• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Cursed or Blessed?

ShadeZ

Maester
A race in my books is made by a deity recrafting a human. This recrafting is brought on by killing a dragon and infusing the dragon's essence, death energy, and hate into the human. If it works, the dragons essence and hateful energy will be dominated by the "human" and will fuse mutating the human's spirit and eventually body and mind into something inhuman.

This race are called in the oldest tongue Vagarii (the champions), they are known as well by the names demiduur(hunter), emorii (dead thing), and dragon slayers. They are prone to heroics and seeking out rivals and adversaries. They lack all but the most primal emotions. They tend to have a condescending edge. They have fantastic speed and reflexes and are unable to be killed by age, sickness, and most means given the nature of their curse/blessing binding their soul to their body. They act like a cat in a humans body oftentimes resulting in acting superior, predatory, and often shy and observant of things they distrust. People who become this creature do so usually to get revenge or to protect someone. Their motives for originally becoming this creature are usually undone in the process. This creature is incapable of letting the blind hate of vengeance obscure the real story from their sight and they come to understand very quickly that all which is human dies and trying to protect someone is only a temporary fix to a long term issue. They rarely form attachments to anything outside their own breed. They have close familial attachments to their own breed and are incapable of turning on each other as humans do. If they fight it is due to believing they are helping the other to not make a mistake.

Would you call this a blessing or curse?
 

Ban

Troglodytic Trouvère
Article Team
100% a curse. No matter their powers, what point is there to life if there is no joy or love? You've established that these creatures live lives of hatred and vengeance, so whether or not they are able to do amazing things is irrelevant.
 
With Ban, not only does it sound cursed, just a terrible thing to become as a whole. Not just lack of the full emotional spectrum and left only a seething festering boil of hatred and killing. There seems to be little by way of culture other then close tribal ties. And as created creatures they appear to be little more then biological weapons. And I have trouble believing they wouldn't turn on each other at some point in time, being programmed or not. Being prone to violence and having mostly one setting and stuck with themselves, I can see spats erupting.

They sound like the sort of wretched thing a protagonist with a more heroic bent takes pity on before giving them a merciful death.
 

ShadeZ

Maester
No matter their powers, what point is there to life if there is no joy or love? You've established that these creatures live lives of hatred and vengeance
Actually they can feel love. They feel a few fundamental basic emotions love, hate, (as much as they would deny it) fear, they can feel every protective and or territorial. Their default is calm and carefree, they're incapable of developing severe mental trauma like humans would if made immortal. They arent made of hate. The human spirit dominates the dragons hate and anger, it gets stronger from fighting it. One can not fight hate with hate which is why they're generally very calm individuals.

There seems to be little by way of culture other then close tribal ties.

Actually, their an ancient culture. Humans were mostly small tribes that got picked off by dragons, monsters, and faeries before meeting and coming under the protection of these creatures. This species pitied the humans for their weakness and lack of organization. They taught humans how to fight back against monsters, helped them build cities and walls, taught them to write and read. There is a common myth that for protection they demanded once a year five young men roughly aged 17-25 of the humans as prey but this isn't accurate and is stemed from the face dozens of young men asked to become the same species as them. Eventually, the humans became so strong they enslaved monsters and fae and some turned rogue on the demiduur and rewrote history to make them out as monstrous creatures. They spread rumors such as the one above as well as claiming demiduur eat fae and humans, they drink dragon's blood. From this a cult devoted to the worship of dragons and the genocide of the demiduur was formed. Eventually the demiduur stopped trying to remind humans what they had done for them. Demiduur nearly went extinct during this time and lost half their ranks. They didn't rebuild until a few millennia later when ironically the dragon god offered aid. There is an entire city of dragon slayers.
 

Silvahkir

Dreamer
Is the crux of the question, is a blessing something that makes you happier or stronger. Lol, I makes me think of Conan's response to the question, "What is good."
 

ShadeZ

Maester
Is the crux of the question, is a blessing something that makes you happier or stronger. Lol, I makes me think of Conan's response to the question, "What is good."
I would say anything positive. If it has a positive effect for you or those around you than it is a blessing. By the same merit, if it has a negative effect then it is a curse.

Being stronger, that could honestly be a side effect of either one. Look at the curse of vampirism for example, the individual is very powerful but it's a curse because of the bloodlust.
 
Top