[INTEL BRIEFING: APEX TRAUMA // CLASSIFIED] SUBJECT:
The Four Stages of Contamination (The Path to the Pale)
The Blight is not a disease you can cure. It’s a conversation the world is having with your cells, and it never stops talking. Most people in the Bastion are at Stage 1 and don’t even know it. Out here in the Wastes, you learn to recognize the signs. This is the path from human to horror. This is how the Blight claims you.
Stage 1: The Static Itch (Latent Contamination)
This is where it begins. Not with a cough, but with a feeling. A chronic ache in your bones that never quite goes away. The chilling, unshakable certainty that you’re being watched, even in an empty room. You start seeing patterns in the static on a dead screen, faces in the shadows. Your chrome might suffer from minor sensory glitches — a flash of a color your brain can’t name, a phantom sound just beneath the threshold of hearing. This is the Blight getting your frequency.
Stage 2: The First Cracks (Dissonance)
The conversation gets louder. The Whispers in the static start to sound less like noise and more like a language you almost understand. The psychological symptoms intensify: paranoia bleeds into dissociation, moments where you look at your own hands and they don’t seem like yours. The first physical signs appear now — an unnatural pallor to the skin, a faint, amber glow in your eyes in low light. This is the first crack in the dam of your humanity.
Stage 3: The Garden of Flesh (Active Transformation)
This is where the Blight stops whispering and starts building. The alien blueprint begins to manifest physically. Small, hard, crystalline growths might appear on your skin like a rash. The veins beneath your arm might rearrange into an unsettling, geometric pattern. The physical corruption is now undeniable. Your mind begins to fracture under the strain, or worse, begins to accept the Blight’s terrible logic, seeing its alien patterns as beautiful and purposeful. This is the stage where you are actively becoming a monster.
Stage 4: The Pale (Total Conversion)
There is no Stage 5. This is the end of the conversation. The person you were is gone, erased. The Blight has finished its work, and your body is now just a vessel, a “Hollowed”. Your mind is subsumed by the alien consciousness of the Rift, and your flesh completes its horrific evolution into a Riftspawn — a creature of warped limbs, crystalline carapaces, and a purpose that is utterly hostile to human life . You have become a living blasphemy, a permanent part of the world’s new, terrible garden.
[TRANSMISSION END]
