#theladyw

Esther dives instead into the deep end of the Unsleeping City, lets herself fall into other types of magic. Magic can be dormant, can be awakened, can be innate and felt, can be gifted and uplifted, can be observed and analyzed, can be learned.

So she learns.

Magic is versatile and dangerous and beautiful. She can't risk the power within her; she builds new power outside of it, around it, fencing and framing it in until it's as far from her thoughts as possible. Until her thoughts stay as far from her heart as she can make them. But she's still human, can't break that connection completely. She's still Cursed, and that Curse is in her blood and her heart and her desires, and however tightly she covers them up they're still there, and she knows it.

There isn't much else she knows, despite all her research and training. Every curse has a counter-curse, but sometimes the counter is just as bad, and even if this one isn't, the Furies are old, older than written history, and nothing she can find has any information on the Curse itself, no known way to take it apart and look at its pieces, only scant observations of the effects, the aftermath.

Most curses have very specific goals, and once those goals are met they're gone. One big push of magic and intention, too strong to easily break or dispel, but sometimes they can be mitigated, or dodged, or simply endured, and one can come out the other side of them changed but free.

Or dead.

That is the most common way to end a curse.

That won't work for her.

Not that Esther wants to die, but she'd be tempted if she knew that this would end, that she would be the last one.

This is not that sort of curse.

It endures, more than any other hex or curse or spell she can find and she doesn't know why.

She is forced to guess, to hypothesize, to wonder rather than to know. She wonders what some distant fore-mother did to incite such an endless vicious consequence, a Curse that follows their bloodline and cannot be banished or cured or even killed. Because it had to have been a woman, they're all women, only women, mother to daughter as far back as anyone can trace. Usually only one, but sometimes more, just often enough that if the eldest daughter dies before she falls, the Curse doesn't fail, doesn't end. It moves, and claims, and destroys someone else.

Their bloodline never dies, despite centuries of women who married less, had fewer children, who tried to hide and dodge and change and still endured, still had daughters, still survived even when they weren't really living. Esther wonders if the Curse is tied somehow to the Fates, some light touch of precognition, just enough to make sure their family keeps going, despite logic or desire, despite the odds suggesting that they should have been devoured by the Furies ages past.

If Esther dies, she's sure the Curse will find someone else, some distant relative far enough away to be ignorant, but not far enough to be safe. (There's no such thing as safe, not really. Safer, maybe, but even that is only for other people. Not her. Never her.)

She wonders how much worse a Fury could get, one who didn't even know what she was, had no idea how magic worked, had no chance at all of tempering the Fury's power as it rose, of retreating to the refuge (the cage) her family had made of Tompkins Park.

The Curse lives on, so she will too.

It would be such a relief to know why, even if it didn't mean she could stop it, maybe it would ache less, somehow. Just a little.

But instead it's always there, cold and bitter and deep, salt and tears and eternal sorrow. She wonders if that pool inside her feels the way it does because this Curse is somehow tied to the sea, eternally shifting tides that will never ever end.

She stops wondering about that, because she can feel her balance waver. She needs a little hope, no matter how pragmatic she has to be to get through most days. She learns to avoid some thoughts, but she never outright lies to herself if she can help it. She will never let her guard down, never pretend she is safe when she knows she isn't. She's still angry at her mother for that, for falling when Esther was still so young, when she needed a mother, when she needed to be able to cry.

She has to be angry. She grips it tight, because it's the only shield she has; anger works, but only for so long. Eventually she'll burn out, and she'll drown, and she'll take everyone and everything with her.

She wonders what her mother held onto when she couldn't risk anger, wonders if perhaps her mother cried, was as different from the woman Esther has made herself as it is possible to be. She wonders if her mother's rage feels like a storm, a tsunami, if it's salt and depth just like her hidden sorrow, if her grandmother's grief is the quiet but endless rain that still floods, and drowns, and carries everything, eventually, down to the sea.

She wonders, but she doesn't believe. That seems too kind.

She would bet that the Furies can't even have that, can't share the taste of the Curse as it overwhelms them. She remembers faint lost stories of her grandmother, whispers of soft warmth turned remote and grey, remembers the bright explosion of magic and pain when her mother fell. She thinks that her mother burns, fire and sparks in her bones and her blood, believes that her grandmother is the stretch of a tundra far from any town, empty and solitary and rock hard beneath each step. She can feel it, somehow, in the depths of the tides within her, that when she falls they'll still only give each other pain, opposite and opposing sides of the same terrible magic.

She wonders if the Curse manifests in different elements, if her Great-Grandmother had been an air Fury, cold and fierce as arctic wind, or as heavy and cloying as the tropics. Imagines, for a moment, the soft warmth of a spring breeze instead. She wonders if there's a clue to the counter-curse there, balancing element and temperament with four instead of three.

