The Throat Tear illness
Everfree Village Lore
The everfree is full of dangerous creatures, but as that wouldn’t be enough to make the grifix’s survival hard, a deadly illness strikes the village almost every winter.
They call it “throat-tear”. It’s symptoms are cough, that may produce greenish mucus, fever, sweating and shaking chills, shortness of breath, rapid, shallow breathing, sharp or stabbing chest pain that gets worse when you breathe deeply or cough, loss of appetite, low energy, and fatigue.
If the illness gets worse, the grifix may even cough blood. When it gets to this state, it’s called “throat-bleed”. From this point it may even be deadly and all grifix fear it.
It’s contagious so it spreads fast around the village despite the healers struggling to stop it.
However, there is a cure for this illness. A flower called Blood-Drop. The flower has big white petals sprinkled with red spots.
Art and design by Kazoowary
The flower blooms in late summer only in the Everfree Forest and it’s very rare. During that time the healers rely on their strong smell to find it and spend a lot of time searching the forest for as many flowers as possible. All the grifix, from the smallest filly to the strongest warrior know that if it happens to step over one accidentally in the forest they have to take it to the healers as soon as possible. It’s hard, but the healers manage somehow to build a supply of this flower, which they dry and keep in dry places for the winter. They even collect it's seeds in order to spread them around the forest and hope that as many of them will grow. They mark the places where the flowers were found last summer, for those might be the best for the seeds to sprout.
When it comes to using it, the healers boil the flower in water and make a tea or soup from it, which the ill grifix has to drink.
Because of the flower being so rare and the supply so small, the healers use the flower only in throat-bleed cases or advanced throat-tear cases.
Unfortunately, if a grifix is too weak it can’t be sure that they’ll survive even with the cure.
This illness has killed many grifix over the time, so keep your grifix safe during the winter!