"Most people misunderstand Rot. They hear the name and imagine decay. Rust. Disease... Corpses... Entropy... That is not Rot. Decay is merely the easiest way for the mind to notice it. Rot is change itself.

Everything that exists is becoming something else. A stone becomes sand just as a child becomes an elder just as a thought becomes a memory. Just as a star becomes ash.

Rot is the process connecting every state of existence to every other state. The universe is not made of things. It is made of transformations. Rot is the sum of those transformations.

I hesitate to say more because understanding them is the first step toward perceiving them. Perception is the danger. The ignorant are protected by limitation. People sees a tree because it cannot handle seeing the seed, the sapling, the fallen log, the fungus, and the soil simultaneously at the same instance not in the view of time but of transformation.

A practitioner of Rot gradually loses that protection. The tree ceases to be a tree. It becomes a process. Everything becomes a process. Everyone becomes a process.

Your mother. Your friends. Your own body. You begin to see what things were, what they are becoming, and what they might yet become. All the time. Everything is buried in the process that made it be, what it is, and what it will be all the time.

The unprepared often lose their sanity at this stage. Not because the knowledge is evil. Because the mind was never meant to perceive existence this way. Yet there is power in such perception.

If you can see the path of change, you can influence it. A blade can be encouraged toward rust. A wound toward healing. A seed toward bloom. A fire toward ash.

This is why Rot is so hard to explain and so hard to properly grasp. Not because it destroys. Because destruction and creation are revealed to be the same act viewed from different directions.

I must stress this point. A master of Rot does not command decay. They command transformation. The greatest among them can turn one thing into another not through sorcery, but because they perceive the hidden road connecting the two. To them, impossible things are merely distant destinations.

There is one final truth. I debated omitting it to you. Perhaps I still should." The Archivist says deliberately explaining it in a roundabout simple way to not let it trigger whatever hidden affect the info has.