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The Sickness was a famous enough historical event that no one here needed to ask for elaboration about it. In fact, Hector recalled Garovel bringing it up once before, and elaboration hadn’t been needed back then, either.

Hector often felt like he hadn’t learned much from school--mostly due to his own bad habits as a student--but the Great Green Sickness was certainly an exception. The lessons about it in middle school had left a lasting impression.

The population of the entire world was halved in the span of a single year--then halved again over the next three years. The Sickness was so pernicious, in fact, that even after the initial waves of devastation, it still continued to cause an overall population decline for another decade before new births finally began to outpace deaths again.

The most horrifying thing about it, however, was the slow creep of its approach. There was a visible change in the victim’s skin, turning it gradually greener and greener, long before any of the truly debilitating symptoms arrived. Some people would be green for months or even years, living otherwise normal lives.

Which caused dramatic civil unrest.

There arose an entire class of green “untouchables.” Despite many of them being perfectly able-bodied for quite a while longer, they were ostracized from the rest of society. Rich or poor, it made little difference, since there was no cure to be found for any amount of money. In some regions of the world, the “dead men walking” even became strangely influential in their own way, growing large enough as a group that they could advocate for themselves politically, despite the attempts to excise them from society entirely.

Such instances were rare, though. They made for exceptional and interesting stories in the textbooks that Hector had read, but more often than not, the sick simply suffered and died in agony.

Here and now, Hector found himself questioning how much of that he remembered from school or from the Candle’s memories. Most of that was from school, he felt. But certainly, the memories from the Candle were making that knowledge a lot more... visceral in his mind.

He had a rather strong feeling that, if he meditated on it, he would discover many terrible images and scenes from that time period. It did have an easy visual distinction from other plagues, after all.

He had to consciously avoid getting sucked into that train of thought, right now.