She realizes she's half recreated the theory of humors, and wonders how she got herself caught up in such nonsense. There's no known way to make another Fury, and even if there were she wouldn't risk it somehow making the Curse more powerful. There has never been a fourth Fury. There are three of them, vicious and deadly and inhuman. The have always only been three Furies, though sometimes it takes a generation or two for the next woman to fall.

Always.

The more she learns, the harder it is to hold onto that one small drop of hope. She's not the first to try and break this Curse, it's sheer hubris to think she'll somehow be the last.

Hubris is probably what got her into this, judging by most mythology. Might as well use it to try and get out, right? She won't give up, she'll never give up, but maybe there's a way around it instead of through, an evasion rather than a breaking.

She learns.

She experiments.

She talks to people, learns to smile without baring her fangs so that they're willing to talk back.

She doesn't make friends, not really, but she learns to be friendly enough. Alejandro and Kingston, Misty and Mike and Willy, Rovias and Orlando and Frank, Ana and Amelia and occasionally even Jackson, though the Monastery's always been a little sideways to the practice of magic, and she's certainly not ready to accept that her life is what it is.

She's careful with her questions, so only Alejandro has managed to put any of the pieces together. (No one else knows her well enough to bother, which is entirely on purpose, but doesn't make her feel better. Not that she needs to feel better. She just can't risk feeling worse.) None of them give her any leads, however, and Esther knows she's running out of time.

If she can't break the Curse, she'll just have to get in its way by cursing herself with something else before it takes hold.

She does not explain this plan to Alejandro, because she knows exactly what he'd say, and also that then he'd keep much too close an eye on her, and that might make her think about how much he means to her, and that is something that has to be avoided.

Esther can't pull off anything as nasty as the thing she's already dealing with, so a new curse seems a reasonable enough risk to her, and her opinion is, in the end, the only thing she's got. She just has to find the right school, the right structure to use.

Necromancy was out; death moved the Curse.

Both healing and destructive Evocation spells had been attempted by every sort of spellcaster she'd heard of (and a few she still hadn't translated into anything she recognized) whenever the Furies showed up throughout history; she hasn't been able to come up with anything new to try there.

Transmutation would carry a bloodline curse with the transformation, so she can't turn herself into a swan or something. Animals still have emotions, and while a Swan Fury is an odd enough mental image to make her snort out a laugh when she first thinks of it, it's also terrifying, so that's not worth the risk. (The cure for most transformation curses involve someone who loves you doing something to help, quests, vows of silence and nettle shirts, or even just a kiss, and she has gone out of her way to try and prevent herself from loving anyone, from letting anyone else love her, and she's learned too much not to know that, and she values her knowledge too much not to think about it, and that way lies almost as much sorrow as the loss she's trying to avoid might cause.)

Divination doesn't really do curses, except of blinding someone to obvious consequences, and that's the opposite of helpful here. If she cobbles one together it might prevent the Curse from continuing whatever weird shit it does that means her family doesn't die out, but it would take a few generations to know if it had worked or not, and well. She'd be gone and unable to do the follow-up by then, and she doesn't know where more of her family might be, so she can't ask someone else to keep an eye on them after she's gone. (And that still doesn't help save her or anyone around her right now.)

Conjuration would just be adding something else to the Curse, and since she can't figure out what was in it to begin with, there's no telling what that would do. She can't use abjuration to shield herself from it without shielding herself from her own blood, which would again be fatal, and if she banishes herself it would, just like in transmutation, come with her. She could throw herself into a pocket realm, so at least she wouldn't hurt anyone, but then she'd just be stuck as a Fury for a subjective eternity until she died and the Curse could do its thing again to someone else. Without even that much time passing here, probably, considering how small pocket realms were in comparison to everywhere and everywhen else.

Illusion or Enchantment magic wouldn't change the Curse itself, just the way she could see it or interact with it, so that wouldn't help. It might even make it easier to trigger, rather than limiting it to sorrow.

She'd considered a sleep spell, of course, as the one exception. She had even gone so far as to doodle a vine covered tower in the margins of one of her notebooks, thorns poking around her sentences, but what if she had bad dreams and woke up a Fury, with no idea of where or when she was, or how she'd drowned in sorrow?

Even so, she couldn't seem to come up with anything better.

She'd have to make an anchor, something small enough that she could keep it on her at all times, sturdy enough that it wouldn't easily break down after she triggered it. Something to keep the spell steady so she'd be deep enough to avoid dreaming, to sleep through the shifting of magic or noise around her, but not so deep she'd die, freeing the Curse to find its next victim.

Her test run on a curse anchor was a spindle, because she did allow herself a sense of humor, but that would be a bit hard to explain as a keepsake in her pocket.

Her next run was a set of rings that would trigger if she put them both on the the same finger. She wore enough magical jewelry that even if someone went looking, they wouldn't be able to tell exactly what they were for.

And she could keep them on all the time, easy to access if she started to lose control before she found a cure.