I wrote The Curse to answer a question I could not put down: what is the difference between grief and vengeance, and how long can a person stand in the gap between them before the gap decides for him? This is a guide to the two books, what they are doing, and who is likely to want them.
What the book is
The Curse I opens The Path of None, a dark spiritual fantasy saga told in illustrated form. It is a graphic ballad, which means the narration is carried in verse and the images are oil-painted pages instead of conventional comic panels. That distinction matters for how it reads, and I come back to it below.
The Curse II continues directly, and the two are best taken together. Book one is the wound. Book two is what grows in it, and what someone else does with what remains.
They are written for adult readers. The darkness is not decorative, and the violence is not there to be admired.
Drakko before the wound
Almost every dark fantasy about a damaged man starts after the damage. I wanted to spend time on the man first, because the whole book depends on the reader having something to lose.
Drakko is a farmer's son and a humble apprentice who becomes a reluctant blade. He is good at it, which is his problem. He has a wife who is razor-sharp in love and in pragmatism, and the two of them are expecting a child they have wanted for a long time. He vows to lay down the sword after one last job.
That vow is the hinge of the entire saga. It is not a plot device to be broken for the sake of drama. It is a man making a genuine decision about the shape of his remaining life, and meaning it.
The man he is sent to kill breaks the vow before it can ever be kept. Not by refusing to die, and not by defeating him. The book is careful here, and I would rather a reader meet it on the page than in a summary.
What the loss actually costs
Out of betrayal. Out of loss. Out of unquenchable rage: something other awakens, and someone other is born.
That sentence is the spine of Book I, and I tried to earn every word of it. The temptation in this kind of story is to treat catastrophe as fuel. The hero loses everything, converts the loss into strength, and proceeds to be formidable. It is satisfying and it is a lie, and it is the exact thing I set out to avoid.
What happens to Drakko is not an upgrade. He does not become a better version of the man who made that vow. He becomes a different man, and the book does not pretend the exchange was worth it. The people he loved are not recoverable, and nothing he does afterwards will convert their absence into meaning.
The question the book asks instead is narrower and harder. When everything that gave a life its shape has been taken, who is it that remains? Drakko's descent is not punishment. It is initiation, and every loss is a layer of the false self burning away. Whether what is left underneath is worth the fire is a question I leave open, because I do not think it has a comfortable answer.
The Dark One, and what the book refuses to explain
There is a presence in these books that whispers of a fate only the free may claim. It is neither saviour nor demon. It gives the blessing, or the curse, and it never explains which.
Readers ask me to clarify this, and I decline, deliberately.
An explained tempter is a mechanism. Once you know what it wants and how it operates, every scene it appears in becomes a transaction, and the reader starts assessing whether the protagonist is getting a good deal. That is a different book, and a smaller one.
What I wanted was the thing people actually meet in grief: a voice that arrives at the worst moment, offers a way to make the pain useful, and cannot be examined closely enough to be refused on principle. Anyone who has been badly hurt has heard some version of it. The Dark One is that voice given a shape and left unexplained on purpose.
Whether it is external or something Drakko generates is a question the books do not settle. Readers who need that settled will find this frustrating. Readers who recognise the voice usually do not need it settled at all.
Why it is a ballad before it is a novel
A comic asks what happens next. A ballad asks what a moment becomes inside the person who survived it. The Curse is built for the second question, and the form follows from that.
The narration is verse, which changes the pace. Verse resists summary. It makes a reader slow at exactly the points where prose would let them skim, and it allows a line to return later carrying more weight than it did the first time.
The pages are oil-painted, and the whole page is usually the unit, not the panel. That is a deliberate loss of some comic-book capability. I cannot do a rapid exchange of dialogue across six frames. What I get in exchange is the ability to hold a single image long enough for it to become a state the reader is inside.
The trade suits this material. A story about grief needs duration more than it needs incident. If you want the form explained properly, that piece is here, and the comparison of the three forms is the shorter route.
