[Inquisitor Rosenadel]

Part III: The Cult of Phthisis

The terrible sickness ravaged the city for a week. Antidotes were found, just enough and with enough time to prevent the majority of the city from falling to the terrible plague. The city labourers that managed to survive the disease were able to pour chemicals into the water to make it safely ingestible to the people. The rot was combated fiercely and there began to appear signs of progress.

But parts of the city still festered. The combat with the true plague has not ceased. Reports came of citizens missing, strange symbols ploughed into the ground, and shadowy groups of strangers speaking in strange tongues.

The Adeptus Arbites reported fights with groups of citizens that were performing bizarre rituals involving the shovelling of earth. The citizens, upon discovery, fought the Arbites with unbridled aggression to protect these sites. While the Arbites were able to put down the attackers wherever they were found, the attackers seemed hardier than normal humans. All had distended stomachs, as well as bloated limbs, and bloated eyes and heads. All manner of roiling maladies were discovered within the bodies of the aggressors. Every effort was taken to cleanse the areas of their foul influences.

After days of enforcement effort, the attack still had not waned. The sites the aggressors were protecting were investigated. It was discovered that the strange shovelling rites were in reality the burying of rotting, decayed corpses. Some bodies had been decapitated, others dismembered, all brutally murdered. When investigators were brought in, and the sites excavated, the bodies were revealed to be arranged in peculiar patterns, no two alike, but all throwing a disconcerting, chilling feeling on those who saw them.

The sites were destroyed, but the chill remained. The sites were sealed off and became the objects of much superstition. Any that wandered too close were never seen again, and it was rumoured that the very ground bubbled and turned to mush where the bodies had been buried. The Arbites forbid entry to the sites on pain of death, but people still went missing.

Even worse, attacks began to target the Arbites specifically. Cultists with foul markings covering their slimy, dirty bodies engaged in fire fights and brutal close-quarters fights. They boiled up from the depths of the city, bogging down the Adeptus Arbites’ efforts to destroy their sites of desecration. The governor worried as, day by day, more and more little pustules of resistance dotted the holo-map of Pandema. Eventually, the PDF were ordered to assist the Arbites in putting down the pockets of resistance.

The things we saw made our eyes run with glutinous tears that burned as they fell down our cheeks. They all had advanced stages of the plague, which had been labelled “The Phthisis”. Their markings indicated that they were all a mess of cults worshipping the Phthisis. That these people would worship such a thing was, at the time, inconceivable to me.