Death Wish

(• • Correspondence,  • • Life;  plus either  • • • Entropy,  • • • Life or both;              sometimes  • • • Forces,  • • Correspondence,  • • Prime 2)                             

The Orphans Survival Guide  127
"I wish you were dead!"  With this incantation (or something similar), a furious mystick weaves a malediction against a distance person.  Connecting the source of her ire to some small personal item in her possession (a doll, a photograph, a piece of hair, etc.), the mage sends a potent backblast of bad fortune or deadly force back along the channel.  The result can either take indirect form as twisted luck (accidents beyond the caster's control), or assume a more direct attack of intense pain, paralysis, heart failure or even spontaneous combustion.  Either way, justice is served.

[This curse has several variants: The basic Entropy 3/ Correspondence 2/ Life 2 version simply makes things go wrong for a person.  The Storyteller checks the successes and decides what will go wrong, how badly, and for how long.  This coincidental Death Wish simply becomes a plot device from that point onward.

[The deadly Life 3/ Correspondence 2 version sends a bolt of malefic energy into the target, inflicting aggravated Life-based damage in whatever form seems most appropriate to the caster; a subtle manipulator may want her victim to keel over from a heart attack, while an extravagant witch might send a message by suddenly twisting her victim into agonized knots.  Depending on the form it takes, this spell could be either coincidental or very, very vulgar.

[A really nasty variant (Entropy 3/ Life 3/ Correspondence 2)  combines both effects, poisoning the victim and inflicting a run of bitter luck as well.  This could be as coincidental as having him break his leg on the same day his dog dies and his insurance is canceled, or as vulgar as having him collapse into a mass of broken bones.

[If you're homicidally pissed, nothing beats a Forces, Prime, Life, Correspondence curse.  Should this Death Wish succeed, the victim literally bursts into flames.  While a coincidence (possibly arraigned with Entropy 3)  might make this look like an accident ("Damn! He shouldn't have been smoking next to that gas pump!"), most orphans perfer to display this kind of power openly.  It's risky, but it gets the point across.

[Paradox backlashes tend to make the malediciton rebound on the caster; an orphan who makes a habit of cursing her enemies from afar usually winds up with a huge karmic overdraft, even if the curses she sends take coincidental forms.  When a backlash comes, it often manifests as devastatingly bad luck, even if the spell that brought it about had nothing to do with a Death Wish spell.]