What is a Curse?
-The art for this post is by Simon Lenz. Click the link for more of his dope-ass art.-
The witch sways drunkenly, soaked in gore and filth, howling her incantations into the outer darkness of the vast intangible world. Her supplicants scrape low, moaning in holy terror as the flames shift and dance and change color.
A presence coils around the room like a serpent, thick and hateful as a river of gelled poison. It bears a thousand formless faces, each with ten thousand glittering eyes, all hidden, blinding, maddening. Silence pressurizes the room, the reek of urine mingles with that of wood smoke and blood, and the awful, murderous attention of the entity moves through the room.
Oppressive and heavy as the shadows of a haunted castle, this attention marks its victim, slowly crushing them like pulpy fruit to extract the sweet juices of their suffering.
The Current Theory of Curses
-from the Book of Wretchedness-
In the eyes of the mighty gods, the New, the Old, and the Eternal, humanity is little more than strange mold, squeaking in tiny voices, singing grand, heroic, delusional tales into a darkness that swallows sound and light and life without regard.
Rare humans, so-called mystics or oracles, claim their vision penetrates to the bones of the universe. In truth they see but a single point of light when the rest see nothing. There are those that say they wield the powers of the cosmos; wizards, sorcerers, that claim to shackle the gods to their iron wills. Wretched humans, they are deaf to the cacophony of mocking laughter.
The mark of damnation glows brightly upon their heads.
Learning the mhallacht, or the art of siring curses, is worse yet. Its practitioners believe their offerings curry favors with dark gods. They believe they may trade flesh and suffering for power and ecstasy. They believe themselves the brokers of malevolence. They believe themselves the mothers and fathers of doom. They believe themselves untouchable, unstoppable, chosen.
They could not be further from the truth.
They are slaves, nothing more. They shovel slop for cosmic pigs.
Little is known about the awful machinery that turns behind a curse aside from the involvement of predatory, parasitic gods. The known pantheon makes up but one small cluster of an infinite number of constellations of gods, pseudo-gods, proto-gods, and their amorphous servants, all lurking and oozing at the very boundaries of reality.
Whether affecting an individual, an item, or an entire nation, a curse is the means by which these intangible entities feed. A curse is a radula, a tooth and a tongue, a spear and a grinder, a maw, a mandible. It is a mechanism for traumatizing and ripping away the physical and psychic material of the world, then pouring it down the bottomless gullets of mindless protogods and their incomprehensible masters.
Those that claim to sire these dreadful parasitic curses delude themselves. They take the vital core of their craft, formulae of invocation and sacrifices of flesh, and build ornate rituals around them, hung with fire and dancing, irrelevant history, performance art, hollow words, and idiotic cosmology.
Higher and higher these rituals tower, monuments to the grim influence of those that perform them. Deluded tyrants, they are unaware that their power, their holdings, balance upon a single ludicrous premise: that the vast, intangible, and endlessly devouring outer world regards humanity as anything other than food.
The fact that these parents of curses are not instantly pulverized and sprayed across the insides of their wretched hovels is testament only to the hunger of unknown gods and the value of the witch’s offerings.
Until the day that they are not enough…
