bewitched me

every rose has its thorn

JAPAN, 2040

Bad things happen to good people. Usually. That was the way the world worked. It had always been that way since the dawn of time.

Either they died or they experienced a hell on earth so abhorrent that death seemed like the light at the end of their dreadful tunnels.

Whether they fought for the good life they deserved or they submitted because they thought their purity did not make them worthy of grace was up to their own discretion, but the mirror was always waiting for them whenever they wished to face the truth and see in the background the ugly world behind them that they swore was good.

If a firefighter saved a girl from a burning house, they would then die later from the thing they worked to save people from.

If a military medic saved a soldier from gangrene by amputating their limb, they'd die from a quick yet painful death they could've prevented.

Spite worked in many ways and against many people. It was a phenomena to few that it usually worked against people who seeked out the bright side of things.

Sometimes, those good people's ghosts wandered the land they tried to save and watched from the sidelines their consequences for having once dared to have a bigger heart than their corrupt counterparts. They watched with tired eyes and emptied chests heavy with their fragile plane of existence the aftermath of the world that marched on without them.

In the wake of their sorrows and grief and regrets, it turned into matter. That matter snowballed until it manifested physically.

It was ugly; unsightly; hideous. It attacked and harmed and destroyed and killed. It caused chaos, seen and unseen, everywhere. It riddled the world and infested the soil with its own evil. It was haunted, it twisted reality and made it into something infinitely darker.

They were curses. They formed from the negative thoughts and feelings from humans and terrorized other people in light of those feelings.

Nobody knew exactly how long they'd been around—thousands of years, at the very least— just that many have originated in Japan, mainly from things like war and chaos.

Though, with every dark tunnel, there was always a light at the end. That light was the people who'd been sent to stop those curses for an unprecedented number of years. Extraordinary people gifted with other-worldly powers and talents strong enough to defeat the curses.

Of course, not all of them succeeded in their fights against curses. Some were lucky—born with exceptional techniques among those inferior— some were not so lucky. Some had to make do with what they were given, though they were never completely useless. Some of them died in a fight for humanity, others died from more mysterious and ominous causes.

Those people—Jujustu Sorcerers—were not the only ones who fought against curses.

Witches were more common than those Sorcerers for a time. Simply because witchcraft was easier to grasp, and nobody had to be born with it to learn it; some people were born with not a single trace of magic or cursed energy in their blood, and yet trained to become marvelous witches.

As time passed, the number of male witches dwindled, until it became a rare recessive gene in males; in correlation, lady witches were more common. And when women were strong, they were shut down. They were captured for their "evils" and rendered no better than curses, and they were tortured, stripped of their freedom, their rights, burned, hung, beaten, drowned, and had a thousand other discriminations against them.

Yet, they prevailed.

Their numbers were even smaller in present-day Japan than they were thousands of years ago. They prevailed, and they lived amongst regular people and other Jujutsu Sorcerers in something less chaotic that wore a mask of peace.