Woe

Woe is the stain of Althuzah's hatred upon the world of kin. It is invisible, intangible, and undetectable. It pollutes everything it touches, slowly twisting people, animals, land, and objects into cursed tools of evil and hatred. It turns good people into selfish, wretched deceivers; it twists ordinary items into cursed relics, silently working to destroy all who touch them; it turns fertile soil into murky bogs and lifeless pits of tar. It can infect both the physical world and the metaphysical, and is especially dangerous and pernicious in the magical realms of the shadow and grim dream.

Althuzah's prison, in the impossibly thin shell around the flesh (the "Between"), is the source of woe. When wizrada bridges the Between to connect the flesh to the shadow (or the flesh to the grim dream) woe pollutes the connection and escapes into the world. The more powerful the wizrada, the more woe is able to escape. All wizrada brings woe, regardless of the spell's effect or intent -- even "good" lifesaving magic brings woe. There is no known way to prevent this from happening. This is why wizrada is outlawed among the kin cultures of Landfall, and why ziraduun are hunted by the Ardent.

Woe typically flows in small amounts and accumulates slowly over a very long time, like pollution. Ziraduun who use wizrada only once or twice will not bring enough woe to have a noticeable effect. But with repeated use over the course of a lifetime, the cumulative effect can turn anyone into a vile monster. Nothing can be done to reverse its effects.

The only known way to mitigate the effects of woe is to divert the flow of woe into special enchanted objects, called tokens or totems. Although the token/totem turns deeply evil over time, the spellcaster is protected. Once saturated, the token/totem is then buried. These cursed relics are scattered throughout Landfall, especially in areas where wizrada was common during the Myriad.

An area of land sufficiently saturated with woe becomes a woespawn -- a temporary gateway for creatures of hate, such as ga'arg and ghuul, to travel between Haelfaun and the Green Cradle.