Next day, Lenora had left for work after breakfast. Lily had gone back to her room to meditate and Smokewell was taking a nap somewhere in the house. I had come to my own room after I was done eating. I had to hit the books.

I spent several hours going through old Elsa's journal entries and my hexonomicon. It didn't take long for me to figure out that there was too much to uncover in a few study sessions.

Since my malice was knowledge, old Elsa had been nothing short of a witchcraft nerd. Her journal had little to talk about what she did in her daily life and more about what she had managed to pull off with her studies.

There were observations and inferences and almost randomly trivial facts that she had jotted down in the pages of the notebook.

No, sitting down and reading it wasn't going to do the trick. Reading the rituals and the entries made me feel like there was a time when I knew how this stuff worked but without practical experience, all of it was just scripted gibberish.

So around afternoon, I decided to fill my reticule with my hexonomicon and my journal and left my room. Smokewell was napping in the living room.

“Where are you going?” she asked as I headed for the door.

“Weren't you asleep?” I asked.

“Not anymore.” the cat said. “Now, where are you going?”

“I need to buy a few things,” I said. “For my witchcraft studies.”

The cat stared at me with cold, inspecting eyes. And then she shrugged. “Don't be out too long,” she said before closing her eyes again.

I sighed inwardly before leaving the house. I hadn't really lied to her about wanting to buy things for witchcraft. What I was going to practice today needed a few upgrades to my gear.

So I headed out to the market. I took a walk to the Pickville street that was nearby. I kept my head down and didn't waste too much time wandering around. I bought some goatskin parchment from a book binder and next I bought a crowfeather quill from the pawnshop.

I, then, boarded the tram to Orowen. From another pawnshop in the city I bought myself a silver nibbed quill. I boarded the tram and went downtown. I walked until I was at a familiar place. Rosa's Public House.

It was just as foreboding and abandoned as the last time I'd been here. I walked inside. The air was still dense with that same sulfuric smell. There was still the feeling of being watched by someone, feeling of having someone invisible standing right behind you.

Before I began my experiment, I took out the two quills I'd bought and switched the nib on the crowfeather with a silver nib from my other quill.

Ever since the practices of witchcraft had been slapped with regulations, selling items that could be used by witches was also regulated. A crowfeather quill with a silver nib was one such item that could be used in rituals relating to curses.

These quills weren't completely illegal to sell. But you had to show some documentation as a regulated witch before buying such a thing. For fugitives like me, we had to rely on improvising gear like this. I could've bought both the quills from the same pawnshop instead of two different ones but I didn't want to risk raising suspicions.

“Perfect,” I muttered once I was done making the silver nibbed crowfeather quill. I put it down on the old half-burned counter in the public house and snuck a glance over my shoulder.

I didn't see anyone peering in from anywhere. People just walked past the entrance without even noticing the ruined public house. That was how non-users usually acted around accursed territories. Especially to a place where the curse was as strong as this one.

I pulled out the goatskin parchment from my reticule and laid it out on the desk. I created a mark on its surface with my crowfeather quill--a pentacle with a flame at its center.

As soon as I was done making the mark, the air inside the building grew heavier. The sulfuric smell had turned into the smell of burnt hair. The invisible presence seemed to grow slightly less invisible.

I took a deep breath and waited for my heart to stop skipping beats.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

One common principle that the curse branch of witchcraft believed was that no one or nothing in the mortal realm ever completely died. No one ever truly disappeared after existing for a while. And everyone left something behind after dying.

When people died with strong, resentful emotions, they left behind shadows of that resentment in places and objects they held dear. Curses.

The stronger these curses were, the more visible they were, even to a non-user's senses. The curses claimed the most vulnerable individuals. Imagine a toddler who kept getting sick for no reason after sitting on a park bench where a pregnant mother was brutally killed. Or a lonely man who was hit by depression after coming to live in an apartment where another lonely man had committed suicide.

