"Ooh, that sounds like the one that happened to everyone in the Hall of Worlds that one time!" says Gysha excited.

"That was obligate cannibalism, and the urge went away when the act was completed," Allegra explains. "Anyway, I am going to get to safe ritual distance, wave me over when you're done, unless it's hugely unsafe for you to do so - in which case I suppose you're figuring out what to do next, I recommend leaving a written note and retreating if you're not sure."

Allegra makes to move off to 'safe ritual distance', which appears to be close enough to watch but not necessarily to make out everything that is said; the ritualists dutifully begin to loosely assemble in a circle around Asitha and draw small knives, which might look kind of threatening if you hadn't just been told they were going to draw their own blood.

She's a little skeptical, but she didn't set aside her armor, weapons, or most relevantly here the holdout talisman that can knock back everything around her to two yards distance. Also, only one of them moves like someone who knows what a serious fight is like, so she could probably win without help if they tried. She keeps a close eye on that one.

"Do you really need those out right next to me?"

"Ugh, we're going to have to start again, I've lost it," says Juny.

"It's kind of part of the ritual," replies Leylyn, "we could all bloodlet into a bowl instead if we really had to, but we haven't brought a bowl and it's a bit of a faff."

"I guess we can do the one where we sheathe them right after, if you don't mind us actually touching you rather than wiping the blades off?" offers Angie. "Allegra said she'd let you know what you were in for, but it looks like we didn't cover the details."

"If you can keep the blades well away from my throat, my face, and the vulnerable joints, and won't make any sudden moves, that's okay. Touching me with the wet blades, even the flats, would be substantially worse, I'd probably deck everyone in reach before I took a second to think."

"I'm glad we cleared that up before we got going!" exclaims Caz.

"Okay, so, let's take you through the actual script. Drawn blades won't come any closer to you than they've been, we'll use the variety where we sheathe them. Depending on personal preference, ritualists will open up a fingertip or the side of the hand or arm, get some blood on a finger, and paint on a very simple rune - if you don't want them on your face, are there any bits of clothing we should particularly avoid because of staining? There will be mildly ominous chanting. We'll dance a pattern around you, we can avoid touching you during that bit but some of us will probably get quite close. That should be enough, but we may repeat the first bit, I think we can get away with drawing the runes on each other that time - we'll re-form the circle before drawing knives again so you will have some warning." Angie smiles awkwardly. "Sorry, Winter magic is a bit Like That."

"Blood on my face is fine, it's weapons near it that's a threat, and I have not had the luxury of slowing down to let my brain have a say in how I react to threats. Ominous chanting and such is fine, everything I'm wearing has gotten bloodstains at least once-" Is that technically true of her underclothes? ...Probably, now that she thinks about it. "-so you don't need to worry about that."

"Excellent. Let's try that again, everyone," says Angie.

The circle becomes less ragged again; a look of concentration on each of the ritualists' faces as they draw their own blood, and carefully put the still-bloodied knives away; a low humming, and Angie states, "Irremais - the rune of Wisdom", steps forwards, and paints a two-stroke rune on Asitha's cheek with the wound on the side of her hand.

Assuming that goes well, each of the ritualists approach in turn - apparently Irremais is also the rune of Sacrifice, Punishment, the Blade, Bitterness and Experience.

Then they start a complex weaving dance around her, repeating their own phrase about Irremais, interspersed with "The curse shall reveal its secrets" and "Winter opens our eyes".

The end of the ritual appears to be the simultaneous action of grabbing notebooks and pencils from various pockets and bags, and frantic scribbling.

"We're just writing down what we found out," explains Angie briefly, "so we don't forget anything."

After a considerable quantity of scribbling, Angie waves Allegra back over.

"Good news, it's not contagious to us; it spreads to your children, and will stop doing that eventually but in, like, a really long time," Angie continues as Allegra walks back.

"That seems alright. Bad news is?"

The ritualists all summarise their insights at this point.

"It runs off doing bad stuff in order to get blood. The blood works in proportion to how bad it was to get it; lots of ways to be bad, but everything has to link back to some kind of suffering in the end."

