The Chromatic Chord

The Ill Wish

The luck-curse or evil eye, a working that weights a person's chances towards their worst likely outcomes, and the far larger body of ordinary misfortune that the peoples blame on it.

Overview

The cow dries, the child falls, the roof leaks, and the neighbour who glared at the market is to blame. The ill wish, called the evil eye in many tongues, is the most widely believed affliction in Caeldon and among the least often real. A true luck-curse exists, and it is dangerous because it is quiet: it does not wound, it only lets the worst already-possible things happen more often.

Cause

The true curse is Augury. Doom Weight, laid by a gaze-and-curse or an effigy rite, presses a target towards the worst branch already open to them, by making hesitation and error likelier; it cannot invent a catastrophe without an opening. Fortune Theft takes good chance from one outcome and gives it to another, so that someone beside the thief inherits the bad one.

A second form needs no caster. Travellers who linger in the Probability Fog can carry its cursed luck out with them.

Most of what is blamed on the ill wish has an ordinary cause: sickness, bad water, weather, poor luck, or carelessness (see Knowledge of the Cosmos).

Who It Strikes

Those with an enemy who can pay an augur, gamblers and rivals beside a fortune-thief, and those who wander too long in the Fog. The careful and the disciplined are least affected, since the curse needs mistakes to work through. In belief it strikes the envied: the fortunate, the beautiful, the newborn, the bride.

Signs and Course

A laid curse shows as a run of small failures that are each ordinary: a dropped tool, a wrong turning, a misheard order, a stumble on the stair. They come closer together while the curse lasts, and they gather at moments that matter. Most Doom Weight passes within a day or so. A curse renewed by an enemy can last a season.

The zone-borne form is worse. The Unlucky of the Fog trip on flat ground, drop what they hold, and draw every danger near them, and some are driven mad by the constant misfortune or trapped in a loop of it.

The turning point is recognition. Someone who knows they are weighted slows down, checks, and asks for help, and the curse finds fewer openings.

Contagion

It does not pass by touch or breath. Stolen luck, though, always lands on someone: the hand beside the gambler, the cart behind the thief.

Treatment and Its Limits

Wards are the true remedy. Turnaside throws a directed curse back at its sender, and Unpicking takes one apart. Sanctified Steadfast Sign steadies a group against panic and curse, and Pale Watch intercepts curse-work around a camp. Counter-augury and plain discipline weaken it. Each of these costs its caster.

Folk charms, blue beads, salt, iron, spit, and averted eyes, give comfort and some caution, which is half the cure. Nothing helps against misfortune that was never a curse.

Mortality

The curse itself seldom kills. Its danger lies in the accident it permits at the wrong moment: a fall from a scaffold, a lost footing in a ford, a missed parry. The Fog's Unlucky sometimes die of it, or lose their minds.

Lore and Belief

Every people has its form of the ill wish. Some cultures treat cursing as ordinary inherited justice, and a wronged family may lay one openly. The Orcs of the Windscar Pacts dread the Curse of Oblivion of Ushkar the Ancestor-Warden, who strikes a breaker's name from memory. Trolls say a road itself can be cursed. Villages accuse widows, strangers, and the squint-eyed, and such accusations do far more harm than curses do.

Feuds between houses are often fought as much with curses as with swords, and every valley has a tale of two families that cursed each other down to the last child, and the hedge-witch who sold curses to both.

In the Medieval Era

Belief in the ill wish is everywhere, and almost every household keeps some charm. True luck-cursing is the work of trained augurs, counted a wrong by most peoples even where a lord pays for it. A lord's judgement may ask for proof before it condemns someone for it; village justice seldom waits for any.

Where It Appears

See Also