The curses would keep gnawing away at these unfortunate souls until their will to live deteriorated completely. And when that toddler or that lonely man had passed away, the curse would get stronger.

Now, why did curses function that way? Because that's what they were born to do. A curse was nothing but a well of hatred. You could either cleanse and extinguish it or harness its hatred for your own use. But a curse wasn't going to become anything kind.

Reading this in old Elsa's diary made me wonder if curses existed in the world of my past life. Since the conditions required to cast a curse could be achieved by anyone on the verge of death and with enough hatred in their heart. Then I wondered if there were people who knew how to deliberately use its power. So many crimes could be committed with such powers and no one would be able to imagine the means one had used to make them happen.

“I want to make a trade,” I said, taking the goatskin parchment with the mark and setting it aflame with a lighter. The paper hissed and shriveled in the fire.

Just before the parchment became ash, the flame turned blue. That meant the curse was ready to listen to my offer.

This was the Accursed Exchange Ritual. Witches used this method to communicate with curses and come to a mutual agreement of some kind.

“Tell me what you demand first.” I took another marked parchment and set it on fire.

The flame turned green and then it turned grey before the paper became ash. Green was the color of life. Grey was the color of death. Of course, the curse was hungry to consume mortal lives.

I took another parchment. “I'll let you have a set amount of lives if you promise to leave this place.” I burnt the paper.

Before the paper became ash, the flame turned red.

Red was the color of finality. That meant the curse had agreed to trade.

I tore five pieces of the goatskin parchment to the size of playing cards and marked them all with pentacles that had a smaller pentacle at their centre. I infused the symbols with my malice and spoke in a clear, stern voice. “That which exists in death and that which remains after death. I call upon you to serve me after your last breath.”

Wind blew by my ear and ruffled my hair. The goatskin parchments on top of the half-burnt counter rustled like autumn leaves. The symbols on them glimmered for a second before the yellowish white color of the paper turned a metallic grey.

I picked up all the pieces of paper. They weren't thin and frail as parchments anymore. They were solid as plastic coated cards, all printed with the pentacles I'd drawn.

Five cards. Five deaths that I would decide to deal to someone in the future if push ever came to shove. Since we returned from our recent little adventure, I'd meditated over what I'd done at Wyndham's apothecary to save myself and Hopper.

I'd remembered the guilt that had overcome me after killing someone. The worst thing was that I felt guilty for killing someone who had been about to kill me or do something much more terrible.

That had me wondering, would I have felt the same way in my previous life? My answer was still muddy with doubt but chances of me feeling guilty about such a thing seemed to be quite low in my original identity. This remorseful attitude was probably a gift that came with Elsa’s body.

I looked at the mark of the liberation ritual tattooed on my hand. “If you left your humanity with me, I wonder what your soul must be like right now.”

****

I packed up my belongings and turned to leave the ruined public house. The oppressive, foreboding presence wasn't there anymore. The silence inside the ruin didn't feel haunting anymore. The smell of burnt hair. The sulfuric stench. All of it was gone.

There were at least two ways of cleansing curses that I knew at the moment. One of the methods involved getting rid of the curse right where it resided and the second one was what I had done--make a deal with it.

All the hatred that Rosa might've felt when she burned to death in this place had now transformed into a weapon that could be put to some good use. Liberation ritual was strong but I still wasn't too good at commanding the abyssal beings. They were subservient but too brutal with their actions.

But with Curse Channeling I could be more precise in times of danger. And there would be times like that if we were going to be adventurers.

This time, I won't let myself feel guilty for choosing to survive. Due to my actions in my past life, I'd never been able to experience true empathy or compassion. Now that I had a chance to feel those things I wasn't going to waste it on someone who was trying to kill me.

As I stepped out into the street again, the sun was shining in my face. I'd successfully carried out an Accursed Exchange and now I had Curse Channeling cards in my possession. The day so far had been quite productive.

The only way the day could get better was if I got a chance to test out one of the cards. I smiled to myself. I knew where I was going to go next.