Generations of knowledge lost in a small manner of days.

It would take many names in the months that followed. Smother, Sallowblood, the Culling Cough; but as people began to understand what was happening to their community, ‘The Withering’ became the common designation. It quickly presented itself as more than a simple virus. The people of Eden would watch their oldest and most influential cornerstones of the community be taken away from them. Try as they might, they would be powerless to stop it.

It started as many maladies do. Dizzy spells, fatigue, a tickle in the throat, and weakness of the muscles that softened even the surest grip. It swept across Eden and became the subject of many a suppertime gossip. It struck the elderly the hardest. 

With little rhyme or reason, the oldest members of the community were becoming bedridden. Beset by a sickly pallor, even previously healthy muscles would suddenly struggle to bear their own weight. Powerful beings who had seen countless war and revolution were rendered frail and weak. Cold sweats and painful coughs would wrack the bodies of the afflicted. A kind of fever set in as their immune system tried to fight off its unknown attacker. Once they had been made handily infirm, the Hunger would set in.

Perhaps the cruelest twist of the ailment, patients would become ravenously hungry, and in the same beat become unable to keep anything down. Their stomachs would twist and growl and ache, but anything other than water came surging back up not minutes later. Even vampires found themselves unable to keep their drink down.

Doctors and Healers took to trying to find the cause of this sudden epidemic with little success. Remedies could soothe some symptoms temporarily, but it seemed to resist any medicine, tincture, or treatment. Even magical ministrations seemed to temporarily rebuff the illness, only for it to return with a vengeance. Physicians met to compare notes and realized that many of their veteran practitioners were also afflicted, and certain groups began to recognize a troubling pattern.

Whispers spread through clandestine communities that the only ones getting sick were the elders of the preternatural persuasion. Worse yet, the more potent their power, the harder they were hit. Secret meetings and rituals were held to try and find out the anchor of the curse, suspicion rose for the humans within the towns, and rumors wound their way into the soil like weeds. Specialists scrambled to find a solution, but too little too late.

The delirium was the final symptom to come and was the chilling death knell of a generation. Families could only watch on in horror as their heads of house shrieked bloody murder at something only they could see, and one by one were extinguished. In their sudden and vacuous absence, longstanding communities crumbled, allegiances faltered, and generations of knowledge vanished over a matter of days. It became clear that the healers of Eden alone could not handle the plague forming before them.In the wake of these deaths, connections to the outside world were suddenly cut off. Artists lost their long-term patrons. Businesses and politicians with mysterious financial backers suddenly lost their funding. Perhaps you are one such person affected by the extinction. Eden opens its arms to you. Listen. Come home. Learn. Truth, like death, comes for everyone.