Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Monsters — Monster who feels there really should be a simpler and cheaper way of protecting their home, but hasn't found one yet
Czo Bitter-Words-Like-Wasps takes to exile like a boot to porcelain: sudden, savage, and with conspicuous displeasure. The elven cursesmith has whiled away tolerable centuries as an adjunct to Fürsten Flutes-Beneath-The-Aspen's cabinet; nobody likes her, but she is respected (after a fashion), and useful (if mostly in potentia, rather than in action), and left almost entirely alone to amuse herself.
And then, somebody inconsiderately kills him, and his successor undertakes a purge of anyone whose loyalties are unsure, and the idiot son is sufficiently ham-handed that he doubts Czo.
Don't mistake her, she'd curse him as readily as anyone else in principle, but a generous salary and a quiet life are all it takes to buy her, and she's not a fool; who buys a cursesmith who doesn't respect being bought?
They ambush her in the night, persons cloaked and masked and unspeaking, blunting her ability to target them for revenge; and they jab her with irons readied in a brazier outside her door while she slept, branding geasa and abjurations into her flanks, her thighs, her biceps, and over her scapulae. Binding her from revenge, binding her from staying or returning; and so she fled, with barely the shoes on her feet.
If they think for a heartbeat it will stay their eventual dooms, they do not know cursesmiths.
She flees in the direction they are least likely to expect, least likely to follow, if they think to follow up; west into the Glass Wastes, the blasted fallout-fields of the great war of wizards, which many human histories regard as, if not the beginning of their peoples, a boundary prior to which the truths of it cannot be traced. She walks long plains of graves, dug in the aftermath by servitor-constructs where shining crystal cities once stood, whose arms wore out and shovels splintered from the work of burying the dead, long before they could complete the task. She walks forests caught in moments of fractured time, at the impact of terrible arcane payloads, forever burning. She walks lush meadows where the animals have melted into the grass, which hungers, writhing underfoot, trying to push through her skin and drink her.
She settles in a seething toxic swamp, and she begins immediately to make it worse.
Some years in, a messenger-bird arrives. She finds it, returning to her hand-built cottage at the end of a long day of land stewardship; ensorcelled to find her, sight unseen and location unknown in advance, in the manner of the Fürsten. It has pecked at a single tempting-bright berry in her demesne.
Its melting, vomited guts have partially dissolved the decree fastened to its leg, but enough remains for her to pick out words like abomination and take notice.
They have noticed her work, and correctly fear her. And so they march to destroy it, raze her not-garden, her year-round flourishing display of solely toxic plants, her smoking caustic marshes, her forests of transplanted and painstakingly crossed and grafted murderous vegetation.
She hasn't even got around to architecting some subtle but horrifying weapon to work around the geasa burned into her flesh and target her erstwhile employer, and yet she looms so large in his imagination that he comes to her.
The smile on her face at the prospect of his arrival is possibly the most poisonous thing within her swamps.