Wraithblade curse mechanics

The curse on the Khopesh does not hang in a room like weather. It hunts, and what it hunts is appetite. Of everyone within reach it takes the hungriest and most driven, which in practice means the man with the most to want and the most people beneath him to want it with. He is first. From him it seeds outward along everyone beholden to him, each hold making the next one possible, so that it travels down a household or a company rather than across a room.

Almost nobody watching can see any of that happen. The specters doing the work are perceptible to two kinds of people only: those the blade has already worked on, and those with Peren eyes. To everyone else a man simply goes strange, with no cause standing beside him to account for it.

What does show from outside is the fighting. Forces under a taken host move in an eerie unison, ordered past what drill or a shouted command explains, as though one intent were running through all of them at once. The goblins who held Wraithblade Keep fought that way, and so did the guard Beltran Grayeras kept close to him in Haudh-Gwenn.

The Hunger

The pull is not constant. It scales with how recently the blade last fed, and a feeding does not mean a killing so much as a making: what comes out of it is one more specter. While that specter is still forming the sword is satisfied and quiet, and the hunger returns only once the thing has settled into whatever it is now. In Beltran’s hands it fed many times, the last two of them a week before the end, which is why it came out of its box hungrier than anyone who had handled it had known it.

The Hundred Hammers

A hundred men, a hundred hammers, a hundred days. That is the method the histories keep for undoing the thing, and it means what it says: the blade was struck until it gave. Every other attempt of that kind failed, this one killed the men who made it work, and the sword came back anyway.

There was a second way, and it needed one arm. Electrum runs through a Mól weapon woven like a web rather than set as a core, and because the electrum is the pattern it is also the weak point, which means the weak point is everywhere in the blade at once. Hinta worked that out in a week at the keep’s own anvil, feeling the pattern in the ring of a struck blade, and her awakened calipers showed her precisely where. Struck that way a Mól blade does not crack in two. It shatters like glass.