Soldier's Red Pox

In the medical corps, you will see a lot of disease, and Soldier's Red Pox is one of the most common on the battlefield without taking the average infection and food borne illneses into account.
Should the regiments under your perview suffer an outbreak of Red Pox, however, it is imperative that you do not allow fear of the disease to get out of hand or the whole army can suffer a breakdown of morale and the whole command structure can come apart. Make sure that those who contract it are kept secluded from the rest of your patients, and those who ask about it are given a satisfactory explanation. The more concern there is about the Red Pox, and the more that rumors circle, the more virulent it will become.

-Doctor Comfort Armstrong, Medicae General of the Union of Leebarallia

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Also known as the 'Murderer's Mark', the Red Pox is a magic-born disease that has a habbit of making it's appearance within the manpower of fighting forces of all sorts.
It's largely believed this is a similar effect as what brings about instancces of Living Aether, but instead of a possible protector or myth-borne monster, it creates a disease that seeks to punish the worst slaughterers of war. Those that lack honor, and kill simply to kill and for no higher purpose. At least, that's what public perception often paints it as.
In truth, the soldiers around the infected victims are often the reason that they become so in the first place. A unit may take on a particularly daring mission, or make some sort of mistake that reults in the death of prisoners, or any other combination of circumstance and perception that results in the rumors taking shape around the unit. They may have been fairly innocuous before, escaping notice of officers and comrades alike, but after, it's viewed as different from the rest. That's when popular myth takes hold. Said myths need not agree on all the detaild, but what they do agree upon is that the most destructive men on the battlefield, with a negative connotation, are marked. By the Icons, the Wyrms, or simply their conscience, but marked all the same. These myths and folk tales might not be intended to be literal, but that does not matter. Eventually, those marks will manifest on the skin, visible to the naked eye.
At this point is when the infection will explode across the unit, as many soldiers will make the connection between their grandmothers stories about the markings of the soul and body and what they are seeing on their fellow soldiers. This connection, made across a mass section of the army, will cause start to form the Aether around them in such a way that the disease will manifest on more of them, which causes other units to believe the new rumors that are now circling about the red marks forming on the infected unit, causing more of them to appear. Eventually, the whole unit will become infected, and given enough time succumb to the infection, because just as other instances of Living Aether are just as alive as you and I, the marks of the Red Pox are just as real as any other disease.

Transmission & Vectors

Social thought and internalized mythology.

Type

Magical

Origin

Magical

Cycle

Short-term

Rarity

Rare

The most famous instance of the disease was during the third Blackscrub War, where a whole army ended up coming down with the Soldier's Red Pox due to histeria resulting from an initial outbreak and the particularly brutal fighting of that war.

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They start off as inflamed skin, that becomes itchy over the course of several days and growing in intensity. Quickly, that itching will lead to sores, which will in turn become weeping. Even then the itching will not stop. Many infected say that the first instances of the itching was on the hands and lower arms.
As the disease progresses, those sores will expand, eventually resulting in large sections of skin coming loose. This is where a medical professional without any of the surrounding information could make the distinction between Soldier's Red Pox and a more mundane skin-eating disease like Ghoul Rot. This is because the necrotizing skin will come off in particularly notable patterns, one of two to be exact. Either a rather random-looking wound that is often described as a "splash", like what might be seen if someone spilled red paint on another, or in the often more distressing case: in the shape of hands gripping the limbs.
These markings are open wounds, given the lack of skin to keep mundane infection from setting in, which can leave the victim in a rather poor state and one that needs constant care if the infected is to survive. Blood loss is also a concern at the disease's outbreak, though if in medical care it is not often the cause of death.
The disease doesn't really advance past this point, but it does grow more severe with time and lack of treatment. more sores will open up, with more skin sloughing off in short order. All medical personnel can do is try and keep those sores clean and provide proper nutrition and hydration to increase the odds of survival. The sad fact of the matter is that the disease will only clear up when the social could that started it has subsided, if it ever does.
In the most egregious cases, it may be necessary to fake the deaths of infected soldiers and discharge them as quietly as possible, which is often enough to finally break the social curse that caused the disease in the first place. If not, then there is little to be one and the patient is likely to fall prey to infection and perish eventually.