood; it falls silently, it does not settle in drifts, and every region that has taken a white winter has reported the same thing afterward, which is that something that used to be docile is now hunting.

"Regions exposed to the Red Summer Ash or Winter Snow, come the following months may become unique and different, constantly exciting the eye of many persons. However, where once a creature was kind, the Crimson could mutate it vicious and deadly in ways in which can only be discovered by experiencing their new found rage." Burning the blight makes more of it: containment by fire produces "infectious crimson ash." So the ash falls, the ash settles, and the following season the region is new.

An ash country is the richest farmland in the world for three years after a red summer and is uninsurable for the fourth. The whole economy of the hill provinces runs on that cycle: the tenancies are short, the rents are set against the colour of the last fall, and a landlord who has read a red sky correctly can triple his income in a season and lose the tenants to something in the woods in the next. Everything that lives on ash country eats better and dies stranger, and every people on it carries the third law in its bloodline whether it knows or not.

Society

The blight preserves function, and that is what makes a blighted hold feel staffed. The infected of a Do'urssan hold are typed as technician, soldier, guard, berserker, civilian, pump technician, and abominable Crimson Do'urssan. A Crimson pump technician still knows how to run the pump. A Crimson smith still forges. It is the reason the Do'urssan have never been able to seal a level and walk away.

The Great Blight Hive is the only named entity of this class, and it recruits. Mother Acasia of the Crimson Hive is "a Do'urssan stonemason who survived early Crimson exposure and now serves the Great Blight Hive as a recruiting hive-priestess. Her skin pulses red along seams of old scarring; one eye is full of blight-spores. She speaks gently, exhaustedly, and with complete certainty."

The Hive was never built and never dug. It is the point at which the hive mind of the great crimson god comes closest to the surface, and around that point the blight has grown structure: chambers, galleries, working faces, and a great deal of it staffed by things that were people and still know their trade. It has no walls and no gate. What it has is a depth at which the shared memory becomes audible, and everyone who has come out describes hearing themselves thought about.

Recruitment is the Hive's only outward activity and Acasia is its face. She does not threaten and does not proselytise. She explains, accurately, that the ash is coming anyway, that the valley will change anyway, and that the people who go in willingly are the ones who keep their trades and their names for a while. She is not lying about any of it. What she does not say is what the fifth stage is like from inside, and she cannot, because she is at the second and has been for eleven years, and the Hive has been careful about that.

Faith

The Crimson is an object of worship rather than a keeper of one. "Many view the Crimson as a magical gift from the gods," and the worshippers of Aezithis go into the blight fields "for extracting blight to create deadly elixirs." Crimson-touched creatures "are sought after all the same" even though "they do not yet know the side effect of eating such affected creatures." No prayer said over it has ever been answered by anything except more of it, and the souls of the blighted go to the auction of the star gods with every other soul.

Tongue

It has no tongue of its own and keeps every tongue it has taken. A blighted hold speaks the language of the hold, in the trade words of the hold, from mouths salivating red crimson saliva. Where the blight has soldiers, the soldiers chant, and the chant is four words long: "I am rot, I am doom." Beneath the speech runs the shared memory, which is not language and needs none, and which is what a person standing deep enough in the Hive can hear thinking about them.

Regard

"Many view the Crimson as a magical gift from the gods." That is accounting more than ignorance: a red summer makes a poor valley rich, and the thing in the woods is next year's problem. The Do'urssan have never viewed it that way, because they were ordered to contain it and have watched what containment achieved. Among them the Crimson is not discussed above a certain rank.

Aezithis is its father, whose heart it came out of and whose refined opposite it became, "yet still him." The Do'urssan feed it. The Iziaka are the only people it has ever settled into, in the Iziakinie. The Remoulded have no interest in it, since it is nothing of the void and cannot be reassembled into anything. The Abominations of Chaos it mutates like everything else, producing lopsided horrors that are also blighted, which are the single most dangerous thing in the ravine country.

