In Nysegard, curing ghouls seems like a pretty regular occurrence. No one was surprised that Hilda cured Vampires, which is a much more difficult feat.

Melissance was mad that Talarius didn't cure her, and instead left her for dead, when she could have easily cured herself if she still had access to Tiernon's mana.
We know her mana is still attuned to his, because that's how she was found in the abyss. Was there no way for her to gather mana from her followers, like the rod members on the Inferno did? Or was it a time sensitive thing, like the demon offered her the deal when they were all moments from dying?

Also, when we first meet Talarius, he is killing ghouls and lamenting that there is no cure. He is completely distraught, though still doing his job, that there is no way to cure them but death.
Did he forget somehow?
Or was he just never taught about the cure? It seems like a cure would be a major help to his job.

I know his knife was corrupting him ( I can't remember how to spell the name), could it have somehow made him believe it was incurable? It makes a lot more sense than him believing that his love chose to be a ghoul.

He also didn't have any epiphany type moments in Nysegard, and I can't believe that he didn't see some hints of ghouls being cured. If not just because no one was crying about having to burn a recently infected loved one on a stake, which would have to be a pretty common occurrence in Nysegard if there was no cure. This would make sense if it was the knife making him believe it was incurable.

Or I guess it could just be something that was missed between the two books.

Edited by user Thursday, February 21, 2019 3:00:46 AM(UTC)  | Reason: left out a word

Well, he might be able to send them to the Abyss and back now, with Tom's help...

Just checked the book.

Melissance claims that she couldn't cure herself or her flock because the knights interdicted her. aprox. location 8086 in the kindle edition of Apostles of Doom

Location 8119 AoD ( sorry I don't know the page number) Melissance says, "Great- he gets defeated and dragged to hell, and you can't wait to plunge into the Abyss after him. Me, I get bitten by a hasty vampire and turned into a ghoul- something for which we have many rituals to cure- and you are all hands off. Wacky Melissance, she damned herself by her actions!"

She claimed that she could have cured herself if it weren't for the interdiction.

Obviously, even if Talarius believed she couldn't be cured, he still wronged her greatly, even if just by being a dick to his dying girlfriend and victim-blaming.

It just seemed weird that he was the only one to ever mention the disease being incurable.

I honestly can't wait for Talarius ( hopefully with Tom and some D'orcs in tow) to meet up with the crew of the Inferno. I expect a lot of violence. I can just imagine, them thinking he's been corrupted by Tom, him upset that they came to rescue him, Melissance mad at him, Sam still mad at his copycat, the orstemothians trying to arrest everyone, the D'orcs mad at the lawyers, and Tom just standing there going, "what the fuck" and maybe saying hi to Sam. Ooh and maybe an etonian avatar could be there as Tom's guest for some reason.
It would be the funniest clusterfuck ever.
Oh, and of course Tizzy would have to be there, making everything worse somehow.

I don't see how the meeting could possibly end well for Talarius. If he hadn't changed, Melissance would be pissed at him for what he did, and the knights would be happy to rescue their friend. But he has changed. She'll probably still be extremely pissed and most likely won't believe him, even if the first thing he does upon seeing her is prostrate himself and apologize, and the knights will think he's possessed if he starts explaining what he has learned.

While I am not a God, nor do I wish to have that particular curse bestowed upon me, it seems to me to be a failing of the major faiths to have it require high level permission to cure a ghoul, vampire, or other such turned Dead. It would seem better to have it at the saint or other lesser servant of a God. That way they could better serve the needs of the people. Perhaps this is something Hilda could petition for within the Etonian Pantheon?

I am sure it depends on the god(s) in question as well as pantheon.

I don't know any actual rules, everything I am saying about who can or can't do something is pure speculation, unless we've seen them do it.

1) Tiernon is a Fire God, Justice and War
-->This means kill first, heal later, resurrect if a mistake was made.
2) Hendel is the Healing god, his priests heal first, so maybe rules are different for them.

Now here's the thing

A) Undead are "dead" first.
B) Vampires are definitely dead
C) Curing any undead (vampire, zombie) is generally going to be similar to resurrection
1) and we will see more discussion of this in COA:ITW, turns out the Kristof's maternal side (non-Etonian) do quite a bit of Resurrection and in that book the rules are discussed to some extent.
2) In a normal fesurrection, finding the soul is usually the hardest part, and may be impossible. This is why in general, you want to only resurrect someone of your own religion. Assuming your religion has an afterlife, it should be straight forward to pull them out of it. Now--think about trying to steal a soul from another god's afterlife. Probably impossible if you are from a different pantheon. Probably a lot of it is unethical if they aren't the same religion even if possible.
3) In resurrection there is also the problem of recreating the body--this can be very major problem...Less of a problem with zombies, and not so hard with a vampire
4) For curing, vampires have their souls there, zombies should also, have something left.
5) What is there is also discussed more in Book 4 as Undead go to the Abyss.

Yada yada, this is going on too long.

In short you got to repolarize the soul and reanimate and heal the body.

I suspect it's on par with resurrection just different.

Ghouls are not dead, they are just severely diseased. How do you cure them with out killing them though? That might be tricky, so you have to be prepared to have them die and resurrect them or I have no idea.

This requires a very powerful priest. In fact, normal parish priests probably can't do this. High Priests maybe depending on the religion. Maybe higher like a Diocate. (See the library for Church Hierarchy)

Melissance was a high priestess. She thought she could cure ghoulism, or may be she at least knew it could be done and she could figure it out.

We don't know how much of what she said was angry wishful thinking and how much was real.

Talarius is not a priest, he may have some holy abilities, but he's not a priest and doesn't know the lore, in his experience, maybe killing is the best/easiest answer if there is no sufficiently high level priest around????

We would really need to ask him. Who knows, there may have been different religion issues to.

Now, we have no idea what religion the vampires etc she cured were, but since they had their souls, there was no afterlife issue and she is quite powerful.


Also on Talarius changing preference---I suspect that the grass is always greener on the other side.

Also, if the Undead are an army attacking the "good guys" it's even more clear cut that you should kill them vs cure them vs poor benighted souls like in Book 1.

There were/are specialist animages that could (and probably still do it)

Technically, at least for ghouls, it's much more up an animage's alley. There are a couple of disciplines that would be involved.

COA:ITW has an animancer or two.

Those were who I was talking about in the first lines...I just couldn't recall the name of the profession when typing.

Because I personally know the main animancer in CoA:ITW and recently visited her in that book, I could remember animancer.

After I posted the response I went "Oh, doh! Animaster..."

BTW CoA:ITW doesn't have a whole lot of Tom, but I'm definitely there. Rather nice to be the most powerful demon in a book for a change.

That really depends on how much of an infection there is, sort of like gangrene.

If the wounds are life threatening, then it can be less than 20 Astlan hours (i.e. a day) before they get "hungry" In fact, it could be within hours, if the wound would have killed them within a few hours, it can, in theory, be that fast. Of course, if it's bad enough to kill them, then it just kills them before they can turn. So it's sort of a race against death vs disease. However, if the disease takes over before they die, and they get food, (meaning ghoul food or ghoulash) they won't die.

A single bite? Well, like any infection, it depends on their health/constitution. If the bite is deep/bad and they are sickly, one to two days.

Healthy people? It can take up to a week (10 days), possibly a bit longer if really exceptional.

I would say most people have around half a week (5 days)