A hexwitch's curse is subtle as it is effective. The skilled ones (and they are always skilled, for the clumsy soon fall prey to their own devices) are known to hide their incantations in the smallest of places. A forgotten thumb drive provides more than enough purchase, as does the data-rich lip of a credit card, or the door handle of a car. Once adhered, the hex is impossible to dislodge, propagating swiftly through the detritus of one's life. Every device touched burns as if consumed by inner fire. Every network connected to trickles to a halt. Traffic lights and GPS signals even freeze at one's approach. So deeply does the hex reach into every corner of their lives that some targets report psychomatic symptoms: a trembling of hands, a fever, as the world slows to a crawl.

Once its ecosystem of contagion has been established, the hex has no cure. Victims often choose to uproot their lives entirely, selling their worldly and digital possessions, living in different cities under assumed names. Even this is not enough to outrun the hex. A digital sliver is all that's needed: a microchipped price tag buried at the bottom of a hastily-packed suitcase, perhaps. In this manner, a hexwitch's targets will find themselves consigned to perpetual nomadicity, drifting from city to hyperconnected city. In extreme cases, they are forced from the grid entirely.

Witches who dispatch persons according to the latter are highly celebrated. To them, working in their glass towers at the city's beating heart, interconnectedness is all things and disconnection is a fate worse than death. For this, a witch who forces a target offline will add a scratch to their keyboard in the shape of a raven's skull, signifying the taking of a life, and the commemoration of oblivion itself.