𝕯𝖔 𝖓𝖔𝖙 𝖌𝖔 𝖌𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖑𝖊 𝖎𝖓𝖙𝖔 𝖙𝖍𝖆𝖙 𝖌𝖔𝖔𝖉 𝖓𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙
Entered by: 0xe9a1…78d3
The Gloomfang Plague: Genesis at Sea
It began as a hunger, not a sickness.
Not in the bellies of mortals, but in the vaults of old alchemy, where flesh and curse met under failing lanterns. In the Tower of Withering Winds, under leaden skies and the grinding breath of tempests, Archmagus Azahl sought to unbind the secrets of vampirism—not to cure it, but to weaponize its curse.
But vampirism alone was not volatile enough.
Too old, too clever. Its hunger was personal, selective, ritualized by bloodlines.
Azahl wanted madness—a sickness with no elegance, no courtship, no whispered invitation to eternal night. He needed chaos. Teeth without purpose.
So he turned to rabies, found festering in the brains of void-bats that fed on nightmares in the crevices of the Deep Sky Rift. He harvested the saliva of the foaming starbitten, a fluid so aggressive it burned through glass and memory alike. Under lunar eclipse, he merged it with distilled vampire ichor—taken from a weeping noble ghoul, gagged in silver—and sealed the fusion with void-pitch runes carved into his own bones.
What he birthed was not plague, but profound apostasy—a heresy of blood and mind.
He called it Gloomfang.
The first vial blinked.
The second sang.
And the third wept.
He did not remain in the tower long.
Azahl had heard the winds whisper of pursuit—the Kaiju Clan hunting him, his art, his very breath. With his plague sealed in nine void-glass vials, he descended to the sea where his last creation waited: The Ship of Hollow Moons.
The Ship of Hollow Moons — The First Voyage
Tied to pylons older than tide, carved from drowned gods’ bones, the ship sat still—its sails stitched from moth wings and funeral shrouds, its hull reeking of embalming salts and dream-wax. No crew greeted him at the gangplank. Only shadows in the rigging, pretending not to breathe.
Azahl stepped aboard with his iron case of blinking vials and gave no orders.
The ship knew where to go.
It sailed without maps, gliding silently into the salted fog. No compass spun. No stars stayed still. The voyage moved through space like an echo—uncharted, unknowable.
The crew consisted of mercenaries, mercurial scholars, and excommunicated monks. Paid in relics and promises, they dared not ask what the vials held.
They spoke little.
Until the thirteenth night, when Crewmate Baroth—a saltbeard from the Moonless Coast—cut his hand on a loose nail while sealing the forward hold.
The blood dripped.
One drop fell onto a crate. Unseen: a single hairline fracture in one vial, invisible to the mortal eye. The Gloomfang essence did not flow—it reached, coiling like a breath inside skin.
That night, Baroth did not sleep.
He murmured to himself. Whispered to the moon. He began licking the salt off ropes, gnawing at them as if tasting memory. His pupils stretched wide. Veins on his neck pulsed purple-black. He wept while laughing. Then stopped laughing altogether.
The crew dragged him from his hammock after he bit Quartermaster Velk on the throat, unprovoked and shrieking about “the light behind the wind.”
His skin peeled in places. His breath fogged mirrors with shapes. He began vomiting shards of glass.
They tried to pray over him.
Baroth smiled and bit off his own tongue.
It took six men to pin him, and even then he shifted—his bones bending, his joints dislocating with pleasure. He grew a second row of teeth overnight. When they finally lashed him in chains and bound his eyes with shadowcloth, Azahl ordered him brought to the lower deck.
But the ship resisted. The timbers groaned. The lamps died.
So Azahl made the choice himself.
In the dead of night, beneath a moon swallowed by storm, they carried the writhing, whispering Baroth to the edge of the deck and hurled him overboard.
He did not scream.
He simply vanished into the salt, swallowed not by sea, but something below it—something hungry, ancient, that had been following the ship since its first breath.
The crew stood in silence for hours, afraid to move.
Baroth was never spoken of again.
The Containment
The infected vial was sealed in a void-wrapped reliquary, and Azahl personally etched glyphs into the ribs of the ship to hold the contagion back. He used his own blood. The wards still bled weeks later.
They completed the voyage. But not one crew member disembarked the same.
Some never left the ship.
It is said that The Ship of Hollow Moons still sails. Without a crew. Without sails. Only its shadow moves across the water, casting no reflection.
If you listen close in the mist, you might hear the chains still rattle.
Whispers From the Deep
A journal fragment, soaked and bloated with brine, washed ashore years later on the Plagued Strand.
“…Baroth is no longer him. He walks under the ship now, upside-down, singing through the barnacles. He tapped the hull last night. Three times. We counted. Azahl hasn’t slept in two days. I think the sea is listening now.”
Ship’s Manifest (Burnt Partial Copy)
-
Specimens:
- 9 vials of unstable hybrid strain (Gloomfang I–IX)
- Preserved vampire membrane (feral lineage)
- Rabies gland (void-bat, Deep Sky Rift)
- Calcified soul-tooth of the Direbeast of Hollowgroan
-
Crew (Deceased or Missing):
- Baroth, deckhand — Overboard / Infected
- Velk, quartermaster — Bitten, incinerated by wardflame
- Sister Calvenna — Vanished in hull; robes found folded
- Last entry: Captain of Breathless Morn (crossed out in blood)
From this voyage was born not a plague, but a new kind of nightmare—not viral, but intentional. The Gloomfang strain does not merely spread; it chooses, infesting flesh, history, and thought, reshaping its hosts into apostles of entropy.
