Spectral Fragmentation

The madness of the elves of Gaul Do Shah is now a legendary and cautionary tale of the Eastern Wastes, where roving bands of them await out of sight beneath the sand to set upon the unwary and carry out acts of depravity upon them. While much of this is exaggerated and stems from the popularity of pulp fiction works centered on the exploits and adventures of famous and infamous desolation striders, the truth is sadly a great deal worse than the fiction. These once beautiful and proud people, now reduced to tales and legends of horrors in the darkness, struggle to find their place and identity through the lens of skewed perception due to the madness that plagues them all.

Causes

As the Spirit Tree of the Gauldowhynna withered, caused by the draining and corrosive elements of the Void working into its vascular systems, and then the desperate decision of the Queen to move the entire enormous structure below ground, the essence of it reflected outward into the realm of eh elves tied to it, seeding the deteriorating aspect of its own situation into the very fabric of what makes them what they are. The result being a varied degree of madness that affects the entire species. This deep seated affliction has no cure as it is part of the remaining spiritual connection they utilize as a means of existing, all of them having been spiritually born of the tree, and all souls eventually returning to it. While that cycle continues within the strange, divine aspects of the tree, the taint that it now bears shuffles into the reborn more and more drastically with each death and rebirth.

Symptoms

These symptoms include any single or variety of the following, as observed in the elves themselves:

• Behavioral: disorganized behavior, aggression, agitation, hostility, hyperactivity, hypervigilance, nonsense word repetition, repetitive movements, restlessness, self-harm, social isolation, lack of restraint, or persistent repetition of words or actions.
• Cognitive: thought disorder, confusion, belief that an ordinary event has special and personal meaning, belief that thoughts aren't one's own, disorientation, racing thoughts, slowness in activity, unwanted thoughts, difficulty thinking and understanding, or false belief of superiority
• Mood: anger, anxiety, apathy, excitement, feeling detached from self, general discontent, limited range of emotions, loneliness, or nervousness
• Psychological: fear, hearing voices, depression, manic episode, paranoia, persecutory delusion, religious delusion, or visual hallucinations
• Speech: deficiency of speech, excessive wordiness, incoherent speech, or rapid and frenzied speaking
• Also common: memory loss, nightmares, tactile hallucination, or thoughts of suicide

Treatment

While various psychotropics and methods used to soothe symptoms such as empathic calming, music, and the like can be utilized to great effect in the short term, there is no cure for the condition as it is a direct result of the threaded attachment the entire ethnic species holds to the tree.

Prognosis

The initial signs of the developing condition begin to show as soon as the youth of the species begin to move into the cognitive stages of development, and from there the growth of symptoms and behavioral changes tends to grow steadily worse with time. Though some elves, primarily the older of them, can exhibit fairly mild effects that tend to stay fairly stable, the younger generations are quickly devolving further and further.

Sequela

The effects long terms are still under scrutiny, as the longevity of the elves makes the data particularly difficult to parse, however, initial studies on the rare cases able to be observed over time would suggest that the effects are increasingly more and more debilitating with the onset of age with a wider variety of the symptoms shown and a greater degree of neurological divergence becoming visible in the patients.

Affected Groups

This affliction affects only the Gauldowhynna elves of Cairne, and shows it self in all ages and genders.

Prevention

No form of prevention has shown any level of success thus far. Neither distance, warding through arcane elements, or the use of artifacts uncovered from the pre-Blight world have shown to have any effect on the condition. It is believed that only the intervention of Shah herself could potentially reverse the effects, provided the absent goddess survived the ordeal prior to her disappearance.

Epidemiology

At its core, this condition is caused by the withering and damage done to the Spirit Tree by the Blight itself, and the continued deterioration of it wherever the Queen has hidden it away.

History

Outwardly, it is difficult to determine when exactly the effects of this condition began to manifest within the elves, as they were isolated and remained focused on their own struggled during the War of Human Attrition that followed the Blight. It was first shown outwardly during the attacks upon the neighboring villages populated by the halflings, and the subsequent extermination of their kind. This was so far out of character for the elves, who had for so long lived in a harmonious, if not symbiotic relationship with the small folk. Following this, attacks upon travelers within their lands became common and outsiders began to avoid the locations they inhabited for fear of personal safety. 
It was not until their interactions with the Ventrytes that any really behavioral studies were able to be completed, these being expounded upon during the life of Airtam Morenthall and her time spent with Ioelena Lurie about which she wrote several papers.

Cultural Reception

Within their own culture, the condition is given little notice, their own conditions from individual to individual being a perspective driven norm generally speaking and the delusions that accompany it leading to a great deal of confused supposition and derivative glossing over of the facts in order to normalize the situation the elves now live in.
Outside of their culture, many believe the Gaul Do Shah elves to be raving lunatic cannibals and marauding bandits that lurk in the sands and ruins of the land of their former forests and glades, waiting on unsuspecting travelers and treasure seekers to fall unwarily into their paths so they might visit unspeakable horrors upon them for the sheer pleasure of reveling in the harm they do. Sadly, in some cases this is entirely accurate, as per the acts visited against the Halflings and many would be explorers and seekers of fortune who travelled those lands without the needed caution to survive. At the same time, not all are so terrible. Many are merely lost in their own delusions, fearful, deliriously confused or awash in their grief. Using the example of Ioelena Lurie once more, who set herself in harms way against her own to protect the sanctity of life.

Type

Mental

Origin

Divine

Cycle

Chronic, Acquired & Congenital

Rarity

Common

Affected Species

• Elf