Curse

A curse, hex or deleterious practice refers to any abstract, harmful magic and understandably covers a broad category.<ref name=":1"/> Practitioners who specialize in deleterious practice are called Curse Adepts.<ref>Laila was the lackey then.  Who wasn’t acting lackey-like.  Intense, stalking forward, she pushed Melody up against the wall.  Laila’s eyes glowed and her breath fogged.

Except it wasn’t fog.
[...]
“You’re always playing the victim, Melody,” Laila said.  The wisps that escaped her mouth took shapes, like clawed hands, and snaking tendrils.  “Stop.  Stop playing up the act where you’re the nice girl, oh you’re so cute and nonthreatening, you’re the victim so much of the time, you’re helpless, you’re ignorant.  You’ve been studying here for two years.  You’re not that much less educated or weaker than the rest of us.  But you pretend to be because it lets you be sneaky about stuff.  People underestimate you and you use that.  Undercutting me behind my back?  To my parents?”
[...]
“You’re-” Melody hesitated.  A moment later, she choked, as a wisp of something snaked into her nose.  When her mouth opened, more traces of whatever got into her mouth.

She doubled over, and Laila pushed her to the ground, putting a knee on her chest and leaning over.  Now the wisps cascaded down over and around her face and head.
[...]
“You cursed her.  Withdraw it.[...] Or there’ll be no further discussion and you’ll be treated as a hostile entity.”

Laila opened her mouth wide, tongue out and extended toward her chin.  The wisps came as a surge that made Melody gag as it emerged, thick around as Avery’s leg, smokey, and winding through the air before returning to Laila’s throat.  Laila’s eyes glowed briefly [...] she swallowed. - Excerpt from Cutting Class 6.2</ref> As with any Practice there are counter moves and similar when dealing with curses.<ref>Deft Deflection, Apotropaic Protections, A Practitioner Alone, Walls of Chalk, Blinded Eye, Curse Lifted…

Avery paged through the initial stuff there.  Counter-practice, countering the evil eye, dealing with large numbers and forces, warding diagrams, counter-augury, counter-curses. - Excerpt from Cutting Class 6.2</ref>

Certain general laws of magic apply to curses. If rebuffed, they can bounce back stronger than before, either on the sender<ref>Barriers will serve their purpose, but hexes and deleterious magics will often glance off the Bane, rendering them a potent devise against the unwary. Without expecting their workings to go awry and come back to them, such a Magus might find themselves dealing with their own practises and the Bane both. - Excerpt from Duress 12.3</ref><ref>“Sticking him with a label?” Lucy asked. “Nothing more?”

“Oh, aye, Lassie. If you wanted more, you cannae be lyin’ in little ways all the time. Makes it easy to shake, and they say a curse you can shake can go back to the sender, stronger than it was. You’re lucky he’s not much of a shakin’ sort.”

“Goblins neglected to mention that,” Lucy said, her eyebrow raised.
[...]
“You smell of goblins, and your lips taste like a curse,” Maricica told Lucy. “Be careful. Curses and lowly practices travel paths of least resistance, and the most common path of least resistance that draws lightning from the heavens, rain from the sky, and light from the sun is down. Sink too far, and you may find it all tumbling down on your head.” - Excerpt from Stolen Away 2.5</ref> or on the original target if that's not possible.<ref>I noticed the doom and followed it to her. She was fending it off, but the way a curse, an omen, or a sending works, if you can’t bounce it back at the sender, or if there’s no sender, it can magnify. The doom had swelled, going away for a time, picking up strength, then returning. - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.4</ref> Actively inviting a curse, such as giving verbal permission, will make a curse more effective.<ref name=":1">“If you’ll give her a moment, she should find a comfort zone with the body and the situation. She didn’t give her permission for the change, and deleterious practices are always more effective if the subject invites it.”

“Dele-what?” Avery asked.

“Harmful. Inflicted wrongs. Curses and unasked-for effects like a transformation,” Maricica explained. “If they ask for it, either by opening their mouths and saying the words, or by doing something in and of itself wrong and deserving of being wronged in turn, the deleterious effect will stick.”

“So this won’t stick?” Lucy asked.

“If she didn’t want it, it would be easy to shake off.” - Excerpt from Stolen Away 2.3</ref> A karmically righteous curse, taking vengeance for some wrong, will also be more likely to succeed.<ref name=":1"/>

Insults can become curses,<ref>“Get bent!” Lucy shouted at him.

