Wizard Cancer

This one wound up more ghoulish than expected. Don't know how canon it is. Everything within probably happens, but not regularly. 

Cancer has been with us for as long as we have fought not to die. It is an unraveling of the self as a unit working towards a singular goal, a parasite that emerges from within the self as a result of traumatic, microscopic damage to some of the smallest component parts of our being. Cancer disregards its place as part of a functioning whole, seeking only to grow and consume, to its own detriment, and eventual extinction. Cancer is chaos, hunger, life incarnate.

The universe is unraveling. It does not remember what it is, how it should function. It is at war with itself. Its brain is filled with tumors. Magic is the milk of reality's cancer, the ultimate product of its slow decay. The use of magic, therefore, begets cancer. The presence of the arcane within a body is often at risk of sending one's cells into the deepest sort of katabasian spiral, a maddening, nigh unstoppable descent. Many elder wizards are full of cancers. Their throats swell with rocky lumps, their tongues swell, their fingers bulge. Their poor brains are packed full of tumors, smooth and slick, jostling along with the tides of thought like stones worn smooth at the bottom of a riverbed.

Wizard's Cancer

Among those who practice the art, there are many folk traditions that they embrace to ward off the disease. Scarification and ritual tattoos in vulnerable areas of the body, and piercings of silver and gold are said to help. Most wizards have elaborate tattoos all along their hands, sometimes on their throats, and silver piercings through their tongues. Some go further, piercing their ears, noses, lips, cheeks, or foreheads (usually this means something resembling a dermal piercing but some do drive spikes into their own heads). Wizards use staves and wands to distance themselves from their magic, hoping the wood will bear the cancer for them (when it works, the wood gnarls, which is why they always have those twisting, knobbly things instead of straight canes). Surgical removal of tumors is often attempted to varying degrees of success. Wizards rarely throw these tumors away, once removed.

Wizard Cancers

A wizard's tumor is a dangerous and sometimes valuable thing. They are treasured the most by other wizards and occultists. They are good offerings to spirits and gods, they are powerful reagents in spells and potions. Eating one is said to bolster your power, or bestow blessings upon your bloodline. Sometimes a tumor has magic of its own. When you kill a wizard, that magic might activate, whether as an explosion of their bottled up potential magical energy, or as fleshy serpents peeling their way out of the cadaver and leaping towards you with gummy mouths.  

Cancer Wizards

Because they're so valuable, some wizards cultivate cancer, in themselves or others. Growing tumors is a delicate art rooted in biomancy and beast magic, with its own practices and ethos. Common hosts include one's self, farm animals, familiars, or apprentices. This is generally a good reason to be wary of wizards that have had lots of apprentices or who keep many at once, they might be keeping the majority of you around for subtle (but often ruinous) experiments. Tumor growth can be used offensively theoretically, if you make them grow fast enough, but it's such a slow death that it's not particularly common for biomancers to whip this technique out against you, unless they're really good at it. Some people might think to use it as a weapon for assassination, but it's often too slow for that too. Better to just push the king down the stairs and make it look like an accident.

Cancer Wizards?

Sometimes, contact with a powerful source of magical radiation will cause tumors to grow within a person that have the initial magical waveform scraped into their DNA. This usually results in the person with the tumor being capable of magic, often pretty powerful stuff, at the cost of their bodily health. Using the tumor feeds the tumor and encourages further rebellion. Such mages burn bright and fast, and are often dead within a handful of years, if not months. Their cancers are the second most valued by other wizards. The first most valued are the ones that can talk. 

Cancer Wizards!

It's super rare, but it happens. It takes a potent magically charged tumor, ideally one developed from brain tissue. If it gets big enough and is fed consistently, it can awaken. Often these tumors seek to usurp their hosts, and sometimes they succeed, replacing their brains fully, or extracting themselves from their hosts. Some powerful wizards are actually tumors grown from the people they appear to be. If they haven't body jacked their host, they will be, to be delicate, fucking disgusting looking. Giant ambulatory tumors are just really horrible to look at. They might embrace it, or they might seek to use beast magic to modify their form into something more personable.