Fouled Wishes

People suffering from unexpected and unexplainable hardships, explain to themselves and the world at large that they suffer from a fouled wish.

This colloquilism refers to the fact that any Wish not granted by Magic itself, will be used against the wish-requester. Such a wish is fouled because it will not be fullfilled according to the assumptions of the wish-requester.

Perfect Wish

Many stories told in Inquest engage with the conceptualization and recitation of a "perfect Wish". Which is defined as a Wish that has no other interpretation than what the wish-requester had in mind. As is common with these stories, the supposed hero fails and has to suffer miserably at her hubris.

As most of these stories were created during the Age of Wishes, where a wish was potentially the end of all existence, it's easy to understand why so many tales are cautionary in nature.

Examples

Because of the shattered History its neigh impossible to create a comprehensive list of fouled Wishes. There are a few well-known major fouled Wishes:

• Curse of the Westwind rendering the Area west of the Sofrantosti Mountain range inaccessible
• Afrantosti Barrier allowing only travel by foot over the Afrantosti Mountain range
• Eastern Circle creating the Sunbend Ocean Current forcing Ships and Skiffs to travel clockwise around the Island

Many of the most prominent and impactful fouled Wishes were caused by sovereigns trying to resort to magic to hinder an enemy or gain an advantage. Many of these failed attempts still create hardship for the population of Inquest today.

Etymology

The concept of fouled Wishes is entwined with the stories about djinn's and other wish-granting entities throughout inquestian History. In particular, in many of the earlier languages of Inquest the word for wish was an acronym for "a lying gift" or in other translations "harmful interpretation" and has only later returned to its meaning of an expression of strong desire or hope for something.

A first usage of the colloquialism is found in a stanza of "Hippopost and the apple", an early inquestian Poem:

fouled is the wish,
it gleams like the apple with perfect skin,
you cannot see the rot beneath its shell

— idiomatic translation