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> or Cursewright.<ref>With the will of the cursewright at work,
[...]
A week later, when this author had figured out the cursewright, the dancer was instructed to pass the stone back to the culprit, a rival dancer, pressing it into her hands.
[...]
To pass the focus back the holder must first carry it to the peak of their particular mountain, and the cursewright was not strong enough - Excerpt from Dash to Pieces 11.13</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><ref>One sound-altering card, tucked in between backpack strap and her shoulder.  One Whittler’s curse, learned from the Atheneum Arrangement.

[...]
Lucy used an arm, bent enough that wrist nearly touched shoulder, to fend off the punches from the guy she was lying on top of.  The runework on her skin deflected some of it, taking away from the impact.  If anything, he was suffering more than she was.  Cuts kept appearing at random places on his skin.

He seemed to realize pretty quickly that as long as the curse paper was on him, every impact was making more cuts erupt into existence.  Each one small, inch-long, no deeper than the skin, easily healed, but all together?

She had to get away before he riddled out the way the curse worked.  The Whittler’s curse was a basic Pónos curse, pain, but backed by Város, toil.  Had to get away, but she didn’t want to stab the guy.

[...]
Yeeeaaahhh, that was part of the issue with the basic Whittler’s curse.  Making it stick.  It needed the toil to keep the pain going.  It only lasted so long, the book had said five to ten seconds for most practitioners, but that seemed like it had been fifteen or twenty.  Every time it activated and delivered a cut, due to exertion or any impact delivered or received, even a running footstep, the duration would reset.

The implication in the book had been that apprentice cursewrights would train themselves on it, and on the basics of exchanging curses, with the cuts serving as rebuke and punishment for failure.  The cuts could lead to unconsciousness from blood loss, even death, but they always healed without scarring. - Excerpt from Summer Break 13.11</ref>

Specifics

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" />

Goats are heavily associated with curses, sometime they are used as a sacrifical animal, other times as an omen or they can appear before a victim as a sign of how much danger they are in.<ref>She’d picked the goat before reading the preliminary stuff on curses, but apparently it was also an animal with links to the deleterious practices.  Dark, offensive practices.  Curses.  Sometimes it was a sacrificial animal, sometimes an omen, for some lines of cursework, that appeared before the victim to indicate that they were well and truly boned. - Excerpt from Dash to Pieces 11.12</ref>

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> using the collateral damage a curse may cause to damage the real target.

An example of a deleterious practice is the curse effect from a finders knot, which can temporarily remove traits from an Other and disrupt other magic.<ref>Practice One: Finder’s Knotting
[...]
The symbol of a circle with a plus sign in it is the astrological sign for ‘Earth’ and the idea is to have something that can be flung. Delivers a curse effect that works best against dangerous Lost and brings them ‘down to earth’. Makes them less Lost, can interrupt any special rules they follow and protections or powers they have. Works on non-Lost too, but varies in how useful it is. Can work on weak patterns or barriers in the Paths. Fire a bullet with a finder’s knot around it (without breaking the hairs? I dunno) and shoot down a door with a mechanism that can’t be figured out. - [9.3 Spoilers] Path Practicalities</ref> Some others are immune to this specific example of course.

