Plague of the Xaagi Islands

CONTENT WARNINGThis article contains mentions of illness, body horror, and painful death.

For the Raessae of Visctheria, peace was golden. The world turned slowly, marching on... until for some, it began to turn back.

Illness

The Plague of the Xaagi Islands came on swiftly, exterminating massive amounts of the Islands' population in under a month. A vile disease that caused the body to swiftly break down, the Plague forced the entire city of Elorx to evacuate or perish. While few survived the Plague, stories are told of the healers that risked everything to stop the sickness, and "first hand accounts" are mentioned in more than one study on the illness.

It was terrible, watching everyone you knew rot away before they were even in the ground. It was like losing them before they were gone.

— Elma Telios, survivor of the Plague

Symptoms

The symptoms of the Plague are brutal. It begins to take you apart at the cellular level, eliminating the body's to heal. It is first noticed as a rash, quickly advancing to a patch of rot on the body. The afflicted Visctherian then begins to decompose while still alive, body melting away cell by cell.

Afflicted

The Visctherians most affected by the Plague are those of Bestial descent, due to a predisposal to the sickness in their Ancestry. Because the Plague originated in the Xaagi Islands, an area with an almost completely Bestial population, hundreds of thousands of Raessae, Danesh, and Mauk perished.

Results

When the Plague began to spread from home to home like wildfire, people panicked, fleeing settlements on the Islands. The capitol city of Elorx emptied almost overnight, leaving behind a plague-ridden wreck of a city. Eventually, the wilds of the Islands grew crowded as people spread away from the illness, and they began to flee to the nearby mainland country of Everia.

This understandably caused a panic on the mainland, and they began refusing refugees at the coast line, forcing their boats to turn back or remain on quarantine in the harbor. When the population of the ships perished on board, the port guards would fire flaming arrows aboard the ship until it sank into the harbor, never to be seen again.

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