The verse, and what I ask of it
Verse in an illustrated book has one job above all others: it has to justify not being prose. If a line could be a sentence without losing anything, the line should be a sentence.
So the narration here is doing things prose does badly. It repeats. A phrase returns three chapters later in an altered context and the reader feels the change without being told about it. It compresses. A single line can hold a stretch of time that prose would need a paragraph and a transition to cover. And it withholds. Verse can stop mid-thought in a way that prose reads as a mistake.
It also has to survive being read aloud, which is the test I apply to every page. If a line trips the tongue, it is wrong, however good it looks. This material has ancestors in oral traditions where the poem was the memory system, and a line that cannot be spoken has lost the argument before it starts.
What I try to avoid is verse that announces itself. Ornamental archaism, inversions for the sake of rhythm, and words chosen because they sound old rather than because they are exact. That register turns a serious subject into costume drama, and grief in costume stops being grief.
What the paintings do that the words cannot
The division of labour between image and text is the whole craft of this form, and it is easy to get wrong in both directions.
Text that describes the picture is dead weight. If the page shows a man kneeling in ash, the narration should not say that a man kneels in ash. The reader can see it, and being told what they can see is faintly insulting.
Images that only illustrate the text are the same failure from the other side. If the narration has already carried the meaning, the picture becomes decoration, and decoration in a two-hundred-page book becomes wallpaper.
What I aim for instead is a gap. The words say one thing. The image shows something adjacent, or earlier, or a detail the narration has not mentioned. The reader closes the distance, and the meaning that results is theirs in a way that no directly stated meaning ever is.
The oil-painted treatment matters here too. Line art is decisive: an edge is an edge. Paint is ambiguous, and darkness in paint can genuinely conceal rather than merely indicate concealment. For a story where a man cannot see clearly what is happening to him, an ambiguous medium is not a stylistic preference. It is the argument.
The question the saga keeps returning to
Every book in The Path of None circles the same problem from a different position, and The Curse states it in its rawest form.
Grief and vengeance feel identical from inside. Both are total. Both organise a life around an absence. Both make a person unavailable to everything that is still here. And vengeance has the advantage of feeling like action, which is why it is so much easier to choose.
The difference only shows up later, in what each one leaves. Grief, given time and no shortcuts, eventually lets a person carry the loss and continue. Vengeance converts the loss into a project, and a project can be completed. The question the book asks is what a man does on the morning after completion, when the thing that organised him is finished and the absence is exactly where it was.
I did not want to answer that with a lesson. Drakko is not a cautionary tale, and the book does not stand above him with a verdict. He is a man who was handed an unbearable situation and responded the way a great many people would, and the story stays beside him through the consequences without excusing them.
If that sounds bleak, it is worth saying what it is not. The saga is not nihilistic. Something survives in these books, and later volumes are concerned with what it costs to recover it. But nothing is recovered cheaply, and nothing lost is given back.
The Curse II: pain as forge
Book two does something I had not planned when I started, and which the story insisted on.
Drakko continues. No longer untouched by the weight of his own quest, he turns south to seek what was lost, uncertain whether his steps are true or false. That uncertainty is the point. A protagonist who is sure he is right is much easier to write and considerably less interesting.
And meanwhile, in the world burnt and cursed, the world he left behind, a child is born. Dræven, marked by a dark destiny, is carried into the mountains by his father and entrusted to six hidden sages, keepers of ancient disciplines and inner alchemy. He endures silence and fire, and he is tempered.
So the second book runs on two tracks. A man walking away from what he became, and a boy being deliberately made into something by people who believe they know what the world will require of him. Neither track is straightforwardly hopeful.
Pain as forge, the soul as raw metal. The mountain training is not a metaphor in this book. It is the architecture of the awakening, and the cost is shown and not assumed.
Where it sits in the saga
The Path of None has a numbered core and several books that sit outside it chronologically, which confuses people reasonably often.
