Curses

Spite and malice given form, revenge as a spiritual chain that twists the fate of the victim. Curses are a vile thing, but if you live long enough you will see that there are some acts that are so horrible that the perpetrator deserves such horrid fates. Patience.

Curses are a special kind of black magic, a mixture of spell and disease that does not degrade over time unlike other magic, thus shouldering the victim with an incredible burden. A tale involving a curse is never a happy tale, and thus they and the situations that can cause them to be cast, should be avoided at all cost.

Curses are capable of breaking many rules that ordinarily would apply to spells; Instead of degrading over time, they most often start out weak and grow in power, and are often immune to any and all methods to dispel them.

Casting a curse:

Mortals
Curses are cast by priests or warlocks on those that have comitted a grave sin.
Alternatively, any mortal can cry out to the spirits of good and evil in the spirit world, in the hopes that they will accept a bargain to afflict those that hurt them with a terrible curse.
In either case the curse is cast with a great cost to the mortal that wished it inflicted upon the victim. A common cost of casting a curse is that the caster themselves dies shortly afterwards.
Curses can be up-scaled, that is to say cast by multiple peoples or entire communities. If the curse is targeted at an entire community or country, the cost will also scale upwards to affect the community from which it stems. This is often nothing short of societal suicide and thus is only ever done in hopeless situations as a final act of spiteful revenge.
An exception to this rule are Witches, for while it is still draining to them, witches can cast curses much more liberally than any other magic users. This is in large party why they are so feared.

Spirits
Alternatively curses can be cast by Spirits. Temple guardians may curse those that descecrate a temple, Shades may curse grave-robbers or the dead victims of a criminal curse them from beyond the grave. This is very painful for the spirit in question and so is only done if the spirit is very comitted to harming that person.
More common is that the gods curse those that commit crimes against them.

Never are curses cast as a result of minor grievances. They are punishment for horrific crimes, violations of the natural order, deliberate malice or disregard of divine decrees. The cost of casting them is simply too great.

Some Examples include:

• A witch makes a pact with a mercenary. The mercenary runs away in an attempt to escape his part of the deal. He finds himself unable to stop running, unable to sleep or eat, running until he collapses, dead.
• A Young man breaks into a tomb, ignores his elder's wisdom and robs the dead of their valuables. The spirits of the dead curse him to be never satisfied with his wealth. He keeps amassing gold, becomes unwilling to spend any of it on food, nearly starving himself. Finally, he dies, trying to rob the wrong person. The gold taken from the tomb mysteriously vanishes.
• A priest is killed and their temple descecrated and looted. In vengeance the scorned deity curses the killers with an early death. A landslide later costs them their lives.
• A wealthy noble devolves into demon-worship and cannibalism. A spirit of justice curses him that he is unable to be sated, ever. Over the course of a month the noble devolves into a howling monster, deformed and monstrous, and flees into the night.
• An Anzu has its forest burned down and the inhabitant animals hunted down and killed. It curses the kingdom that caused this crisis, sending swarms of locusts unto their fields and causing sickness and the plague to run rampant. The Anzu, with his bound land destroyed and with his power exhausted, then dies, but its plagues continue, animated with an unnatural malevolence.
• A father cries out over the body of his murdered family and burnt-down home. He cries to the world and his pleas are answered. The raiders of his home are later found to have been torn to pieces, the father never to be seen again.

Lifting a Curse

Once they have begun, curses are notoriously difficult to cure. Many powerful individuals have fallen to a curse before they were able to gather the components to cure it. As a result, it is not unheard of for traveling mystics to carry multiple curing ingredients with them, to sell for exorbitant prices. The authenticity of such curse-curing articles may however be uncertain.
To cure a curse, a cursed creature must assemble a number of suitable curse-curing ingredients that must then be used as part of a magical ritual or potion to cure the curse.

The following items outline a number of cure components that can be found within the world of Haven.

• Witche's promise. A potion brewed by witches, purposely named confusingly.
• A strand of hair from the lost but not found. From a pillow or other possession of a lost person.
• A twice-murdered raven. A raven that has been killed, resurrected, then killed again.
• The highest pinecone of a forest. Found with a lot of climbing.
• The root of a mountain. A rare black ore, found deep underneath mountains.
• A clock which runs backwards. A Clock, enchanted to tick backwards.
• A black pearl, harvested but a week ago. Found with a lot of swimming.
• A book that has never been read. From a publisher or printing press.
• A rose that grows in darkness but not sunlight. A rare flower known as a Black Rose.
• A life willingly given. Someone willing to sacrifice themself to cure the cursed.
• Wish. A wish granted by a divine spirit.

In order to determine what components are needed to break a curse, the aid of scholars, priests, oracles or certain spirits of knowledge is required.