Traitor’s Curses

She had lived her entire life in a self-sustaining concrete home, underneath a small city. The water was filtered from the river and the only place where she could see out was a small balcony behind the waterfall.

And yet, there were areas she had never visited. Doors that were always locked. She had many caretakers who acted as her family, though rarely were they all there at the same time, but she knew from a young age that her parents were dead. How they died, she had not been told; all she knew, from a little eavesdropping, was that their deaths were honorable acts of sacrifice to let others escape.

All of her caretakers had strange abilities. Having grown up watching them, she believed it was normal, and wondered why she didn’t have any. When she was about fifteen and a half, her powers burst into being. While some of her caretakers were ecstatic, most acted as if she had just died and they were already mourning her death. Her power to ‘undo’ things - locks, spells, etc. - meant they had no way to keep her out of more dangerous areas of the complex.

Instead of trying, they personally unlocked the doors one at a time, letting her use her own judgement on how to act, though they did supervise in case they needed to stop her from doing something that would get her killed. In each room, she took careful stock of the situation - looking for traps, inlain spells, curses - before putting even one foot in. To her caretakers’ surprise, she was able to completely undo what they had been scared of for so long.

They were debating whether to let her see the most dangerous room when the one who had been tutoring her raced into the room, breathless. The girl had claimed a need to use the restroom and slipped away; when the tutor had gone looking for her, the door to the basement was unlocked. They all immediately raced down.

When she had reached the bottom, she had been surprised to find that it was flooded. She disabled the spell that was keeping it that way and began looking around. The basement was a large common area with only one hallway; the only rooms were the bathroom, an exercise room, and what appeared to be a trophy room of some sort. She headed down the hallway, choosing to start with the bathroom at the far end and work her way backwards toward the entrance.

Luckily, the bathroom wasn’t booby-trapped, and all she had to do was use a basic cleaning spell to fix the rusted pipes and dusty counters. The exercise room was a bit more complex; it seemed that if a person touched something, they were doomed to be stuck to that item for eternity - and worse, the objects couldn’t leave the room. She undid each of the curses separately, not wanting to mess up when the original structures of the spells had been that complex. She wondered absently who could have done such things.

Finally, she headed to the last room. The entire time, she had been trying to figure out why this all seemed so familiar, from the formerly locked rooms upstairs to the basement that she had never before entered, and why with each cleansed room, her caretakers cried with relief.

The last room was strange. According to the plaques on the wall, the former occupant had been the leader of some kind of special squad. She could see a curse laid on the room, but she couldn’t interpret it. Without stepping in, she stretched out her arm and picked up a dangerous-looking book that she could sense was tied to the curse. She began to read:

“If you have entered this room, you can never leave. You will die if you take a single step out of it. Perhaps not immediately, but slowly and painfully. Yet, to destroy the crystals which are the source of this curse, you must step into the room. You may be considering zapping the crystals to destroy them. Let me tell you now, this will not work; the crystals have been programmed to absorb any destructive magic.

“There is a catch. If you can destroy the crystals and exit the room within 20 seconds of entering it, you will be safe. However, this is impossible. Teleportation spells are ineffective inside my curse. After 20 seconds, you will be unable to destroy the crystals through any means. If my curse is not destroyed within ten years of being placed, all Specials will be killed and I will be free to destroy the world. Good luck!”

She stared at the book for so long that she didn’t notice the approach of her caretakers until one of them set a hand on her shoulder, startling her. She put the book back - she wasn’t going to risk setting off a hidden trap by removing it from the room - and allowed them to lead her to a seat, where they began to explain.

Once upon a time, the complex had been a base for a group known as the Specials. It was an organization made up of those with extraordinary powers and those able to use spells or curses. They had been operating out of what was then known as the Compound for decades.

One morning, 9 years and 10 months ago, they woke up to find that their water supply had been tampered with. The supply line provided by the city had been cut off and their purified water was now just river water.

Such a thing could only have been done by someone within the Compound, but no one could imagine who would do it. The teams sent to fix it succeeded, but died immediately after. Their dried-up corpses were magically teleported back to the Compound by spells woven through the curse.

They were all going through their normal morning routines when the multitude of curses spread over the Compound began to make themselves known. All of the bodies were teleported into the Room of Respect as soon as they died; every single one was perfectly preserved, as if awaiting a time when they could be properly laid to rest.

The most dramatic one was the room of the Specials’ leader. All those remaining were in the basement holding a strategy meeting - the leader was participating from the entrance to his room, having read the magical guidebook as soon as he’d seen the curse - when suddenly the traitor made herself known. It was someone they had all trusted, but who had harbored extreme grudges toward many of the members for quite some time.

