← Ashen Mark
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Decay

Base: ENTROPY

Physics: Accelerating material entropy. Organic matter rots. Metal corrodes. Stone crumbles. Living tissue degrades. The universal direction of disorder, aimed and accelerated. Every system moves toward equilibrium; a Decay user tells it to hurry.
Signature: Wet. Everything. The smell of things the body is programmed to step away from — spoiled meat, fruit left too long, damp leaves at the bottom of a drain. A Decay user's room has a smell even when the room is clean, because "clean" is a fight they are losing against their own mark. The visual is slump: surfaces that look like they have had a long day, edges that have rounded from too much use.

F-rank. A bite of bread held a moment too long goes soft at the edges. An apple on the desk of a Decay F-rank student develops, over a morning, a single dark bruise that spreads into a soft spot by afternoon. The user does not intend this. They simply are, in the vicinity of organic material, and the organic material quietly agrees to move toward its eventual state more quickly than it otherwise would. A leaf held in the palm turns yellow, browns, curls, and crumbles in under a minute. The smell is not dramatic at F-rank — a faint ferment, the smell of a cellar with one forgotten pear in it. The user's skin tends toward dryness at the knuckles and cuticles; their fingernails are slightly fragile and chip along the edges no matter how they care for them. The internal signature is a feeling of unravelling — the soft sense of a knot loosening — located somewhere behind the eyes, a pressure that eases when they perform the mark's work and returns when they have not worked it in some days.

E-rank. The radius widens to a small room. Flowers left in a vase at dinner are past saving by breakfast. Milk in the pantry curdles faster than it should. A wound on a classmate — a small cut, a scraped knee — refuses to close normally in the Decay user's vicinity, a thin scab that keeps softening and weeping where another scab would have dried. The user discovers, to their quiet distress, that they must store their own food separately. Bread in their locker goes blue-green by its third day where other students' bread lasts a week. The guild issues the student sealed containers and an allowance for replacement provisions. The allowance is not generous; the guild considers it a routine aspect of living with the mark and does not want to encourage self-pity. The smell thickens: the user's dormitory has a note to it, a low constant fermentation, the smell of a compost heap's outer edge.

D-rank. A D-rank Decay user can aim. A glance toward a wooden beam in an opposing fighter's weapon-rack and the beam, over a minute or two, develops a dark spreading wetness along the grain — moisture emerging from nowhere, wood drinking back the years of drying it has done, and then some. Within five minutes the beam is soft. Within ten it will not hold a weapon. The aim is not precise — a D-rank targets regions, not points — but the effect inside those regions is complete. A leather strap decays into flexibility at the near end and slimes where the user looks, and fails before the buckle. The guild's training accounts for this: Decay users are given rigid equipment, replaced often. Internally at D-rank the user begins to feel the distinction between the kinds of entropy. They can tell a dying leaf from a drying rock. They can tell a rotting apple from a wasting corpse. The sensations are different at the root of the tongue, and no instructor has been able to explain this to any Decay user without using metaphors the instructor does not fully believe.

C-rank. Biological targeting. A C-rank Decay user can aim at a living thing and the living thing experiences, at a scale below the obvious, a cascade of small breakdowns — minor vessels leaking, tissue stiffness, an immune response spinning up on nothing, a low fever, an ache nobody can locate. In combat this manifests as an opponent who tires faster than they should, whose wounds take longer to close, whose grip loosens on the sword through a fight that should not have drained them. Fatal targeting is possible but slow — C-rank Decay users kill by lingering, not by striking, and the kill is an afternoon of watching, not a moment. This is one of the reasons Decay is stigmatised. Another reason is the smell at C-rank. The user's working radius has a smell that opens a meter ahead of them when they concentrate, a cold wet rotten smell that people respond to at the reptilian level. A C-rank Decay user in uniform walks into a room and conversations reorganise around the empty space beside them, and this is not something the user is always at peace with.

B-rank. Area effect. A B-rank Decay user applies a field — a working radius of several meters sustained over minutes — inside which every process that can degrade does degrade. Steel rusts. Rope frays. A healer trying to work inside the field finds the body they are working on resisting the healing, the cells sluggish and reluctant, and the work takes three times longer and is never quite complete. Plants in the field wilt. Insects die. The visual within the field is a slow uniform ageing — everything present taking on the texture of having been sat in rain for a season. Afterward the field lifts and the material does not spring back; the aged-in-place state persists. A B-rank Decay user cannot walk through a garden without leaving a corridor behind them of plants that have had a bad week, and the week does not unmake itself. The guild pairs its B-rank Decay users with professional gardeners who work, quietly, in their wake.

