The Corvixix Parasite

The cover art “death tarot” is by the brilliant Leonardo Mazzoli from Bologna Italy. His work fills me with joy, and I suspect it will fill you with joy as well, something vital in these trying times. Click through and check his stuff out!

Special thanks also to Lentescura in Rome for letting me use his piece “Sono Diventato Il Corvo” in the outro. Click through the links to check out more of their GORGEOUS work. Also, pray for safety and health in Italy during these pandemic times.

I also included a piece by Jonas Hassibi which I found whilst perusing ArtStation. It caught me, so I had to ask. He is a maker of gorgeous things. Check him out too!

LIVE BY THE CROW, DIE BY THE CROW

-from the Book of Wretchedness-

“Corvixix grows best in darkness, and there is no place so dark as the hearts of wicked men”
-Demeter D’Lantern

It is said that corvixix was brought to modern civilization by the greed of a small band of glamour-seekers, set out from a small nameless village squatting at the edge of a vast and ancient forest. They dove into the darkest heart of the darkest jungle, a place known as the Orellan Reach, seeking the riches of the lost Starlight Empires. This jungle was said to be so black and deadly that no human had passed a thousand paces beyond its monstrous boundaries and returned intact.

When the ancient treasure hunters emerged from the wood they were blind and feverish, clutching at their throats for breath, clawing at their eyes and ears until their necks and nails were caked in filth and blood. Birds, bizarre and evil, perched in ranks so dense that all but the thickest of the limbs of the canopy above sagged like warm tallow. Their eyes shone like cold gems as the explorers screamed in the fading light and were carried back to their village by their clansmen.

There was only one survivor that could speak, and after sifting through his fevered, nightmare-fed gibberish, his people reconstructed the horrors of his journey, learned of an ancient battlegrounds at the mouth of a gigantic stone temple, learned of rows of small sealed urns, each big enough to hold the feathers and skeletal remains of a single black bird. At the heart of this temple, at the bottom of an endless flight of stairs reaching deeper and deeper into the sodden earth, was a chamber filled with riches. In this chamber was a large round table of gold, and upon this table were many small golden urns like they had seen above, their tops sealed in rich crimson wax. Fools, they should have known better, but they could not resist.

The Shimmering Colors spoke loudly into their minds, and had young Bauros not acted so impulsively, they surely would have brought the vessels back to their village to be opened in the chambers of their mighty chieftan. The boy ran forward and wrenched the top off of one of the vessels. There was a loud pop and the chamber was filled with a thick stinking cloud of choking powder. They fled, first the chamber, then the temple, then the jungle, blind, choking, itching as if covered in red cactus spines, the sounds of flapping feathers, of shrieking birds filling their ears.

The victims spent their final days screaming in pain and terror, tied down to keep them from tearing themselves or others to pieces. They screamed always of birds, black birds and rainbowed jungle birds, coming to tear them to pieces, coming to spread them across the land, coming to feed them to their loved ones and to feed them all to strangers until there was nothing left but dead feathers and dust blowing through twisted jungles. Those taking care of them shared in the nightmares, as if the nightmares were transmitted in sweat, in coughs, in the very vibrations of screams.

And then the birds came. They came from the jungles and from the plains, some simple and black, some as colorful as the wildlands in spring. At first they merely perched and watched and listened to the screams. But when the screams of the explorers grew weak the birds grew loud, and they flew with gluttonous madness. They tore through doors and walls and roofs with axe-like beaks. They ripped the men to pieces, ripped their families to pieces, ripped all who had shared nightmares with the men to pieces. And when the screaming and the shrieking ended there remained only carnage, steaming in the fading light of a setting sun, feathers, blood, and a single sobbing child all that remained in the wake of dreaded Corvixix.

The poisoned and blasted “cave” where the glamour-seekers found it. A crow that could never be stuffed back into its urn. “Infested Kingdom” by Jonas Hassibi

COVID-19 DAYS

Covid-19 is a bitch. I will start by saying that. If you’ve lost your job because of it, or if your finances and future are on the fritz or if you are sick or you have sick loved ones, my heart goes out to you. If you have lost a loved one to this disease I don’t know of any words that will restore balance to your life or to your heart. For you and yours I can only pause and hold you in my silence.

I work in medicine. I drive around the City and I help our elders and their families in their homes. I speak to them candidly and I interview them, all of them, about themselves, their history, and the world at large as seen through the lens of time-earned wisdom.

