An Overview Of Curses - A Background Piece For Jonna's World
The fairy sipped her tea and smiled in appreciation. “I must say that you do know to provide a genteel refreshment. I do like that in a person.” Her purple lips, lipstick surely, were making a perfectly friendly shape. “Now it was curses you wanted to know about, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am.” The hostess was a skinny girl with a multitude of large freckles and skewwhiff hair. It was obvious that no good fairy had been summoned to her christening to grant her insipid beauty. “If you please.”
The dark-haired, purple-garbed fairy drank some more tea. “The oldest curses are revenge curses, payback for injury. Those are the sort of thing that can wipe out an entire family or doom a kingdom, and the layer of the curse doesn’t care or is even glad. You might have heard of the city of Lancart?”
“Only in once-upon-a-time stories,” the girl offered her guest a plate of biscuits.
The dark fairy took one, “Thank you. Lancart used to be reality, not a story, and it was a curse that brought it down. Of course, what I do is a variant of revenge curse, with lack of respect as the trigger. It may seem cruel, the gifts I give to those children, but some of them - how else are they supposed to develop any character or backbone? Good fairies, in my opinion, can be a little too eager to smooth out life’s potential rough spots.”
“But not all curses are about revenge.”
“Indeed no, particularly these days.” Another sip of tea. “You can trust a witch or even a sorceress to retain a sense of, well, appropriateness and connection when they deal out curses but get a wizard involved and it usually comes down to money. The fancier the title he gives himself, the more willing he is to provide curses in return for cash, in my experience. Want to disadvantage you rival in love? A wizard will sell you a spell to make warts grow. Want to get an inconvenient prince out of the way? A mage will turn him into a frog for you. In return for gold, of course.” She fumed into her tea for a moment then asked, “So, why do you want to know about curses, my dear?”
“There’s someone I…really like,” the girl blushed, “and I want him to be happy, but he’s in love with this other girl who’s under a curse…”
“Ah, well,” the fairy put down her cup and patted her hostess’ hand, “every curse has its remedy. It may be obscure. It may be unpalatable, but it does exist. Even mine have an out, if you’re devious enough.” A thought occurred to her, “Is it one of mine?”
“I don’t believe so, ma’am. I heard that it was supposed to be a blessing.”
“That could be awkward,” the dark fairy picked up her teacup again. “Blessings aren’t required to have escape clauses.”