A-rank. Strategic. An A-rank Decay user targets infrastructure. A siege tower refused to burn, refused to fall to rams, refused to topple in storms — but put in front of an A-rank Decay user for a quiet afternoon it softens, its timbers slowly going to sponge, its iron rusting at rates a century would not normally achieve, its rope slimes off the rigging and pools on the ground like something that was once a thing. The tower does not fall so much as collapse into its own decomposition, and the noise is wet and awful and people avert their eyes. A-rank Decay users are not battlefield combatants in the way an A-rank Fire user is — they are siege engineers in a category the world does not have another word for. They arrive, they work, they leave, and the thing they worked on is a ruin that a generation cannot repair. Their own bodies at A-rank are carefully tended; they themselves are subject to the mark they wield, and Decay users of high rank without constant counter-care from Healing-type partners age into infirmity faster than other mark users. The guild assigns them Healers. The assignment is not entirely a courtesy.

S-rank. Regional. An S-rank Decay user's working radius is a kilometer, and the time scale compresses: in minutes, organic matter in the radius goes to compost; in an hour, metals go to red dust; in a day, stone itself weathers visibly, edges rounding, faces pitting, the structures within the field becoming what they were always going to become in a thousand years of weather. The field is horrifying at the sensory level: the smell within it is a physical thing, a wall of decomposition that every human body responds to by reaching for its deepest aversive instincts, and even seasoned guild members posted near an S-rank Decay user in field operations report that they cannot eat for a day after. The user themselves is often a quiet, thoughtful person with careful hands and a tendency to keep a very clean, very small personal garden tended to within a centimeter of its life. This is not uniform but it is a pattern. The guild's internal mental-health resources were first written for S-rank Decay users. The other expressions with their own such needs came later.

Population context. In the founding era, three to five S-rank Decay practitioners existed across the Seventeen houses in each generation. That population thinned; by the modern era the guild lists two living, both retired, both in non-combat advisory roles — their working radii cannot be brought near populated areas without consequences the guild will not accept. The guild keeps them busy with research and with the occasional quiet deployment to a specific site where a ruin must be finished before it becomes a problem. The two surviving S-rank Decay users are, in fact, unusually pleasant people. The pleasantness and the mark have had a long time to negotiate, and the negotiation has produced, in both cases, a kind of weary kindness that younger mark users occasionally find disquieting without quite being able to say why.

SS-rank. The user is the second law of thermodynamics with a preference. An SS Decay user's presence in a region produces, on long exposure, the collapse of the ordering that civilisation has spent generations imposing on its environment: walls weather, roofs sag, roads lose their grade, forests lose their clean edges, rivers silt and spread. The effect is slow at the edges of the radius and rapid at the centre, and the centre is wherever the practitioner is currently sitting. They age. Not themselves — others, nearby, over years. A child raised in the long vicinity of an SS Decay user will not be short-lived but will be, at twenty, visibly older than other twenty-year-olds by about a year in tendon, half a year in skin, and three years in the eyes. The effect compounds. The practitioner themselves is extraordinarily old, by mark-lifespan standards, and extraordinarily tired, which is the temperament the expression tends to produce in those who have carried it for centuries. SS Decay is not, in the founding-era sense, a warrior expression. It is a finality expression, and the practitioners reflect that.

Population context. In the founding era, one SS Decay practitioner per generation across the Seventeen houses, sometimes none. Two across the entire compact-era Ironward. Zero living today. The last known SS Decay user died approximately ninety years before the story opens, in a manner the guild records as "natural causes at age four hundred twelve," which is correct in the technical sense but is not, in the sense most interesting to historians, an explanation. The practitioner, upon recognising that their long work had produced as much finality as they were willing to contribute to, stopped eating. The stopping took a little under two months. The people who attended upon them at the end reported that the room the practitioner died in was, at the moment of death, clean — as if the mark had quietly reversed itself for the hour of the dying, and set down its burden, and left the room tidy for whoever was next. This may be mark-and-practitioner mythology. The guild has not investigated.

SSS-rank. The practitioner is dissolution. Tens of thousands of years of tending the direction every closed system is already going, and the practitioner has become, in effect, a walking statement of that direction. They do not will decay. They do not aim it. They are what decay is, given a body, and the body's presence in a region means the region is more quickly reaching the state it was heading for anyway. Regions they have lived in for centuries are not ruined; they are advanced, accelerated along the trajectory of their own eventual end, arriving at that end while elsewhere is still in the middle of being. The practitioner themselves is, at SSS, frail-looking in a way that is misleading. They have not been vulnerable in the physical sense in a very long time. Frail-looking is the aesthetic the mark produces in the host, because frailty is the direction the mark travels; the practitioner's body wears the appearance of its own work without being subject to it, and this is one of the most subtle negotiations the mark system has ever been asked to hold.

Population context. SSS Decay existed in the founding era. Exactly one confirmed. The practitioner retired from the world approximately two hundred and sixty years before the compact was signed, walked alone into the southern salt marshes, and did not return. The salt marshes, on any surviving map, are uninhabited, unfishable, and unpleasant. The region expanded by approximately fifteen percent over the two centuries following the practitioner's retreat. The expansion slowed approximately eighty years before the compact and has been effectively static since. The guild's hypothesis — not published — is that the practitioner died approximately eighty years before the compact, and the expansion ended because the expansion required a living author. The guild has not sent investigators into the marshes in a century. The marshes are still there. They are still uninhabited.

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