And in the salt of the sea, Baroth waits—changed, yet patient, whispering to the windless tides.
Some say he was the first. Others say he was only the first to return.
The Kaiju Clan never found the ship.
But they remember Baroth’s name.
And it remembers theirs.
Years Later — The Spill
The wind was thin in the Vale of Heathen Pines, dry as parchment and scented with rot-sap. Faint mists coiled like snakes through the underbrush, curling around stone outcrops and leaning trees that bent away from the forgotten road. It was a path no one used anymore, and for good reason. But on this day, it bore a caravan of black purpose, dragging its shadow behind it like a wound that refused to heal.
At the center of the procession was a reinforced wagon, clad in blackwood and braced with bronze laced in ritual etchings. It creaked with menace, its burden humming low behind sigils sealed in wax, blood, and silence. The wagon was drawn by four oxen bred in the hollows of the Iron Wetlands, beasts with bone-masks nailed to their heads and veins like rotted vines.
Around it rode thirteen mercenaries. Some bore old brands—deserters from dead legions. Others wore dark tattoos, faded yet still humming with loyalty to a forgotten breath: Azahl. Most kept quiet, heads low, weapons loose in leather scabbards.
Ahead, the trail narrowed to a rotting bridge—a skeletal span of timber and rope hanging over a deep, forgotten ravine, its floor swallowed in fog.
Then came the smell.
Not windborne. Not natural.
It hit like a memory of slaughter. Sweet. Metallic. Touched with static and sulfur.
The oxen froze.
Then they bucked—violently. One shrieked, a grotesque braying that shattered the forest stillness. Eyes rolled white. Froth flew. A second ox twisted its neck and tried to bolt. The lead pair reared, yanked the wagon sideways—
The bridge groaned.
Snapped.
And the wagon tumbled.
Wood cracked like bone as the front wheels caught the lip of the broken span. For a frozen moment, the whole thing teetered. Then gravity took hold.
Down it went, cartwheeling into the void below. A blur of blackwood, chain, and screaming oxen vanishing into mist.
The guards dismounted. Some shouted. Some ran to the edge. Too late.
From the ravine came the sound of shattering glass.
The crate had broken.
And what it held was breathing.
From the gorge rose a vapor the color of bruised violets, curling and snapping with filaments of light. It drifted like breath, then like thought, then like intent.
Those nearest the edge stumbled. One clutched his skull and began to laugh, tears rolling down his cheeks. Another unsheathed a blade and jammed it into his own thigh, moaning with pleasure as blood gushed. Then another lunged, biting, tearing.
It spread quickly—as if drawn to old pain.
The mercenaries turned on each other in a blur of madness. Skin tore. Limbs snapped. Some fought like animals, others like dancers mid-ritual. Their eyes burned gold, then purple. One man knelt and vomited a wriggling slug of crystal, then reached down and fed it to his friend.
Screams rose from the ravine, echoing off the stone.
And down below, nestled between jagged rocks at the base of the drop, the shattered crate had spilled its contents into a still pond—a shallow thing no map marked, fed by groundwater and the slow tears of the pines above.
The vapor drifted low and sank into the pond. The water shivered.
Then boiled.
Fish rose, belly-up, bleeding from the eyes. Frogs burst into gelatinous pulp. The reeds blackened at the tips and bent inward as if trying to hide.
And then, from the far shore, a wild boar emerged.
Old, scarred, with one tusk broken and moss tangled in its bristles. It grunted, nosed the water, and drank.
For a moment, nothing.
Then the boar stiffened.
Its back arched. Spines burst from beneath its skin, needle-like and humming. Its mouth foamed violet. Its tusks twisted, forming blades with barbs that glittered. One eye ruptured. The other turned solid white, then gold.
It opened its mouth and let out a sound not heard since the time of the Deep Stirring—a shriek that bent birds mid-flight, that rippled through the canopy and made the pines weep sap like blood.
It charged into the forest, leaving behind a trail of scorched ferns, torn bark, and steaming prints.
By dawn, the ravine was quiet.
The bridge hung torn. The oxen were dead. The mercenaries were scattered—some limbless, some devoured, others laughing softly into the moss, unable to stop. The pond shimmered gently, but now glowed from beneath with a light not of this world.
And far across the heath, the boar ran. A vessel now. A harbinger.
The animals fled from it. The trees bent away. It would not die. It would not forget.
They called it the Gloaming Beast.
But those who knew the truth would give it another name.
"Azahl’s First Echo."
And so began the slow-spreading sickness of the Heath’s Gloaming.
And far beneath the moss-veined crust of the world, Azahl stirred, tasting the wind for the first time in a hundred years.
And the Kaiju Clan, scattered and sleeping, felt it.
A sickness returned.
A voice remembered.
And a debt—long-buried—had just clawed its way back into the light.
Entered by: 0xe9a1…78d3
