How to Break a Monstrous Curse

1. Extraction - remove yourself from all sources of conflict; the birthplace of curses.

A week before your eighteenth birthday, your mother will sit you down and tell you not to panic, “there’s something you need to know—”

You should listen, but you’re seventeen; the restless weight of budding wings at your back, the horizon sprawled at your feet.

So when she reveals you’ve been cursed since birth to turn into a beast, some monstrous creature of nightmare you’d never have believed in before you saw the look in her eyes, you don’t learn the details, you don’t let her explain. You do the wrong thing. The very thing she begged you not to. Hearing nothing but a thrashing heart in your birdcage chest, blinded by the blood-splattered visions that arise, you panic. Worse. You run.

No one can flee from themselves, though, can they? At every turn, the shadow bound to your heels is the Wolf, the Ogre, the Banshee. Your nightmares stain every dawn with gore. You shatter every mirror to cross your path.

2. Cleansing - ritual purification may, in some cases, destroy the dark energy clinging to the subject.

The witch you find bathes your hands and feet in chamomile water, anoints you with rosemary oil, and smudges your aura with burning sage as you choke back fits of coughing. But the crease in her brow only deepens, and at last, she sends you on your way with a sprig of bay leaves tucked into your hair and the too-generous gift of a black tourmaline pressed into your palm. Her relieved sigh brushes the back of your neck as you go.

3. Prayer - for deliverance, renounce all forms of evil wherever you shall find them.

A cleric renounces his Devil over your bowed head, muttering his dead language and calling to his Deity, he begs for your deliverance from evil.

“I rebuke any evil thing that has been sent against this daughter, and break any curses, hexes, spells, or demonic activity passed down through the generations to her for whom I pray.”

You try with all your will and body to believe as he calls louder and still louder, until at last he’s bellowing, “I claim the shed blood of Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, over this one that I now lift to You, Lord, for her protection, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.”

In the echoing silence, the holy man seems to hear the fall of angel-wing feathers, feel their celestial power pass through the room, through you. All you can hear is the shift and gulp and flex of your own insides as they keep you stubbornly living toward your doom.

He pronounces you healed. Blessed. He asks for a large payment as you leave.

4. Binding - protection can be found if the curse can be bound to a shield object, such as a talisman or sacrificial poppet.

Desperate, and on the wisdom of a superstitious boardinghouse landlady, you watch the relentless grey rain from a nest of grey blankets in the window seat of your bare grey room, and sew a sackcloth poppet. You fill it with a lock of your hair, some nail clippings, and a sprig of rue, and you find yourself following the lead of the desolate sky, crying into the little thing’s cotton stuffing heart.

As you sew her closed and dress her in torn scraps of your own clothes, draw her humble mimic of your face and weave her crude yarn mop of hair, you recite the words given to you by the landlady.

“I have made you, and your name is Sister. You shall receive the negative energy sent by that Curse-maker in my place.”

You sleep with her under your pillow, dreaming of yourself bound in snakes and ropes of thorns. Come dawn, you walk into the forest behind the boarding house and, placing the poppet in a box of black salt, bury it in a shallow grave beneath a bonfire you light with a cedar sprig.

All day you stand, with the damp crawling up from the ground to settle in your heart, and watch the fire consume itself. All day you watch as the raging, dragon-red blaze dwindles, first to crackling tiger’s-eye embers, then, at last, to silent, dandelion-seed ash. All day, you chant your wish that the curse will die with the flames.

5. Surrender - when all is lost, there are those few who can learn to accept their fate, even live with it.

As the sun bleeds out the death of that last day, you feel it; the first tectonic grind deep in your bones, the flash of bright fangs in your mind. And though you’ve wandered far by now, losing your way many times, your feet still know the road home. Home, where no matter what you become, or how you change, they have to welcome you in. Don’t they?