Echoes of Pain: Why Some Tales Will Haunt Us

There’s a moment in Shadow Veil where the magic isn’t loud or heroic. It’s quiet. Practical. And deeply wrong.

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Before, I’d known almost nothing structured. A few tricks. The rest had been raw, volatile power. Now I was learning how to control the world around me, the elements, the very essence of a person’s perception, their minds. It was like I couldn’t stop.

Then, somewhere in the stacks, Morvaine found something stranger.

A thin, battered tome tucked between glamourcraft treatises. Inside was an esoteric ritual couched in a story so unapologetically Dark Fae I could practically hear its evil laugh. It described how to replace a human heart with a thistle so they’d never feel the ache of lost love again. The thistle numbed everything—grief, longing, hope.

I recoiled and shoved the book away… for a time. But it called to me. Pulled at me. And eventually, I found myself reaching for it again.\

It was probably nonsense. It had to be. Didn’t it?

But it was haunting, tragic, poetic. Just reading it, I felt that same dark magic coil up in my breast, waiting like a snake, tensing to strike, followed by a delicious ache for something I didn’t have a name for.

And it felt good—too good, like the tiny intake of breath just before the first touch of sex, or the moment I press the blade to someone’s neck in combat. I flushed, looked around, and kept reading. I couldn’t not.

I could imagine it so clearly: a hollow-eyed maiden kneeling before me, begging for the heart of the one she loves. I give her the price: her own heart, still beating. She offers it willingly. I pluck it out, press a thistle into the cavity, and glamour her beloved into loving her back.

It was a perfect tragedy: a love the maiden could never return, a lover receiving cold devotion, a hollow triumph.

And me, the capricious Queen, tying mortal lives into pretty knots just because I could.

Honestly, it read like something pulled straight from an Irish fairy tale—dark and gorgeous and doomed.

I loved it.

And that was the part that unnerved me. I wanted to try it. Almost desperately.

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That spell is the problem.

Not because it’s violent or grotesque. Folklore is full of worse. It’s the logic of it that lingers. Replace the heart. Remove the ache. Continue functioning.

Ancient tales rarely hinge on destruction. They hinge on relief. On the seductive idea that pain is optional if you’re willing to trade something essential and call it a fair exchange. A thistle where a heart once beat isn’t a curse so much as an optimization.

That’s why stories like this don’t age out. They’re not relics. They’re pressure tests. They ask the same question over and over, dressed in different centuries: What part of yourself would you give up just to stop hurting?

European fairy tales understood this with uncomfortable clarity. Love is never denied outright. It’s rerouted. Made colder. Made safer. Made wrong in ways that only become obvious later. You get what you asked for. You just don’t get to decide how it feels.

Modern readers still recognize that bargain instantly. We may not talk about thistles and glamour anymore, but we understand numbness marketed as peace. Control sold as healing. Distance mistaken for strength.

That’s why the spell unsettles. Not because it’s dark, but because it’s plausible. Because, even though we know better, some part of us reads it and thinks: Yes. That would work.

And folklore smiles when you think that.