Mindbender's Malady

Colloquially known as "The Malady", The Mindbender's Malady is a condition that sometimes occurs when someone ingests or injects the Malestrom Cure-All. While the Cure-All can cure every disease and affliction known to the races of Aremus, it cannot cure the Malady. Its name comes from Mindbender Nerik, the human who initially discovered the Malady. Nerik was an illusionist Wizard who lived in Malestrom when the Cure-All was first developed and produced and discovered the true effects of the Malady.
The Malady created headaches among those who consumed the Cure-All, which would dissipate within a week. However, for some, this headache would return, along with visions of the stars. Those afflicted would claim to see "the truth among the heavens", and "the reason for existence itself". Over the next several months, the afflicted would become more and more incomprehensible and their visions would increase. For some, these visions would end, leaving them to describe themselves as "empty and cold", while others continued into worse symptoms.
Nerik would discover that the Malady would begin to contort and change the bodies of those it inflicted into various ways, depending on the race and even background of the individual. Humans would become stockier and ghoul-like, Elves becoming gaunter and taller, Dwarves more beastly, and Drakar lizardlike. Those with pronounced fears, such as of spiders or the Northmen, would begin to see these things everywhere, hunting them down. This would cause the afflicted to begin attacking and destroying everything in sight to get away. Those who were not killed during this process would only become more beastlike until their eventual death.
Attempts to study this Malady left Nerik and his compatriots to the truth, of alien remains below Malestrom. Deep within the earth, strange, starfish-like creatures bodies were found preserved in the remains of the craft they crashed in, alongside unimaginable technology. The truth of what the Cure-All was only lead his compatriots to consume it too, so they may either learn the truth or forget it entirely.
Nerik now waits alone in Malestrom, using his illusion magic to both keep people out, and the monsters within.

Type

Supernatural