The Curse I and The Curse II are books one and two of the numbered core, and they are where the sequence is designed to begin. Chronicles of Bubhutsatsu: Awakening follows as book three, an origin story for the shadow that shapes what comes after. The Spiral is book four and opens a saga of its own. The Ascent is book five.
Separately, The Last Whisper of the Orchard is a chronological prequel that stands entirely alone and costs nothing. It is set long before Drakko and tells the origin of the figure later called the Still One.
Two honest routes. Start with The Curse I for the numbered core, or start with the free prequel if you would rather test the writing before spending anything. The full reading order lays out both.
Who it is for, and who it is not
I would rather lose a sale than have someone spend an evening on a book that was never going to suit them.
It suits you if you read Berserk for the wound rather than the monster design, if you want violence that leaves consequences, if you are willing to read verse without expecting it to rhyme its way to a moral, and if a story that refuses to convert loss into strength sounds like a feature.
It will not suit you if you want intricate plotting, a magic system with rules, dialogue-driven scenes, or a protagonist whose arc resolves. It is also a poor fit for anyone who reads primarily for worldbuilding, since the world here exists to apply pressure to one man and is not mapped for its own sake.
Readers who have finished it tend to describe it as heavy in a way that stays with them. Selected reader reactions on the book page put it as reading like a graphic novel and a dark fantasy poem at once. That is an accurate description of what I was attempting, and whether it appeals is a matter of taste and not of quality.
Content notes
Both books are written for mature readers and contain dark themes, graphic violence, grief, and adult spiritual content.
I do not think content notes spoil anything. A note saying a book contains bereavement does not tell you who, when, or what it means, and it does not touch the experience of reading the scene. It tells a reader whether to open the book today, which is a different question from what happens inside it.
The material that most often catches readers off guard is not the combat. It is the domestic loss early in book one, which is written to land and does land. If bereavement involving a family is something you cannot read at the moment, this is the page to stop on and not the third chapter.
Every book on this site carries a note like this. A reader who knows what is coming can decide honestly whether they want it, and that decision belongs to them.
Questions readers ask
Do I need to read The Curse I before The Curse II?
Yes. Book two is a direct continuation and assumes everything book one establishes. It can be read alone and a great deal of its weight depends on knowing what Drakko lost.
Is The Curse a comic or a novel?
Neither exactly. It is a graphic ballad: oil-painted pages with narration carried in verse, where the page is usually the unit and not the panel. It reads more slowly than a comic and more visually than an illustrated novel.
Where does The Curse fit in the reading order?
It is books one and two of the numbered core of The Path of None. Chronicles of Bubhutsatsu: Awakening is book three, The Spiral is book four, and The Ascent is book five. The Last Whisper of the Orchard sits earlier in the timeline and stands alone.
Is there a free way to try the writing first?
Yes. The Last Whisper of the Orchard is a complete gothic graphic novel, free on Kindle, set long before these events. It is a fair test of the prose, the verse, and the art without spending anything.
Who is the Dark One?
A presence that is neither saviour nor demon, which gives the blessing or the curse and never explains which. The books deliberately decline to settle whether it is external or something Drakko generates, because an explained tempter becomes a mechanism.
Does the story resolve, or does it end on a hook?
Each book completes its own movement, and the saga continues. The Curse I brings Drakko to the point his whole life has been bending towards and does not stop mid-scene to advertise the sequel. Book two opens a second track with Dræven and carries both forward.
How long does it take to read?
An evening for most readers, and longer for anyone who stops on the paintings. Illustrated books read faster in clock time than their page count suggests, and this one rewards reading slower than you comfortably can.
Is it available in Kindle Unlimited?
Yes, alongside several other books in the sequence. The guide to what is available through the subscription covers which titles are included and in what order they make sense.
Is it suitable for younger readers?
No. Both books are written for adults and contain graphic violence, bereavement, grief, and adult spiritual content.