The Vomiting Plague

''In Xiong Plains, an army of rats escape northward, driving others from their burrows and running in irrational fear. Dead rats laid everywhere, but the wave of fear continued unabated, for they are escaping the inescapable; the fleas in their fur, and the disease in their blood. ('''Unknown)

The Vomiting Plague started in the Xiong plain, the vast empty land north of Xilan. It quickly reached Siberia and the Himalayas. Spread by flees on rats, it would move westaward to the entire civilized world. This was in 2825 BC... In China, ironically, the plague led to political unity, forming the Man state and expanding the Xilaroi empire. A concentrated effort of medicine and quaranteen allowed these nations to survive... Not without casualties. A third of the empire's populance and half of the people elsewhere died and the plague remained, though lessened. That was just the beginning.

The plague reached India by nomadic tribes. Once there, it created devastation in two types. In Dakinsa Raj it killed 2 out of 5 people on the Indus, and left as suddenly as it came. Dakinsa killed the sick, a brutal strategy, but effective at saving those who are not yet ill. Unlike Xilan, here the plague was a destabilizing force. The Patni Empire on the Ganges collapsed, though the reasons for this where political. That nation was already unstable due to mismanagment and internal ethnic rivalries. The effect was that Dakinsa became the dominant power in the region, though numerous other states remained.

Next the plague reached Aramyan via Hormun. There, it empited many cities of their populance. What came to replace them is the ethnic diversity that would dominate South Mesopotamia even now. It also destroyed the old bureaucracy, allowing it to be replaced with the more efficient Exaltations.

In Greece (then Atyria) the plague came slowly and steadily. A quarter of the population died in the end, in small groups of "only" a thousand at a time. Society was remodeled, Exnotism became the official relgion and the unified state grew in importance. In Anotolia the plague killed a fifth of the population and started the spread of the Koyunlu tribesmen. Yes, the same ones that would spawn the war machine of Katan.

The last victim of the plague was Anorian Egypt, which collapsed into numerous feuding city states. The plague however was only one reason for this. In reality this was caused by the god-king in Anor's wars in the levant. Because the Anorian government ignored the south, a rebllion formed, led by Pharsa of Thebes, allied with the Lybians and Damiette. The result was a total collapse as neither the pharoah or the alliance against him could hold the country together. Much later, would emerge victorious from the ensuing Civil War, with support from Nubia, which it ended up absorbing, forming the giant Neo-Egyptian Empire....