It is strange and challenging work, but it is worth it, for it puts me in contact with what can only be described as the Wisdom of the Ancients.

One of our elders told me this:

“The most contagious diseases known to man are fear and ignorance”.

Obviously he wasn’t talking about true diseases. If he were, he would have been obliged to make mention of measles, mumps, and oral herpes at Burning Man.

But the man had a point. Fear and ignorance are as contagious and as destructive/disruptive to human lives and human society as any disease. This point is pertinent today as we watch Covid-19 reach across our world and dig its nasty little fingers into our lives. The idea plays. It holds water well.

We fear what we don’t understand. And it is hard to understand a thing when the conversation is overwhelmingly hysterical and seems to involve politics (both overt and occult) rather than cool headed reason and information. Some say the death toll will be negligible. Some say Covid-19 will mutate and scramble our genes. Some say this novel coronavirus is a bioweapon that will spell out the end of the world, will eradicate huge swaths of the human population. The truth is likely somewhere closer to where all of those ideas meet.

People, out of panic, are hoarding toilet paper. Other people are starting to lose faith in their increasingly erratic and panicked TP-hoarding countrymen, and have taking to stockpiling the next best thing: bullets.

Still, not knowing exactly what we’re dealing with here, we should be prudent and we should be calm. I will continue wearing my mask, maintaining my 6ft bubble of space, and washing my hands obsessively to protect myself and my patients. There will be no slack on that front.

Before I go on, I want to make a few requests of you, dear reader.

The First: Do not let hysteria or fear grip you. Fear and hystera make you stupid. They make you pliable. They turn you into a useful idiot. When you feel fear reaching for you, repeat the Litany Against Fear. Repeat after me:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

The Second: Do not let ignorance grip you. Ignorance is a pack of wolves and you are alone in a forest. Build your fire bright and remain vigilant. The cure for ignorance is not merely information, it is vigilance. Be willing to question your own beliefs or the beliefs of others. Learn what your cognitive biases are. Pay attention. If you do not, you will pay the price of all prey: you will be eaten and incorporated into the body of your enemy.

The Third: Wash your fucking hands. Cough into your elbows. Practice social distancing. Maintain the six-foot bubble. AND DONT BE SELFISH DEGENERATE HUMAN GARBAGE.

A canned, flaccid apology. But an apology. Beyond combating fear and ignorance, we should learn to forgive as well. We were all young and stupid once.

THE CORVIXIX FUNGAL PARASITE

Polvere Negliocchi, Crowbait, Gibbeteer’s Curse, Corvixix

CONTRACTION/INCUBATION
Corvixix is contracted by mucous membrane contact with corvixix spores. These spores have a two stage life-cycle. As external spores, they are found in the environment, either carried through the air by a strong breeze or as water contaminants. Animals, crows and ravens in particular, can contaminate waterways, farmlands, and otherwise inhabited areas with explosive gouts of diarrhea. External spores can retain their viability for a considerable time, ranging anywhere from six weeks in wet climates to well over a thousand years in desert tombs.

Spores require approximately 12 days to complete germinating once inside of a suitable host.

PROGRESSION/SYMPTOMS
Symptoms usually begin with itching localized to exposed tissues. When ingested in contaminated water this is experienced as a progressively itchy, swollen throat. When contact is initiated via a blast of spores into open eyes the symptoms are considerably more dramatic, often resulting in the unfortunate victim scratching their hellishly itchy eyes until they bleed or burst.

Once these spores germinate inside of their host, they attack the body, invading and replacing tissue with mycelia, pushing spore-producing fruitbodies out from the body through any exposed mucous membranes (eyes, genitals, oral and respiratory mucous membranes) and any other orifices. These fruitbodies are fingerlike projections, colored in browns, whites, rich reds and vivid oranges. The remains of corvixix victims that are not ravaged by birds or wildlife will begin sprouting these fruitbodies starting approximately ten days after the incubation period is complete and will reach full maturity approximately eighteen days after this.

These invasive mycelia release neurotoxins that induce and augment fear responses in the body. These toxins also produce a range of sensory hallucinations with a consistent avian theme of feathers, beaks, and shrieking birds.

