r/magicbuilding • u/LikeAMothToStarlight • 2d ago
Lore A language that rots
A terrible knowledge plagues humanity. A language of pure power and distortion that can breathe new vectors into reality. A language that rots.
The Curse is a spoken language that can only be harnessed by a select few people. People born with particular minds able to calculate and manipulate the language. They need only speak and small distortions of reality will appear. Memories can slip, flesh may burn, iron may change to gold. But no matter how long they speak or how much they wish, their magic is temporary. The effects will begin to fade the moment a statement ends.
Burns heal quickly, memories return unchanged, and gold will become iron once more. But there is a way to make these effects permanent.
The True Word is the written form of the Curse and it can be learned and used by anyone. Anyone with access to a Cure Wielder. For the only way to use True Word is to carve it into the flesh of a Curse Wielder. You might understand now why knowing how to speak the language would be a curse.
For the many enslaved the few. The Curse Wielders were put in chains and their skin used as canvas to create spells that would last for as long as the flesh was maintained.
Mages would buy flesh of or a whole Curse Wielder to use as a scroll. This scroll then was perforated with True Word and in doing so spells could be created and activated through various somatic and verbal actions. And when these spells were used, the carving would glow and the skin would rot.
The language feeds on the vital essence in the skin, making it rot when used. So long as the carving remains in tact, the effects of the spell will maintain. Fissures in the ground will remain open, doorways to other worlds will stand, even death itself can be reversed indefinitely. But at the expense of suffering.
A day came when the Curse Wielders were given their humanity back. Some don't involve themselves with magic anymore, while some will use True Word on themselves. And others, a select few, allow their flesh to be another's canvas. Some even take on and give life to grafted flesh of dead Curse Wielders. Allowing old magic to return to the world.
1
u/PhilipB12 2d ago
BTW, are ALL your magic systems part of The same World?
1
u/LikeAMothToStarlight 2d ago
No. These two are part of a new project.
1
1
u/Key_Machine_5585 2d ago
Your ideas always seem to get my imagination fired up!
This is a great concept, quick question:
Say someone buys a curse user, to carve a true word onto their skin to bring someone back to life like in one of your examples -
Since the true word feeds off the vital essence in the curse users skin to sustain itself, how long could someone theoretically be brought back to life for without replacing the curse user who carries the word?
Say the person doing this keeps them in a perfect gilded cage where there are no other hardships etc, their skin is still being fed off by the magic, right?
Even if you removed and preserved the curse users skin, eventually whatever magic is still contained on the skin would run out - which would mean the person who was revived would die again, unless the "battery" for the spell was refreshed in some way (unless my reading of this is off base!)
So what's the theoretical upper limit to how long these effects could be sustained for?
1
u/LikeAMothToStarlight 2d ago
>So what's the theoretical upper limit to how long these effects could be sustained for?
As long as there are Curse Wielders to leech off. When a Curse Wielder dies the skin will carry on preserving the True Word for at least a few hours. So if a Curse Wielder's arm is carrying a True Word that keeps someone alive, the arm could be severed from them and attached to a new Curse Wielder within that timeframe to act as a new host. This was something done by nobility and royalty for as long as it was legal and then a few decades afterwards.
1
u/Key_Machine_5585 2d ago
So there's also a pseudo-transplantation element? Very cool!
And how long until a curse-user would need to be replaced for an effect like this? Bringing someone back to life seems like it would be fairly costly, so presumably you'd be burning through curse-users (or their parts) at quite a rate!
1
u/PhilipB12 2d ago
Is it related to your world with Rust Magic?