The Sallow Bride of Kesk
A fragment of the Void Prince of plague and pestilence. She wears a woman in a wedding shift, walking, with the sickness on her that took the town of Kesk in a single winter: the skin gone yellow, the throat swollen shut, the hands still gloved.
She does not speak, because the shape she borrowed could not.
Body
She goes into houses and sits with the ill, and the ill die, and nothing else in the house is touched. She came off the Prince who cursed Zhurx, and she carries a thin, cold shadow of the same disease.
The physicians who have gone into Kesk to study her have not come out, and the ones who came out early were not well.
Frailty
Kesk has been empty for sixty years and she has never left it, which is the clearest case anyone has of a Shattered that has outlived its gradient. A Shattered lives off dread the way it navigates by it, and when the fear that made it goes out of the world the thing does not die: it goes quiet, becomes slow, stops responding to what is in front of it, and over decades stiffens where it stands.
With nobody in the town to be afraid, she has slowed to a walk of perhaps one house a week and does not appear to notice. The condition is not permanent, and that is the uncomfortable part: a district that starts telling the old tale again brings the thing back inside a season.
Country
Kesk is hers and she has never gone past it. Nothing in the record settles whether that is the shape holding her or simply the absence of anywhere else worth going.
Whether the disease she carries could leave the town with anything that walked out of it is the question the physicians went in to answer.
Lore
Summary
Extended Lore
Still unwritten in the record for this entry.
- Where Kesk stands
- Who the bride was, if she was anyone
- Whether the disease she carries can leave the town
- What became of the physicians who went in