Visual signs of an infected host are rarely more than clouded, debris-filled, or bleeding eyes, itchy rashes and flaking skin, deafness, anosmia, and small lumpy masses beneath the skin.

Victims of corvixix rarely die outright from the infestation. Most die from fright or cardiac arrest as their waking nightmares grow ever more vivid and real with each passing day. Those that are not inspired to die by their visions die from massive blood clots in the heart, lungs, or brain.

Most victims are dead mere days after their first vision. There is but one known case of a victim of corvixix surviving longer than a week, and many cite this as proof that the gods hold we humans in low regard.

EFFECTS
The hallucinations caused by corvixix grow in intensity every day, plunging the host ever deeper into black madness. What start out as hints and whispers, quietly staring birds, fluttering wings, or a single rainbow-colored feather stained in blood gradually transform into flocks of murderous birds, screaming, butchering, and blocking out the heavens.

With time the toxins and spores saturate the body and are excreted in the victim’s body fluids. Blood, sweat, tears, saliva, and waste alike become deadly poisons.

With a burning fever contaminated sweat evaporates, carrying spores and toxins alike in a deadly miasma, spreading corvixix through the air to those that would dare help or love the unfortunate victim.

Victims of corvixix will do everything in their power to move from confinement to open air. Once in the open, the excreted mycotoxins disperse ever further and function as a powerful attractant to avian forms of life. Birds of all kinds are drawn to regions known to harbor corvixix and its victims. As the victims near death, the watchful birds move in for the kill, descending in a shrieking frenzy, ripping and tearing anything within reach. Timbers and stone, metal and bone are all that remain aside from countless feathers and stains of gore.

CURE
Once in the host’s body and germinated, covixix seems to be relatively easy to treat provided one has access to the proper sorts of medicine: that which can cure fungal sicknesses is likely to have a curative effect on covixix. It is also said that in the ruins of the Starlight Empire there are encrypted instructions in how to produce powerful antifungal medicines via alchemical treatments of certain rotting fruits.

As always, folk cures and superstition often stand in the way of real treatments. Some claim that sinking pins dipped in red ink into the victim’s various “wells of vital energy” is a potent. Others claim that ingesting copious amounts of black salt, campfire ash, or powdered cinnamon can help. All are effective in equal measure to praying for mercy from the Bird Gods, the Lords of Nightmare, and the Gods of Death.

Often the most reasonable treatment of covixix is to limit its cruel and deadly effects by dosing the doomed victim with powerful sedatives until their heart stops and then dumping them into a pit of white-hot coals.

LORE
“Live by the Crow, Die by the Crow” describes one of the first contacts between the current age of Holm and the corvixix pathogen. That nameless village, slumbering on the doorstep of a huge ancient temple complex buried near the edge of a huge ancient jungle, unleashed a plague that a much older (and only slightly deader) civilization had encountered and weaponized.

This empire was a fragment of a much larger group of empires, known as the Starlight Empires. These mysterious empires are extinct, though there are rumors that there are minute fragments hidden at the bottoms of abyssal trenches or squatting in dim unbreachable warrens near the center of the world. Little is known of the Starlight Empires aside from their alien moral codes, their worship of unimaginable gods, and their casual, almost recreational approach to war, suffering, science, arcana, and death.

While corvixix goes by many names in the current age, it is rarely spoken of; the simple superstitious folk are convinced that many of the evils of the world require little more than a word tossed into still air to materialize. Beyond their superstition, the very name corvixix immediately calls to mind the lost Starlight Empires, and their degeneracy, their hatred, violence, cruelty, and access to terrifying vaults of unnatural, mind-eating knowledge.

Perhaps corvixix is a joke, a twisted form of slapstick comedy, a mischievous artifact, the last laugh of a civilization so alien to ours that the misery and death of millions would have been no more than an evening’s entertainment for them.

IDEAS TO PLAY WITH

• Infecting PCs with corvixix is a death sentence unless they already have the cure at hand. I recommend against infecting the PCs directly. Rather corvixix is a way to modify their environment and a way to alter they way they have to interact with NPCs and their surroundings. PCs must pay attention to connect the pieces, to learn that corvixix is contagious, that the hallucinations are sometimes real, that the flocks of birds are drawn to the victims, that the PCs are at risk of contracting this horrid disease by merely sharing air with the victims.