Harvest

The richest material set in the world, which is precisely the trap. Crimson Blight, which feeds Greystone and is extracted by Aezithis worshippers. Crimson Bloom, "The Red Rot," found in infected Boalden country. Red Ash and Red Summer Ash. Blightblood. Blight Crystal, grown from the shells of the Blishmyth Rock Beetle. Scarlet Algae. Gore Resin. Blight Weed. Papilk Poison, "extracted from the disease riddled dust glands of a Crimson Papilk," bringing "all assortments of diseases."

Every one of those is taken off a body or a ground that is still in one of the six stages, which is why the trade kills its own people at the rate it does. Blightblood is drawn from a living host and webs in the jar, so it is carried in wax and used within a day. Crimson Bloom is cut off a Boalkar that must be held down. The cutters work upwind, in the cold months, in the dry hours, because those are the three things the blight cannot manage, and the ones who get careless about all three are the ones who cough sweet a fortnight later.

And the standing warning, which has an answer now. Crimson-touched creatures are eaten, and the side effect of eating one still in mutation is that the eater goes feral and mutative. The world does not know this. The world will find out one market at a time.

Remembered

Mother Acasia of the Crimson Hive. The Do'urssan stonemason who survived early exposure and now recruits for the Great Blight Hive, gently, exhaustedly, and with complete certainty. She is at the second stage and has been for eleven years, and the Hive has been careful about that.

Zhurx. A Nu'uman. He tried to steal power from a Void Prince of plague and pestilence and was cursed by it for the attempt, and what he was cursed with is the purest form of that god's disease. He is no fragment of a Prince and therefore no Remoulded, and he is set down here because a carrier of a pure divine disease belongs with the class that is about what a body becomes. "The disheveled and boil riddled face"; "the lacking of lips reveal a set of jagged and uneven teeth, with pieces of fresh and rotten flesh n' bone stuck between them." The lips are the tell and they are the disease's signature rather than an injury: it takes the soft margins first, the lips, the eyelids, the nostril edge, and leaves the hard structures standing, which is the opposite of what the Crimson does and is how a physician who has seen both can tell them apart in a moment. Elsewhere he appears as Iqora's bound abomination, the ghoul pet. Bound is the word to hold onto. Something has him on a lead. He was a person who wanted power badly enough to reach for a god's, and he now carries in his body the reference sample of a disease that the Prince itself has never released at full strength. What he has is not the Crimson and does not answer to the crimson god; it sits alongside it, and physicians who have seen both say the two do not mix in a body, they compete.

The bosses of the wilderness. Any creature exposed to the Crimson can become its own monster, which is why the record of this world can run forever. Five are the unique ones, the individuals a region knows by name, hunted deliberately and usually unsuccessfully, holding the wilderness around them the way a Shattered holds a valley: Ourgh the Ash-Bearing Stag, whose antler is a living spore-bearing structure and behind whom a red summer falls out of season; the Kiln Sow, who survived contact with the molten stuff and is one of the very few large animals the hive mind acts through directly; Sarnegh the Standing Wood, a mutated tree walking toward the volcano at a hundred yards a year with half a valley living inside it; the Nine-Legged Widow of the Black Fall, who spins in blight rather than silk and has eaten nine hunting parties of note; and Old Aekh the Pump Foreman, who is still running the water system of a hold two hundred years dead.

Strains each has a page of its own

Every people has a spoiled mode, and the spoiled modes are the kin of this class. They are not descended from one another. They are the same thing wearing eight different peoples, and one of them has stopped being a horror.

The eight ratified strains are set down with the peoples they took, because that is what they are: the Papilk with the Papillian, the Do'urusee with the Do'urssan, the Mekulak with the Mekuhlian, the Boalkar with the Boalden, the Vulkar with the Vultari, the Xacrikar with the Xacrie, the Tusiboash with the Tusiva, and the Iziakinie with the Iziaka. A strain is a people's own spoiled mode and belongs on that people's account, not on this one.

What is left under this class is what belongs to nobody else: the five bosses of the wilderness, which are single creatures rather than strains; the Hof'mai, a deep-water strain out of a submarine vent that is no Hof and no people at all; and Zhurx, who is not a mutation but a carrier. The list of the first kind does not close, because any creature exposed to the Crimson can become its own monster, and the ash goes where the wind takes it.