Where the Grey Wyrm destroyed stone, Mama Wulfae destroyed people. The creature wandered from village to village wearing a stained cook’s apron and carrying a great iron pot filled with bubbling green broth. She offered food to the hungry, the frightened, and the desperate, insisting with smothering maternal affection that every soul deserved a warm meal. Those who refused her hospitality were pursued, restrained, and fed by force. Those who swallowed even a mouthful received what she lovingly called her gift.
The Merry Pox covered the flesh in swollen pustules and weeping sores, yellowed the eyes, and slowly consumed the body through fever and infection. Its victims did not experience their suffering as pain or horror. They became euphoric, their minds drowned beneath an unnatural happiness that deepened as their bodies decayed. They laughed through bleeding gums, embraced while their sores burst against one another, and danced barefoot through mud and rain until rotten flesh peeled from their feet. To the afflicted, Mama Wulfae is not a monster but a beloved mother whose generosity freed them from grief, fear, and loneliness.
Many villages remain inhabited by these plague-stricken congregations. Their inhabitants decorate the streets with rotting garlands, paint crude images of Mama Wulfae upon chapel walls, and gather in the village squares to sing praises to her gift. Their songs carry through the fog at all hours, accompanied by drums made from stretched hide, clattering spoons, and the wet stamping of diseased feet. The afflicted prepare great communal feasts from whatever meat, grain, mushrooms, or carrion they can gather, stirring the food in blackened cauldrons modeled after Mama Wulfae’s own pot.
Travelers unfortunate enough to enter such settlements are welcomed with embraces, music, and tables burdened with steaming food. The afflicted seldom attack at first, for they sincerely desire to share their joy. Refusal is treated as confusion, fear, or illness requiring patient correction. Doors are barred, horses are seized, and smiling villagers crowd around their guests with bowls and ladles. Those who continue to resist are held down and force-fed while the congregation sings over their screams. Survivors often carry the Merry Pox for days before its first sores appear, allowing the contagion to travel farther than any afflicted pilgrim could walk.
During the final reclamation campaigns, Alveronian engineers destroyed bridges, collapsed mountain passes, and brought entire cliff faces down across the roads leading from the infected valleys. Watchtowers were erected along the few remaining approaches, and standing orders permit border soldiers to kill anyone emerging from the quarantined villages without warning. These measures were not intended to save the people of the Nebelmark. They were meant to imprison them and prevent Mama Wulfae’s gift from reaching the heartlands of Alveron.
The barricades have endured better than the kingdom’s mercy. Behind them, the afflicted continue their feasts, weddings, dances, and processions through villages that should have become graveyards years ago. Generations of the infected have been born beneath the Merry Pox, raised to regard disease as blessed communion and unblemished flesh as a sign of terrible spiritual emptiness. On quiet nights, soldiers stationed along the broken roads can hear distant singing beyond the collapsed passes, thousands of joyful voices praising Mama Wulfae and promising that one day her table will be large enough to feed the whole world.