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>

Types of curses

• Pendulum curses - Curses that give you something and then takes it away.<ref>Some items were pendulums.  Give something, then take it away on the backswing.  A makeup kit that could make someone beautiful but then the beauty would fade and it would take away the original face’s beauty with it.  Bit by bit, encouraging more use, more use, more use.  Until the user took their own life, or got killed for being a monster.  Then the makeup kit would drink up the Self or the soul, using the claim it had established, position itself to be found by someone else or get moved by its creator, or it would return home for the stored power to be extracted.- Excerpt from Playing a Part 15.7</ref>
• Plot items - Cursed items that build stores with traps in them.<ref>Some items were plot items.  Cursed items that had built in stories with patterns or traps woven into them.  A cursed clown doll that would let someone invent humiliations to force on a peer in worse ways and worse ways, from blurting out something embarrassing, sudden weight gain or hair loss, wardrobe malfunctions, crapping themselves in a public place, having debit and credit cards cut off in front of people, and so on, always asked for and then enacted the next day.  The doll would always demand the wielder of the doll to escalate from the last time, but as the pattern was established, the doll would always be stolen by the target, would always be used against the original wielder.  There would always be a final confrontation, always with both the original user and the primary victim holding the doll and trying to wrest it from the other’s grip, each trying to top the other’s last stated curse, or top themselves.  And, almost inevitably, the two would invent humiliations capped off in finality.  Each stating an embarrassing death for the other.  Then the doll would go cold, and they’d have nothing left but to wait until tomorrow.  That was the pattern, and breaking from it would require tests of character and sacrifice.- Excerpt from Playing a Part 15.7</ref>
• Poisoned apples - A cursed item that generated an effect then collects the assoiated energy.<ref>Apples or Poison Apples were a curse specialist’s term for items that generated an effect, helped an energy or effect take hold, then collected that energy.  She’d read about a crystal egg that made love cool.  Families would become cold and distant, calculating, ruthless, empathy dying for those touched by any light that hit the egg and refracted out, for anyone else also touched.  Clementine had picked up the fake flower in a plastic tube by the roadside, and it had generated an overabundance of life.  But poison apples were often very simple, beautiful objects that people wanted to keep around or keep on display just for the artistic value – that kind of aesthetic led people to put them in prominent places where they could work.  This frame and this world wasn’t that.- Excerpt from Playing a Part 15.7</ref>
• Trails - Trail related curses offer the cursed a test of character.<ref>Trials were tests of character, where items offered power with the expectation that someone would be ruined by that power, or demanded the target learn a lesson.  Enough people would fail that the cursed item collected more power than it spent doing whatever it did.  A lot of Clementine’s items were tests of character.  The game console, the thrift store dress, the choker, the sleepy book, the key to the goblin room, the knife, the earring.  Others.  If there was a pattern for Clem’s items, it had to be something related to that.  Avery had read about a bowl that, if filled with water, could let someone see and control the dreams of someone they loved.  Writing in cuneiform around the edges of the bowl told of the rules, that it had to be someone they loved.  The test was what that love involved, and how someone would act if the love faltered.  Often, a lot of the people using the bowl would act in a way that had no love in it, for their own satisfaction or glory, with no kindness, respect, or trust.  Then, having violated the warning, they would be swallowed by the bowl and kept imprisoned in the same kinds of dreams they devised.- Excerpt from Playing a Part 15.7</ref>
• Snares - Items that entrap the user, often in another realm.<ref>There were snares, like Clementine’s possible first magic item, the videotapes that had sucked up her neighbor.  Items that closed around the user like a bear trap, slowly or quickly.  A lot of them liked to make realms, like this.  They tended to have bait or something appealing to them to lure people in as the jaws closed.  Verona had liked the idea of the oil of Aphrodite, which would enhance lovemaking between couples or help bring fantasies to vivid life for the solo lovemaker.  But the experience would be so vivid the user would lose track of time, they wouldn’t answer knocks on the door, and ran the risk of enjoying themselves to the point of wearing their genitals down to calloused or scarred-over nothingness, or lovers would fuse together at the pelvis.  That sort of fit here.  But they tended to be simple.  They didn’t usually have rules like this had, beyond the one obvious one.- Excerpt from Playing a Part 15.7</ref>
• Affliction curses - simple items that generate a negative effect and are hard to get rid of.<ref>And there were affliction items.  Simpler still, often tying themselves to the user.  They did something bad while held and were hard to get rid of.  Cherrypop’s rock.  There was no way this was an affliction item.- Excerpt from Playing a Part 15.7</ref>
• Coded items - Items with rules that need to be followed.<ref>Coded items had rules or codes that had to be followed.  They could be intricate and complex, or simpler, and some items of other categories often had codes or something going into them.  But a pure coded item was one that set out rules for how it was to be used, and then punished the violators.  The brownies at the Blue Heron were that.- Excerpt from Playing a Part 15.7</ref>
• Ferriers - Items that house Others inside.<ref>Then there were Ferries.  Items that housed Others.  Jinn in a ring, something fairy in a music box, gremlin in a computer, echo in a piece of clothing.  The Other gave the item its power and it also gave it a more complex motive and an intelligence.- Excerpt from Playing a Part 15.7</ref>

Notable users

• Lucy Ellingson
• Laila Throop

References

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