Warning: Causes Unlimited Cursing

From The Chronicles of the Upside-Down Grimoire, copied and translated into modern parlance by our own inimitable Barto Svalta, from shredded scroll to battered paper to mouse-nibbled parchment to leaflet to tattered book to moth-eaten tome, from time immemorial and unknown:

To those who read these words, I cannot express in them the utmost sorrow and heartfelt regret I must convey. The fault is mine. I am responsible for the curse that has plagued us since I decided to implement my Grandiose Idea.

I would blame it on my hubris. I would fain unload all of my responsibility on anyone, anything, for my pride. It does in fact go before a fall, and oh, how far we have fallen.

But, rest assured, I had the best of intentions. I am certain that large swaths of the road to Hell are now firmly paved because of my doing.

I had first read the idea for the spell I so thoughtlessly cast while reading another’s memory book. Not their grimoire, the location of that volume is so jealously guarded that I cannot perceive its whereabouts. I thought to gain knowledge from the scribbles, incomplete notes, sketches, and doodles he’d written for his own enlightenment.

I think it is a he. But now I am not so sure.

He – She? They? I do not know. They did not like hunters.

I learned that they had tried to create a spell. A powerful one. One that, as long as a hunter was using a weapon against their target that was other than their bare hands, anything that they threw at their prey would bounce directly back at the thrower, randomly, some times. Throw stick? Arrow? Sling rock or pellet? Atlat’l dart? You had best pray you are agile, lest you fall victim to your own projectile.

Sadly, it became inactive at the death of the caster.

I did some thinking.

Scrying using the memory book as a focus brought me back to the time it was cast, like I was an imp sitting on their shoulder. Maybe that’s what imps are? Many is the time I have felt a Presence staring over my shoulder, peering at my runes as I scratched furiously under the cover of weakened lighting. Cloaked and hooded, even in the middle of summer, to conceal my identity even further.

I was stealthy. I was careful.

Slowly, steadily, I gathered the parts of the spell, fitted them together into a whole.

And when I was ready, I created the warding, stepped inside, and cast it again with an emphasis on permanence.

I didn’t realize for months.

All the more fool I was.

I had been warned about ensuring all ripple effects would be contained. Never cast unless you are sure! It is the main tenet of all our teaching.

Whenever I dropped a twig, an herb, even my wand, I chalked it up to clumsiness.

But you, who will live in the future, which I can dimly scry, ah, I am ever so regretful.

You have those receptacles for debris? You wad up things, toss them at it, throw up your hands when it lands properly?

All those times it does not?

All those times you drop things, thinking it was, what do you say, “butterfingers?”

Things that you had a very good grip upon, and suddenly it is skittering away like a live thing escaping a trap?

All those times you blamed the cat? Or the dog? Or the children?

Ah, I am filled with remorse. As I scry, I See my poor ghost doomed to wander, drifting this way and that, watching the results of a spell now permanent, baked into the very fabric of the world.

I wish I could change what I have wrought.

I wish I could reverse my doom.

I wish that I had not seen you fling that… dirty thing into the waste bucket, only to have it bounce onto the floor with a sickly noise, and must therefore clean it up.

The words I have learned, the inventive curses, the invective aimed at my very soul. Even there, even now, some bounce, and recoil on the caster.

I wish…

I regret.