[Inquisitor Rosenadel]

Part V: The Spoiled Land

The Phthisis started in the ghettoes, where conditions were the worst, and where the traveller had dwelt. This is where the Arbites went to root out the centre of the corruption. The reports what were sent back were disturbing in the extreme.

They described a desecrated landscape, ripe with decay. The soil turned to sand, and stretched across the ghettoes in a vast plain of pallid desert. Wherever there was vegetation it turned to mush, forming great patches of steaming, bubbling swamp. Even boulders became gelatinous and sank into the bubbling ground.

The Arbites pressed into the ghettoes, but became bogged down in the mire and sand. The heretics that had brought about the land’s terrible transformation then ambushed the enforcers, causing heavy casualties. Some Arbites teams simply were not heard from again, disappearing into the vast marshland. Others became infected with a myriad of diseases, all linked to the Phthisis, all with similar symptoms, but all unique in their biological makeup.

Not only the land decayed. Buildings also began to sag, folding over like slabs of diseased skin on themselves. The great manufactoria that spewed forth the plumes of smog had become great rusted structures. Parts of them had collapsed, and parts of them still collapsed, killing whole squads of Arbites, as if the very structures themselves were deliberately squashing the intruders. Ooze sweated from the walls, seeping out from the great factories.

Inside the Arbites found that the forges and assembly belts were still functioning. However, the furnaces were now boiling pits of pus and bile and the construction areas produced only rusted, smoke-belching version of the machines they once created. The processing plants still processed grains and oats, but instead of bread they were transformed into blackened lumps of charred carbon.

The worst places were those where the cultists had performed their rituals, permanently scarring the land. Sometimes the Arbites came across groups of cultists still alive, ensuring that their land remained in a constant state of rot. They defended the sites viciously, using poisoned weapons and powerful magicks to rot, infect and kill the invaders of their realm. It got so bad in some places that the PDF were once more called in. It was just as well because it wasn’t long after that the cultists’ real purpose was revealed.