• In horror movies, when a character is harassed by birds it is usually a sign of demonic oppression. “Why would demons or ghosts use birds? Oh, because they’re inhuman, unemotional, they can fly, they’re often seen to eat the dead, etc.” In the case of corvixix, they are drawn by specific chemicals excreted by the afflicted, and so they are not simply a tool of oppression, they are animals prompted to act in accordance with their biology. In pecking a victim apart they are being no more cruel than if they were tearing apart some nice tasty bird seed.

• If someone that was screaming about imaginary birds a few days ago is murdered along with their family by an endless swarm of birds, the simple superstitious locals are most likely going to accuse them of witchcraft, diabolism, cannibalism, lycanthropy, congress with the Dark Gods, or some other similar evil predilection. Their associates will be smeared with that same dirty accuser’s brush.

• It is likely that any primitive “CDC”, possessing knowledge of corvixix and lacking any effective cures, would sooner put a victim and their family to the torch than permit the disease to run its course and spread on the wind. Saddle the PCs with that moral dilemma, either carrying the torch or trying to spare a victim the blaze.
  
  

PLOT HOOKS

• A powerful ruler has tasked the players with leading an expedition to penetrate the jungles that swallowed a Starlight Empire citadel in order to search for clues on how to produce the alchemical cure for covixix. The players, if they are savvy, may come to suspect that this ruler has less than benevolent intentions.

• The players are sent as agents of the King, tasked with finding a man rumored to be carrying an ancient golden urn into the city. It is not clear why he has brought it to the city, whether he brought it for sale of something worse, but the agents must find it before it is too late.

• The players come across a family in a wagon, wending their way across the country with a sick person in the back. A pack of giant cassowary birds linger in the distance watching intently, and the family beg for protection from birds and bandits. They say they were cursed by a witch in the last village and since that nightmarish encounter they’ve been haunted by more and more birds. All they want is to get back to their village with vital supplies.

NOTES

• Conceptually corvixix is based on the parasitic cordyceps fungi. OBVIOUSLY.

• “Corvi-” refers to the corvidae family of birds, the taxonomical home of crows and ravens.

• ”XIX” is the roman numeral for 19

• “Polvere Negliocchi” is a bastardization of the Italian words for “dust in the eye”. According to the internets, at least.

• The Starlight Empire

• “The Oriyyan Reach” is obviously named after the Spanish explorer Francisco De Orellana, a man famous for exploring the Amazon River in search of the fabled golden city of El Dorado.

• The Shimmering Colors are the capricious gods of weather, water, precious metals, and precious stones.

• The red cactus spines I mention in the opening are from the opuntioideae family, and refer to something LIKE the opuntia microdasys monstrose specifically. I grew up with them in the house (dad is a plantsman) and, being a naturally clompery clobberer, it was not unusual to see me blubbering in the corner with a patch of skin covered in their microscopic little spines.
  
  

  OUTRO: VIVA L’ITALIA!

“Sono Diventato Il Corvo”, by Lentescura of Rome

The world is a strange place right now, folks.

It feels like everyone is holding their breath, like they’re speaking at a whisper for fear of being heard. Its as if COVID-19 is a black-skinned beast, Grendel, and we lie in wait, pretending to sleep on the benches of Heorot as a fire snaps in the hearth and heavy footfalls sound in the moonlit mud outside. We lie in wait with our knuckles whitening around the hilts of our swords. Will the footsteps retreat back to the swamp that birthed the devil, or is this moment of silence merely the time it takes for a clawed fist to smash through the thick timber doors and throw our once merry hall into gore-spraying battle?

I know that right now Italy is getting hammered by COVID-19. There are many factors driving this, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. My personal philosophy, one I encourage you to adopt, is that, so long as one does not depend on the other, one should never take lightly the happiness or the suffering of another human being.

COVID-19 should tread lightly on the soils of the Italian peninsula, though, for Italy is filled with Italians, a conquering people of indomitable will and the headwaters for many of the glories of the modern world.

They will survive.

We will too.

The alarms will die out.

The panic, the fear, the ignorance, will fade.

Humanity will persist.

And I hope that we will emerge as a sharper, more vigilant, more honest world.

Anyhow, that’s it for now. Be safe out there, folks. Wash your hands.

AND STOP FUCKING HOARDING TOILET PAPER YOU LOWLIFE FUCKING DEGENERATE DIPSHITS!

Until next time…

Be creative. Have fun. Get weird.