"If you use more blood than you need, you'll get temporarily stronger and better, but first you'll lose the capacity for mercy and then for rational thought."

"The really bad news is that it's got some kind of labyrinth spirit attached - that's why it can last more than a year, and be clever about what it's doing. And it's got a power source that's, did anyone manage to write it down?"

"It's not one of the standard realms of magic, that's for sure. Unless it is, in a funny hat."

"Anyway, fixing the labyrinth spirit would sort it out, but, uh, it's now pretty old and pretty stuck in its ways."

Allegra looks particularly unimpressed by the idea of a 'labyrinth spirit'.

"Well, that mostly sounds like what you expected, other than for what's sustaining it?" she contributes. "We have - as an Empire - dealt with a rogue Labyrinth Spirit before, one called the Eater of Hope, but it... wasn't an easy process."

"Yeah, that sounds reasonably okay. A small number of people can do okay just personally killing their food, my parents' people do it. So I'll be fine here for a long while, probably, if you don't have the time to spare on ending it."

(Someone particularly insightful might notice a small hitch in her voice at 'my parents' people'. But only a small one, she's had years to get used to it.)

"And I'm not sure whether we really defeated the Eater of Hope or just chased it away, so I'm not sure we'd be able to break the curse on where you came from by acting on this end; it might be worth working towards it, just in case there is such a resolution, though.

So. Sorry for hustling you about; would you like some more tea? We eat a lot of preserved and imported food here, but there are deer in the forest, if you think hunting them would help. And fish a bit further upstream, although I don't know if they are complicated or cute enough to count. And we can have that nice sit down that we were about to have, and see what you'd like to do next."

"Sitting down would be good, now we've confirmed I don't need to be quarantined. Lead the way!"

As they walk, she continues offhand, "Deer and fish should be fine, that's what I did before I left home. I think that wasn't quite enough to ignore the curse, but it's enough that people stay basically healthy and don't worry much except about long-term exhausting the prey populations. Those forests are probably the healthiest place in the Cursed Empire."

"I will be extremely impressed if you manage to exhaust our deer population," replies Allegra. They get back to the small table and chairs set up by the stream; Allegra lays her staff in the grass and sits down. "And if you do you can always pop over to Sermersuaq, I hear they actually are having a bit of a mammoth overpopulation crisis because they keep casting Rivers of Life. Although the ongoing war might be a bit awkward."

"Huh. I might do that just for fun, honestly. If not for the trying to travel through a war part, at least."

"Sermersuaq's really big, there's plenty of it that is not actively at war at any one time, although I hear there are now three or four different forces fighting there depending on if you count the Hylje. It's also primarily ice and permafrost, although currently apparently it's incredibly pretty with all the burgeoning life. Bit cold for my tastes."

"Probably wouldn't bother me. What are they fighting over, who gets to be in charge? Actually, also, what's 'Rivers of Life'?"

"Mostly, who gets the natural resources. There's a mithril mine - I don't know if you have mithril, it's useful for lightweight weapons and armour, and big mana-focusing mirrors? And an ilium deposit as well. The Jotun poured in a few seasons ago and took the mithril mine when everyone was busy being distracted by the Druj and the Grendel, and the Thule have been sitting on the ilium deposit for a while now as part of the peace treaty we signed with them, so have showed up to defend their bit. All those are neighbouring majority-orc polities, all of them are terrible in one way or another although the Jotun probably the least.

Rivers of Life is a Spring ritual that is primarily for reducing casualties in a war, although how it does it is to make everything in the area supernaturally healthy and good at healing; which means that if you keep the place under it for, it must be over a year now, one casting lasts a season - then everything just grows out of control. It's relatively safe to do it in Sermersuaq because the natural state of the place is basically an icy wasteland, although don't let the Suaq catch you saying that; getting it anywhere near a Vallorn would be, uh, bad. Not that it's stopped us now and then, but it was still bad.

I have completely forgotten where I got to in my basic explanation of anything, did I even mention the Vallorn?"

