Chapter 4: The Price of a Curse

I have never truly lived well.

That thought clung to me like the chill of a Michigan winter. I’d always felt out of step, watching other people’s happiness from the edges, never quite invited inside. It was like being the last kid picked for dodgeball—except the stakes were life and death.

This was already my second time strategizing for Marcus.

I came from the wasteland. My task was to let the young, prematurely dying general live past twenty-seven. As long as he made it past his twenty-seventh birthday, I could return to the real world and get endless food. I was starving to death, so I accepted the task without hesitation.

My stomach used to growl so loud at night I’d punch the mattress just to drown it out. The idea of real food—pizza grease pooling in the box, mac and cheese thick as glue, hot coffee in the morning—had been enough to make me say yes to anything.

The system told me that, starting from age twenty-three, Marcus would face a deadly calamity every year. So I traded one of my eyes to the system for the love curse. Though I was blind in one eye, as long as I recited the love curse, he would only have eyes for me and do whatever I said. As long as I kept him from danger on the day of each calamity, the task would be complete.

Sometimes I wondered if the system was run by a bored corporate HR manager. Trade your health for an edge, work yourself sick, all in the name of someone else’s survival. The kind of logic that made sense in a country where insurance paperwork could kill you faster than disease.

So, in four years together, I used the love curse five times. He called me a witch, said I manipulated and controlled him. But every time I used the curse, it was just to keep him alive.

He looked at me like I was some kind of monster from a cable news segment—dangerous, unpredictable, a threat to the American way of life. I’d laugh if it weren’t so sad. The more I tried to save him, the more I became the villain in his story.

What I didn’t know was that the love curse could fail.

That day, he charged to the base of city hall without a second thought, just because the one hanging on the roof was his first love, Lillian. To save her, he entered the city alone, endured torture, and died.

The headlines would’ve called it a tragedy. Maybe even a love story, if you squinted and ignored the bodies. But for me, it was just another lesson: no spell in the world could change the way his heart beat for her.

My task failed, and he and I were both sent back to the day we first met. The system’s rule was to restart the task—skills invalid, but what was traded would not be returned. So this time, I traded my sense of smell for the love curse again.

I never knew how much I’d miss the smell of rain on hot pavement, or the way fresh coffee could fill up a whole kitchen with hope. But I was desperate, and the system never gave refunds.

Everything that happened afterward played out as before. The only difference was, this time, the one captured by the enemy was me.

I finally understood: Marcus’s calamity was never just a series of accidents. His calamity had always been Lillian.