''City's lay empty, the earth was littered with enlargend bones and flesh. The rivers ran red with blood with those cursed black clouds above them.''
- Rapport carved in stone by an unknown author in Ipeitaka Archeological Site, Vexan .
The Abyssal Flu is an extremely fatal disease of divine origin, almost exclusively referred to within the context of the extinction event that destroyed the elvish civilization.
Presumably created by
Toroc, the God of the Underworld in an act of war against the
Ogres that had betrayed him earlier that era, the Abyssal Flu would spread quickly from the north.
Transmission and Symptons
Sources from
Eldar myth tell of the Abyssal Flu as an air transmitted disease that took the form of a black smoke that swept across the land, where people would inhale it and become infected. However, later investigations into the matter would suggest those tales of the black cloud to not be the disease itself, but a symptom of it instead. The disease itself most likely would be following a more traditional air-transmitting cyclus, since the "black cloud" theory would not explain why some isolated groups of elves would survive the plague, sometimes even without knowledge of the plague raging on far outside their dwellings.
The disease would however only spread within regions of moderate temperature, which was probably caused by the disease just not being able to stand against either too cold or too high temperatures, which led to the disease only really taking hold along coastal regions and on the central plains of the continent.
The symptoms of the disease would be horrifying; The disease would first go into an incubating phase, where in the infected would not experience any symptoms, but would already be able to transmit the disease. After between 1 and 2 weeks, the second phase would kick in. Within an hour, intense pain in the bone marrow would accumulate, caused due to the plague accelerating bone growth to an extremely high degree. After a day, the skin and muscles would start to stretch to such a degree under the pressure of the enlargened bones that the victim would become completely unable to move. At that point, the victim would have less than 2 days to live, as eventually the flesh would give way as the victims bones would burst through the flesh, leading to death as the result of massive shock, bloodloss and the eventual onset of an heartattack.
Cure Research
Although no cure for the disease was ever found, it seems attempts were made. In the early 25th century AoC a massive scale research by the Republic of Argothenge was started to fight the disease, as shown by a large variety of masks and leather suits found by archeologists in the region. Any of these preventive measures however would at most have slowed the spread of the disease, as shown by the eventual extinction of the species.
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