Wailing Death The Wailing Death was a magical disease that ravaged the city of Neverwinter in Tarsakh and Mirtul of 1372 DR . Most of the citizens of the city were dead or dying within a tenday of the first reported case . Neverwinter did not fully recover from the effects of the disease for an entire decade and it left the city vulnerable to Netherese infiltration . History . The disease started in a region of the city known as the Beggar ' s Nest , one of the poorer districts . Clerics and healers were dumbfounded at the disease ' s resilience to both mundane and magical healing and hundreds were dead within days . The city was quickly quarantined to prevent the spread of the disease and a call was put out to brave persons to receive free training in order to create a taskforce of adventurers loyal to the city ( or at least to gold ) especially meant to combat the plague any way they could . At the same time , Lord Nasher Alagondar petitioned Khelben " Blackstaff " Arunsun to come up with an arcane cure . Nasher ' s right hand , Lady Aribeth de Tylmarande , spearheaded these efforts with the aid of her fiancée , Fenthick Moss , and Desther Indelayne , the leader of an expedition of Helm ite priests from Helm ' s Hold who were the last people to enter the city before the quarantine . As the first and best of the newly trained adventurers gathered for a graduation ceremony , several strange mage s teleported in with a small army of goblin s and undead . Their intention was to steal away the reagents Khelben had sent to the city as the essential parts of the disease ' s cure . These reagents were the brain of an intellect devourer , the heart of a yuan - ti pureblood , a cockatrice feather , and a lock of a dryad ' s hair . The plans of the mages were foiled but the reagent creatures all fled into the city at large . The cure was gone and only one academy member out of the entire student body and faculty had survived the attack . The cure was gone and most of the city ' s hopes with it . Due to mass riots , the remaining city militia was charged with peacekeeping and the task of finding the reagent creatures fell to that lone survivor . They did not disappoint either . Soon , the cure was back in the hands of the city and several clues had turned up about a Cult of the Eye that might have been behind the attack on the academy . During the ritual though , a further setback was suffered . Desther revealed himself and his priests to be agents of the Cult of the Eye . He stole the cure and fled through a portal back to Helm ' s Hold . He was followed though and the cure retaken by the same adventurer who had retrieved them in the first place . That adventurer was named the Hero of Neverwinter . The plague wasn ' t completely finished with , however . Later in the quest , the Hero of Neverwinter discovered that Commander Damas of Fort Ilkard had used blankets infected with the Wailing Death to infect the Elk tribe . The plague was completely cured , but it had done its job . It had weakened Neverwinter to such an extent that Luskan declared war on the city and invaded . Only with the help of the Lords ' Alliance and the Hero of Neverwinter did the city repel the Luskan army .