Seerblight

Credit to The CDC for virus image

Dankia Perkinson for image of a book

and Jene Stephaniuk for abstract art.

You look into the future of the client in front of you, peacefully drifting across the rivers of time. You speak, almost half conscious as you view these events. When suddenly the flow ceases. You are left with one image: A blood-red sky, and the end of days. When you awake your client stands above you attempting to resuscitate you. Something seems to be missing. That's when you realize: the water has gone silent.

When a seer spies on you, its almost impossible to know. That is, unless the Seerblight was already on you. It is almost default for a seer to be seeing multiple planes of existence, multiple dimensions, spectrums of color. These are the abilities of Read and Arcane and a magic and they become second nature. This is also how they can contract the virus, when it appears for an instant, and takes from them their truest sight.

As a side note for the viewers of this article, please read it in order. It is best to under stand the shape of the virus and how it affects the world before the actual details of it and its history.

Global perspective

The Seer perspective

Seers have learned to fear the blight, it can come on at any time, from anywhere. In seer communities there are often guidebooks created across generations to avoid contracting the blight.

Attempts for prevention

In preventing the blight, there have been a few methods developed. One example is using objects related to people exclusively, which is a perfect prevention method. This does limit their ability to see the future though, obscuring certain events based on the objects present.

Another example is the aforementioned guidebooks.

One of the guidebooks

Finally the most morbid method of executing seers who devolop any signs of the blight. This is a valid method that does prevent it from spreading, but leads to accidental deaths, and a lack of self-reporting.

Treatment of affected seers

In many communities the victims of this virus are treated as such, and they are healed to the best of everyones abilities. Sadly this is not always the case, in some communities the contractors are treated with great disdain, and often executed at first sign of symptoms. Whilst this does protect future seers to some degree, it is often rooted from a place of unjustified fear, they cannot transmit the virus once they start showing symptoms.

Blight anatomy

Transmission

The virus can be transmitted in two ways: Mundane and Seer.

Mundane

When the virus interacts with a mundane person, it acts like almost any other virus for one instant, transmitting to nearby people, usually about 1-2 feet away in the next instant it transmits to every parallel version of those people, specifically those created by their decisions in that instant.

To review: The virus transmits to all people within 1 to 2 feet in a chain (so if it transmits to one person two feet away, it also transmits to all people within two feet of them).

Then the virus travels across their decisions to all parallel versions of them created in that instant.

Importantly, that is wear the virus stops, creating a blockage in the time-stream that is cursed with the blight.

Seer

When a seer contracts the virus, usually by traveling over one of the mundane created blockage, they contract the blight. Additionally, this makes the blight temporal, and allows it to travel with the seer down the time-stream. If the seer attempts to use their abilities for the short period afterwords before symptoms begin, they will notice they can no longer see the future. It is instead that their magic is transmitting the blight forward and back in time.

This gives whatever they were using whomever they were using their abilities on the blight, and thereby creates another patch at any moment they attempted to see.

Epidemiology

The virus will only become an epidemic for isolated moments in time due to its nature. But when it would be considered an epidemic, it is extremely dangerous, the more people it can affect across one instant, the larger the radius of dangerous time.

The actual detection of these epidemics is near impossible, as they come into existence in an instant, and disappear just as fast.

Symptoms

Once the virus has finished its spread, it begins to affect the seers it has latched onto, these symptoms are divided into three mutually exclusively categories, each an aspect of the virus. This is dictated by a variety of environmental factors. In order for one of the non-temporal symptom categories, the seer must be exposed to more of that energy than ambient temporal energy from the flow of time.

But first there are some symptoms that affect any seer who contract it. These are the lack of ability to use any magic, and the slow deterioration of vision. The deterioration is marked by the slow reddening of the iris, and leaves its victims with blood red irises.

An artistic abstract depiction of the effects of the virus by a relative of the victim

Magical

When affecting a seers magical in the magical aspect the virus begins to force the victim to absorb all the magical energy in the air. This begins to mutate the victim in a variety of ways, eventually leading to death.

There is no treatment for the magical aspect.

Mental

Mental manifests as a complex mental illness, that if left untreated with lead to death. Its primary symptoms involve the deterioration of higher brain functions, typically those related to communication and creative thinking. The Blight will then progress to harming motor functions, before eventually destroying essential life functions.

Mental is the most easily treatable aspects, as it affects a physical part of the individual. Similar to the way deadly mental illness can be countered but not reversed by a healer, this too can be slowed down and even stopped, but never truly reversed.

Temporal

Temporal is the most common symptom set, it affect a person sense of chronology, causing them to experience life either "out of order" or experience events simultaneously.

Temporal is somewhat treatable, the difficulty is in sustaining the treatment when ones mind bounces from time to time. It is livable with, however, and will never result in premature death.

History

A note on temporality: The nature of the blight make it difficult to write properly in chronological order, it affects present past and future. As such it is better to think of it spreading across a map, rather than traveling down a river.

Original manifestation

The Magi-Virus was manifested in a similar time stream to this one, it was a byproduct of the death of that universes Arcane patron, most similar to the primary timelines Primordial: The Weaver of Fates.

Spread

Given the way that the blight spreads, it was able to find its way into parallel timelines via sentience, which inherently creates these timelines. The virus couldn't spread between one specific "row" of time, essentially it could only find parallel moments to its exact manifestation. This would have been all it could do except for the fact that in this universe, a seer appeared immediately.

How it spread "down"

Using the seer it was able to move down the stream, affecting a large number of moments and "lines" across time before symptoms began.

The primary timeline

The primary timeline is only affected in a few places, and it is carefully kept that way. For most of temporality in the primary stream, there are books, prophecies, or warnings not to view specific time. The virus does reach new points when these are accidentally viewed, but this largely affects parallel timelines.

This is not an actual image of the virus, due to its nature we can only approximate what it would look like.

Type: Magical Temporal Mental

Rarity: Sometimes very rare, sometimes an Epidemic

Affected parties: Any sentient species can contract, shows symptoms only in Read or Arcane users

Referenced articles: Summercamp 2026