"I don't think you've mentioned the Vallorn before. Or ilium, or orcs. Are orcs basically-civilized people, like humans and whatever Briars are? There's a few intelligent species back- in the Cursed Empire, but they're all magic-warped animal species that only interact with humans violently, and other than the ratmen I don't think any of them have progressed past stone tools."

"Yes, orcs are just people; they have a mild tendency to be a bit - fightier - than humans, and they generally hate being the only orc in the room, but individuals vary a lot. Briars are humans, just with a little bit of Spring magic attached; there are a whole set of those, Changelings for Summer, Cambion for Autumn, Draughir for Winter, Naga for Night, Merrow for Day. If someone's basically human shaped but with some extra bits, probably one of those, called 'lineaged' as a general term.

Orcs are a bit more different, they're just built heavier and with thicker skin, monochrome shades - young orcs tend to start out entirely coal black and old orcs end up bleached bone white, but in between there's often a bit of brown or yellow mottling involved.

Then there's heralds, which are actually creatures of the magical Realms, but often talk and are intelligent and all that - they generally have extremely weird perspectives on things, though, and can look like all kinds of bizarre things. I once saw one that was just a gigantic crab, some that were floating glowing jellyfish, an absolutely colossal spider; if it's incredibly bizarre and it talks then it's probably a herald.

Uh, illium. Illium is a bizarre metal that only occurs in rocks that have fallen out of the sky. It has all kinds of magical uses in small pieces, but its main one is to make magical effects last longer - if you want a permanent magical item, or ritual effect, that will generally require quite a bit of ilium.

And the Vallorn - it's essentially, malevolent terrain. Exudes a poisonous miasma, and if you're unfortunate enough to die in it, then it can take over and puppet your body; and instead of going on to the Labyrinth, as usual, you get trapped in there until someone destroys the body and lets you out. The Navarr, everyone with one of these Binding of Thorns tattoos," and she indicates the small tattoo of a thorny branch over her left eye, "are all sworn to fight it in some capacity - mostly in this Steading we're harvesting mana crystals and producing useful things for other people. The main way of fighting it is to walk the Trods - a set of magical pathways - which helps leech the Spring magic out of the Vallorn and makes it possible to eventually destroy it."

"Huh. As far as I know, no one who dies, back my way at least, is ever in a condition where they'll talk about what happens after. Is the Vallorn or its miasma easy to see from a distance?"

"Yes, usually; if you're in deep forest you might not notice the change in time, but one of the things we do as Navarr is put up warning signs and cut down clearings at the borders so it's easier to see - suspiciously dense forest behind a clear-cut area is likely to be hazardous.

Green mist, a dense humid feeling in the air, insects that are too large, and suddenly feeling ill for no apparent reason are the most reliable signs; if you get to the point where you can see moss-covered husks of people shambling around you have definitely gone too far. Occasionally it will reach out and attempt to spread to a nearby area, which will make the borders a bit more indistinct for a while.

It exists in fairly well defined regions; within the Empire at least, people you pass on the way towards one are likely to warn you about the local warning conventions and tell you about the known safe routes. The nearest one is over a hundred miles north of here; Miaren used to have one, but it's the only one we've ever defeated in full."

"Good for you! I've seen things a bit like it, I can guess how ugly it would probably get if you weren't fighting it."

"Yes, left to its own devices it'd basically eat the world, or at least this continent.

There are a few outside the Empire's borders, though. The Thule, for all their faults, do at least let us in to help contain theirs; the Druj keep trying to weaponise theirs, of course, but at least one of their powerful individuals has some kind of self preservation instinct and keeps it at bay with Winter rituals.

I'm most worried about the Axou one - they just avoid it, and it's clearly been growing unchecked for years as they've been too distracted by the Druj to handle it.

And if the Jotun keep Liathaven longer term, they don't really have the magic to deal with it, although we did dump a horrible Winter curse on the whole place which should hold it for a bit."

"You sure have a lot of people - groups? - maneuvering around each other. How do you keep them all straight?"