Chapter VI: The Turning of the Blight Guards
“To rot is not to die, but to be reborn with purpose.” — Inscription on the Door to the Hollow Hospice
They say he came to them in the midst of their agony.
The siege of Blackwell Monastery had failed. Its defenders, once noble sons of the Eastern March, had been undone not by steel, but by breath—a wind that carried no sound, only death. The invaders never crested the walls. Instead, sickness came through the very stones, a yellow cough that blackened tongues and boiled lungs.
The warriors fell one by one, their iron armor steaming with inner fever, their prayers unanswered. Their chapel burned. The bishop flung himself from the bell tower, shattering like dried bark upon the stones.
And still—they lived.
A handful of stricken soldiers awoke on beds of mildew and velvet, deep beneath the earth, where candles wept green wax and the walls pulsed with something not quite stone, not quite flesh. They coughed, they bled, they moaned for death. But death did not come.
Instead, he came.
They say the Plague Weaver was once a kobold.
A creature of soot and servitude, too small for glory, too clever to stay chained. But this one found an older power buried in plague-ridden catacombs—a language of blight, a code written in sores and spores. He did not learn it. He breathed it.
He began to change.
No longer rodent nor servant, he became the vessel of contagion incarnate. His skin peeled, and what grew beneath was scaled with lesions that glimmered with infectious light. He shed his mask—forever. He no longer hid from rot. He was rot.
Now he walks uncovered, his face a crown of pustules and silvered bone, his breath warm with sickness, his eyes brimming with rheum and power.
The Blight Guards are masked because they must be. He is not masked, because he is the plague.
The Hollow Hospice
They were taken—half-carried, half-dragged—into the Hollow Hospice, a ruin of once-sacred halls now black with mold and humming with hidden pipes. Bells rang, not with clappers, but with wheezing breaths, echoing the death-rattle of forgotten martyrs.
Here, they underwent the Rite of the Black Bile.
Each man—stripped of name, stripped of memory—was laid upon the Bone Slab, carved with plague psalms too ancient to be human. The Plague Weaver stood above them—small in stature, yet immense in presence, his clawed hands luminous with pustular glow. The air around him thickened with every exhale.
“You are not dead,” he whispered. “You are discarded. But I do not discard.”
“You were made to serve the clean. Now you shall serve the truth.”
The Crucible of Becoming
1. The Carving
Their chests were etched with the Mark of the Spoiled Host, a symbol grown in fevered dreams and scrawled in gall. The Weaver’s claws etched deep, drawing black ichor and screaming flame. Each wound sang. Each wound obeyed.
2. The Mask
He forged the masks himself—plagueglass and rot-iron, beaked and brimmed, pressed onto their raw faces. The screams were not resisted. They were hymns. The masks hissed and fused, forever sealing identity beneath obedience.
3. The Blood of the Weaver
He opened a vein in his own forearm. Thick, viscous, gleaming with plague-motes—his blood was poured into their mouths, drop by poisonous drop. It burned their throats. It branded their minds. It twisted their marrow into something new. Something devout.
Five survived. Not healed—but hollowed.
4. The Armor of Silence
They were sealed in armor scoured from the tombs of long-dead Blight Guards—hulking iron suits laced with syringes, vents, and sacred rust. When the final plate clanged shut, they rose—not men, not monsters, but instruments.
They did not thank him.
They did not speak.
But when he raised one scaled claw, they moved in perfect unison, blades drawn, cloaks of rotted velvet fluttering like the wings of moths too long buried.
They do not breathe the air. They carry their own breath—his breath—within their masks.
They are called the Blight Guards.
They do not remember their names.
But they remember who saved them.
Not a man. Not a god. A kobold—unmasked—who became the Plague.
Entered by: 0x712b…E85C
No further Lore has been recorded...
