The townsfolk didn’t say “curse.” They weren’t superstitious folk. But they started calling him Dthrip with a hard, final thump, and they kept their distance. Pretty Boy grew up in a bubble of quiet, attended by a mother who loved him but was terrified of his tears, and a father who drank himself stupid just to avoid looking at his son’s angelic face.

Pretty Boy came every night to sit at its roots. The whispers were not words, not exactly. They were echoes of old sorrows: a widow’s sigh, a miner’s crushed hand, a child’s lost dog. The tree drank sadness. And Pretty Boy found that when he sat there, his own tears no longer felt heavy. They just fell, and the mirrors drank them, and nothing broke.

One day, a little girl named Maggie—brave, freckled, and utterly unafraid of curses—found him there. She was crying because her kitten had run off.

Pretty Boy shrugged. “I’m poison.”

She sat down next to him. And for the first time in his life, Pretty Boy Dthrip put his arm around someone else’s shoulder while they both cried—him for all the years of being untouchable, her for the lost kitten.