A few hours later, Emika was absent-mindedly sitting in her room, trying her best not to process the information she’d received all too much.
It didn’t change anything. It shouldn’t change anything. So instead, she sat over her book of curses, trying to absorb as much of it as she possibly could. Which, in her current state, wasn’t a lot.
That went on until eventually, her three roommates returned from wherever they had been, and made concentration impossible.
“You suck, Blaike! I’m never going to ask you for a favour again!”
Alisha was fuming, strode through the room and eventually — much to Emika’s surprise — jumped into a float, and flopped down on her bed.
“You can fly?” Emika asked and looked at the other two. Could they too?
Epse didn’t answer and just sat back down in their corner.
“You really don’t know what we are, huh? Well, whatever,” Blaike said, and took a seat on his usual chair, crossing his legs.
Emika didn’t know what to say to that. Wasn’t that already established? When she didn’t answer, he motioned to the book she was reading. “Introduction to Curses, right? Check out chapter 15. Should mention us.”
“Should mention you?” Emika asked.
“Well, not us, specifically, but our species. We are Wish Demons. People use us for curses all the time.”
Emika frowned. Using people in curses? What did that mean? She started flipping through the pages and landed on a chapter called ‘Delivering a Curse.’
Sure enough, among others, there was an illustration of a person with gleaming green eyes, despite the book being black-and-white otherwise.
“Why are you reading that book anyway? Want to curse someone?” Blaike asked and righted his glasses.
Emika frowned again, rapidly losing track of this conversation. “What? I’m reading it because I’m cursed, and I want to find a cure.”
“Oh?” Alisha poked her head out from her bed, staring down at Emika. “What’s your curse? What happened?”
Emika took a deep breath. “I was cursed to turn into a tree and kill everyone I touch.” She grew out some of her branches a bit further in a snakelike motion.
At that, silence came over the room. Alisha stared down confused, and Blaike looked like he was seeing a six-legged cat.
“You weren’t born that way?” he asked. “You’re not a monster?”
Not a monster? Well, that much was apparently debatable. “I was cursed, and I’m trying to find a cure. I was a normal human just a few months ago.”
Well, with what she now knew, ‘normal human’ was maybe a bit of a stretch, but mentioning that probably wouldn’t serve her right now. In any case, she was slowly gaining a decent understanding of what was going on. Yes, yes, curses like the one she was suffering from weren’t normal, it was a ‘ridiculous’ curse, she already knew that. Maybe that’s why these people had assumed she just was that way.
“Hey!” Alisha shouted after a while, and it took Emika a moment to realise she wasn’t the target; the girl was shouting at Blaike. “Help her!”
“Help me?”
“Yeah,” she said. “He’s a researcher. That’s how he got caught. Thought he could come here to help find out more about monsters and then they just kept him locked up.”
Blaike shrugged. “They still let me help with their research projects, so I got what I wanted.”
This was truly a horrifying place.
“So you can help me?” Emika asked. So far, she hadn’t ever had the chance to talk to anyone about curses without having to hold back in some way. Everyone she’d met with any knowledge on the topic had been her enemy in some way, or at least adversarial, to the point where she couldn’t just ask questions.
Blaike just shrugged. “Can try. At least, I can help you with theory on curses, if there’s something in that book you don’t understand. It also only barely scratches the surface of what’s to know. I won’t be able to help you other than by talking, though. Not going to get my hands dirty.”
Emika shook her head, and felt a soft elation in her chest at the same time. Suddenly, she saw him in a very different, much more huggable light. “That’s fine,” she replied. “Just need the theory. I’m ready to get my hands dirty all by myself.”
At that, Blaike’s lips curled up to a slight smile. “Perfect. So, what do you want to know?”
There were probably a thousand questions that popped into Emika’s head at that very moment, although she deemed one of them the most important to know, just to understand the connections between everything that was going on. She tapped on the picture of the Wish Demon on the book, and then asked, “So, what’s a Wish Demon, and what does it have to do with curses?”
“We’re like curses ourselves!” Alisha blurted out from her perch. “If enough humans have a certain wish — you know, something they want to become real — a Wish Demon is born, and tasked with making it come true.”
“Yes,” Blaike confirmed. “Each of us has a wish, and the desperate need to fulfil it within the world. We can’t die until we succeed.”
“And that’s like a curse, how…?” Wait. Actually, just as she asked that question, she remembered those Ancient Curses mentioned in the book. “So, like Ancient Curses, instead, you are personified?”
“And productive,” Blaike added. “Ancient Curses only destroy. Of course, there are Wish Demons like that, which is why humans would like to find a way to kill us. They don’t want to kill us three, specifically, but they’d like to find out how a Wish Demon can be destroyed, to get rid of the… ruder ones. Whatever.”
Again, he gave a wide-armed shrug.
“That’s not the reason why we’re mentioned in that book, though,” he continued with a nod towards it. “The thing is — curses normally don’t travel long-distance. You can’t sit in your home devising and concocting a curse and expect it to just hit whomever you want. The curse needs to be delivered, usually by hand, in some way. The target needs to drink a potion, or be touched, or otherwise directly compromised.”
Emika had trouble processing this information; it felt like a ship piercing the dense fog of her minds’ waters. It kind of changed things a little, didn’t it? The fact that someone needed to have been with her when it happened. That someone had to have touched or made her eat something to infect her.
“But,” Blaike said, “People don’t like to deliver their own curses. It’s potentially dangerous to do that. You can be caught or it could backfire in some way. So, typically, curses are delivered by a proxy.”
“Ah.” Emika looked back at the book. Delivering a Curse. The different beings shown on that page, were they creatures that could be used as proxies? She could see something that looked like a faerie with wings there, and also some indiscriminate black blob with the tag ‘Shapeshifter’. “So Wish Demons are used to deliver curses?”
Blaike nodded. “We are immortal and have some benefits. Some of us can fly, some of us can turn invisible. Tools given to us to try and accomplish our wishes. Abilities aiding with infiltration. Thus, many mages will make pacts with Wish Demons and ask them to deliver curses in exchange for furthering the fulfilment of the Demon’s wish.”
In other words, it was possible that someone had cursed her by hand, or that maybe she’d been visited by an invisible Wish Demon or a Faerie at night, and gotten her curse that way. Emika’s head started spinning.
“Enough about us,” Blaike then said. “Doesn’t matter. You want to find a cure? Then let me understand your situation. Is it okay if I ask you a few things?”
Emika nodded.
“In that case, let’s start with the obvious.” He raised his eyebrows and made an offering gesture with one of his hands. “Do you have any enemies?”
It was at that exact moment that everything fell into place. Something in Emika’s brain shifted to the point of sending goosebumps all over her skin.
She didn’t have any enemies. None that she was aware of. At least, not before being cursed.
However, that’s not what made this question important. It’s not what made it matter. It’s not what it told her. She felt fireworks go off in her head as suddenly, how she’d ended up in this situation started to make a lot more sense.
I hope she won’t be too angry. Because that will end bad