God, I can no longer bear the thought. It screams never ending. Too many faces. Too many eyes.— Final entry in the recovered journal of Cesare Loreto, an Executioner of the Holy Chalsic Church who was sent into an area claimed by the Scourge.
The Scourged is a blanket term used to describe beings who have undergone deformation due to prolonged exposure to the otherworldly magic present in the rare event of an open rift to The Scourge.
Unlike demikith, which are beings influenced before their birth by these magics and exit the womb as fully-formed demikith with fairly standard animal-like mutations, and therianthropes, were-beasts, or carnomancers all of whom only temporarily or impermanently change between any given shape, the scourged suffer from increasingly severe permanent deformation depending on how lengthy their exposure was, and may eventually even cease to resemble their former species at a passing glance.
Appearance
(Scourgespawn, scourged creatures)
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As it stands, few brave souls have truly attempted to learn how it is that the scourged think and feel, and so it remains a mystery to all but the deformed creatures themselves. While some posit that the creatures become mere shells for the infection with no signs of higher life, simply lashing out at whatever moves nearby them, others believe that the creatures share some sort of "hivemind" mentality and are connected to each others thoughts by some magical or unholy method hidden deep within the rifts.
Basic Information
The scourged show very little in the way of uniform appearances, varying wildly both from region to region and from individual to individual. A few observations have taken note that instances of the scourge tend to scramble the traits of infected creatures with the biology of their surroundings - beings transformed by the scourge may display antlers if the source is near woodlands, or gills and growths of blubber if near underwater life, and so on - but the majority of mutations seem to increase and disfigure the growth of a being's natural traits. General similarities between those infected by the scourge, especially in the early stages of the infection, include the formation of pus-filled boils, hardening of the skin into a substance similar to chitin, growth of thickened patches or lumps of thick skin, extension of bones or formation of new bone matter and other alterations to the skeletal structure, and the fusing or separation of limbs or other protrusions from the body.
Strangely, the rapid mutations of the scourged seem to hamper their abilities just as often as it might help them, such as in the case of a scourged being found dead miles away from the nearest presence of the rift that had starved after its mouth had sealed itself shut. In addition, many scholars debate over whether or not these mutations cause the infected to live in a constant state of pain as their flesh is warped around them - a common theory due to the constant shrieks and wails the creatures will often vocalize.
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