“You suck!” Avery called out.

“Enough,” Drowne told them. “Insults can be come curses. Come.” - Excerpt from Gone Ahead 7.9</ref> possibly when amplified by the Rule of Three and fed a bit of Power.<ref>“It’s a-” Toadswallow started. He nearly fell over, tripping over trash. “Third one sticks. It’s a minor curse. Turning an insult into something that means something, by driving it in. That rat’s going to be grosser. It works with all kinds of things. Faerie use it with fancy words and phrases. If you do a contract with them, they’ll work in repeated words and phrases that imply crap and make other stuff more important.” - Excerpt from Lost for Words 1.5</ref>

There are ways to use a curse with out targeting protected individuals of course.<ref>“Laila Throop.  Large-scale curses.  I can’t use them on the staff or students, really.  Bristow would expel me and my parents would- it wouldn’t be good.”

“Curses are fun,” Gashwad said, crawling partway up a tree to get a better look at her, his already small eyes narrowing.  “You hit big groups?”

Laila nodded.

“If you can’t use it on the school, [...] Either go for the delivery drivers and people in the nearby town, stir some shit up…”

“The karmic backlash could eat me alive.”

“Or the Brownies,” Gashwad said.  “Slow them down some.”

“Or the Aware,” Toadswallow said.  “Small group, but still a group.” - Excerpt from Gone Ahead 7.7</ref>

Curses and Magic Items

Magic items which carry a curse are fairly common, especially "in the wild",<ref>A lot of devices and ‘found’ items tended to be… problematic. When an Other got into an item, it tended to be frustrated or angry, or else a predator lying in wait, or a conniving thing trying to use the device as a vector to hurt people.

These items, from the scratch-a-sketch to the polaroid camera, were ones Zed had tended to. Curses removed, Others managed or pulled out, bound, and put back in again. In cases where those Others had been ones who preyed on fear or negativity, the items unfortunately became things that couldn’t recharge or sustain themselves. - Excerpt from Out on a Limb 3.z</ref> and spreading such items to harvest the unwary is the specialty of Peddler-type Others.

Curses and Others

Others have been known to cast curses even restricted as they are by the Seal of Solomon and other accords. Some are very good at it, such as making items as discussed above or casting them directly. Some Others give curses if they're killed, such as Black Dogs.<ref>“Another kind. For every twenty or so of the rest of us, you might see one Black Dog, one Rag Tag. They come from civilians like I come from soldiers, but… they come from wrongs, from pain, attrition. They’ll look like kids. Or like old men or women. Kill them, you get sick, or something twists inside you and you can’t eat enough anymore, or… you get cold and you can’t warm up. A curse. The strong ones, you can’t even hurt them or say an unkind word without them laying something on you in turn. And they come back too. They protect us, walk into firefights, stop other kinds of binding than just the circles. They give us direction, motivation.”
[...]
“Our Black Dog. My friend,” he answered. “She filled the empty hours of the day and kept me entertained, she watched terrible shows. Not, uh, not so clarified. Black Dogs, they don’t take lives, not easily. Only if they give someone a curse of revenge and that curse kills. But what was there was… rich. [...] I was the one who took Yalda’s life in the end. I was cursed. I carried it with me for years. Then Charles carried it for a short while before they figured out how to break it. If I was going to hate anyone, I’d hate myself, and I spend too much time on my own to spend it stewing in hatred.” - Excerpt from Lost for Words 1.5</ref>

In some cases even a sapient Other might be considered a living curse one way or another. Such as metaphorically,<ref>There's been theorizing that he was a curse bestowed on us from the First Nations, over some slight. - Excerpt from Subordination 6.7</ref> or in a more literal sense where the the curse has gained sufficient complexity to become sentient and even sapient.<ref>“I am Inomenos. I am a wrong, made by man, released against men. I have earned a name for myself.”

A curse, given life, I thought. - Excerpt from Execution 13.7</ref><ref>The ___ Flare attack is [Thomas Black']s filler if no attack fits or if he needs something to get started off, and his black cat familiar is a living curse that trips enemies up so everything's just a little more likely to land, but he can have it become something similar to a flare, to serve as emergency filler at the cost of no longer granting its ambient effect for the remainder of the combat. - Wildbow on Reddit.</ref>

References

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