Apparently, she had waited until the day that the youngest child, the daughter of the vice-leader, had turned six. She claimed it was to make her games more fun, and that it would leave a bad taste in her mouth to kill a kid younger than that. She said that this entire thing was her revenge - for what, she never said. When the leader pointed out that ‘all Specials will be killed’ included her, she laughed and shook her head. Pulling out a small crystal, she told them that she had never been gifted with anything but luck.

She then activated the other two curses she had placed. The first was a one-time-use-only that specified that one person must die per minute for thirty minutes, but that if anyone was left in the basement after the time was up, they would be killed automatically. The second curse forced all Specials who had ever been a part of the organization to return to the base at least once every thirty days or they would die, and there had to be at least six people within the Compound at any given time. She had also set up a spell so that anyone killed by any of her curses would be automatically transported to the Room of Respect perfectly preserved, but that if any of the bodies were buried before all of her curses were destroyed, those involved with the burial would all be killed.

The first to die was the leader. He purposely stepped outside of the boundaries of his room and died a gruesome death to give the rest another minute. twenty-nine others immediately stepped inside his room, having already decided to sacrifice themselves. Each minute, one of them would step out, resigning themselves to a painful demise to buy time for the others to escape. The vice-leader and his wife were the last to go, having used the preceding twenty-eight minutes to set up a flood spell that would prevent anyone else from being caught.

When the last group (who were carrying the vice-leader’s struggling daughter) was on the stairs - technically out of the basement - they turned to watch two of their most beloved members. They wanted to shield the child’s eyes, but couldn’t bring themselves to prevent her from getting closure. The vice-leader died first; his wife never released his hand, even as she died. Neither looked away from their daughter until the very end. The last few that were on the stairs fled, just in case the curse of the basement included the stairs. The flood spell was activated as soon as the one-time curse disappeared.

The group chose to wipe away the memories of the girl’s first 6 years, tying the spell to the traitor’s curses so that the memories would return when the curses were all canceled.

The traitor was never seen again, but they all knew she was still out there.

As her tutor finished explaining the circumstances of her 6th birthday, she noticed that she was crying. Touching her cheek absently, she wondered if she could destroy the curse on the leader’s room. Her eyes shifted to it and the knowledge that it was that curse which had taken her parents’ lives, even as willing sacrifices for the sake of others, hardened her resolve. She focused all of her power on that one room. She knew she couldn’t reverse the activation of the curse, so instead of undoing the curse or the magic cast on the crystals, she undid the crystals’ very existence. She could not change history, but she knew that she had just created a separate timeline where those crystals had never existed in the first place, though she had no doubt that the traitor in that timeline would just find other crystals to take their place.

The curse over the room vanished. Her caretakers, no, her comrades stared at her in shock. She headed up the stairs to the center of what she now knew was the Compound and spread her energy over the entire structure, reversing each curse placed there one by one. When they had all been erased, she asked the people she had grown up with where the Room of Respect was, and they guided her to it.

She had already undone the curses on both the room and the corpses, but they still required burial, and a small part of her wanted to check if reversing the curses would bring her family back. She knew it was unlikely, and therefore wasn’t surprised when they were still dead. One by one, she and her comrades began laying their friends and families to rest.

When they were finished, she used the slight traces that had been left behind by the curses to track the traitor. Her comrades wanted to take care of it on their own, but she was determined to face down the person responsible for her parents’ deaths.

First, they contacted the government. They had been taking only short-term jobs for the last almost ten years, and now they were ready for something bigger again. Then, the newly-reinstated Specials paid a house call to the traitor who had destroyed their lives. One of the things discussed with the government was permission to do whatever they wanted to a specific person; the government only agreed after the word ‘traitor’ was used.

The woman was not expecting those she had scorned to ever find her, much less en masse. They stormed her house, trapping her; the girl had already reversed all of the magic that had been set up to detect and stop intruders. Next, she erased the crystals, and anything else in the house that appeared to have the ability to cast magic or curses.

One of the Specials held the woman in place as the girl padded toward her. The traitor wondered who the girl was until she was close enough to see the resemblance to the vice-leader and his wife, and then began to struggle. The girl had no mercy. She erased the woman from existence and took her relief in the fact that she had just created an entirely new timeline where the traitor had never existed at all. It occurred to her that this action might have consequences, but she shrugged it off. She refused to regret her actions.

The Specials resumed their work, assisting many governments in times of crisis, and they have continued to do so to this day.