The Crimson

What it does

"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 it is this world's magma: there is no ordinary magma on Nu and never has been. What is under the crust is the mutation.

Most of the fantastical creatures of the modern world are Crimson mutations. Beasts, peoples and places touched by the blight change, and the change breeds true. The fifth class of monster, the Crimson Horrors, is the blight given a body.

How it spreads

Three ways, and they are not the same event. Pure molten crimson takes a creature into the hive mind of the thing beneath the ground; there is no recovery, no rite and no cure, and the creature keeps walking and keeps working and is no longer anybody. Eating the flesh of a beast that is still changing makes the eater feral and mutative, and since nobody can tell a finished beast from a changing one until afterwards, the meat trade of the ash country is a lottery that the ash country keeps playing. Mutated ash and soil work slowly, through the breeding pool of whoever lives on them, and come up generations later as a strain: most of the variety in the peoples of this world is downstream of an ash winter somebody's great-grandmother sat through.

The ash comes from the crimson volcano, and its colour is read as a forecast. Red ash is the richest and the most dangerous. White ash is the rarest, and the regions that take a white winter all report the same thing afterwards, which is that something that used to be docile is now hunting. Burning the blight makes more of it, because containment by fire produces infectious ash.

How the world sees it

A great many people regard the blight as a gift from the gods. Others regard it as the end of the world arriving slowly. Both are correct about something. The slur "Crimson scum rags," thrown at peoples who cannot even carry the blight, says how deep the fear of it runs in the settled world.

What the settled world does not know is that it is being answered. "This developed a consciousness, a refined opposite of Aezithis, yet still him." The Do'urssan were ordered to contain the Blight and have spent their whole history feeding it instead, "thus allowing it to consume all genetic codes, becoming the seed of all life." It has woken, and it knows what was done to make it.

The Crimson and the peoples

Crimson kin are not confined to one tier. Eight spoiled strains are known, and each is written on its parent people's page, because a blighted Papillian is a Papillian first: the Do'urusee of the Do'urssan and the Mekulak of the Mekuhlian are two of them, and the Iziakinie of the Iziaka is the exception among them, an old mutation that settled and is now treated as a noble strain rather than a horror. Older than any of them is the Flosien of the Irugaine, mutated ages ago, who "have fought against it and remained pure of heart" and are the only lineage known to have done it. The genetically locked peoples carry none: a locked people has no variants at all, and no Crimson kin.