Artifact of Death



The Artifact of Death is an item that will eventually bring about the death of anyone who owns, uses, or comes to be associated with it, often in a grisly and supernatural manner. It can take any shape, whether ancient, toy-like, or high tech. This terrible item is often foolishly sought by many for its "power"... which, of course, always comes with a price: the life of the user. More often than not, it just takes, rather than both giving and taking, typically because it contains a terrible Curse.

Though it has a lot of overlap with the Artifact of Doom, the Artifact of Death doesn't actually need to have a corrupting influence or magical powers, it just has to kill whoever uses it. Also, the time taken to kill whoever uses it varies. In some stories, the Artifact will kill anyone who attempts to use it on the first try. Other stories will have the owner die in a set amount of time, after a set number of uses, or it may simply shave years off a user's lifespan. It can sometimes be an Amulet of Dependency as well.

If an artifact is intended for the Chosen One and reserves its dangerous side effects only for other persons who try to use it, it's an instance of Only the Chosen May Wield (and/or possibly an Empathic Weapon).

If the Big Bad is a walking Artifact of Death, see also Bad Boss. See also Harmful to Touch. Contrast Immortality Inducer.

Anime & Manga

 * The Book of Darkness from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha. It grants ultimate power to its master if they fill up all 666 pages by draining the Linker Cores of other magical beings... and it does so by taking over its master and pushing their magical powers to the limit to destroy everything in its path, killing the master in the process. And if the master doesn't fill up the pages, they will still die as the Book feeds on their life force instead.
 * The Death Note. Possessing one means the Shinigami who owns it will eventually write your name down and kill you. (though typically, if they aren't the foxy Ryuk, they have to get the book back first.) Also, you can choose to gain Shinigami eyes so you can see the name and remaining lifespan of any person, which makes it much easier to write their name in the Death Note, but at the cost of half your own remaining life. Finally, if you use it, your life will suck. It's guaranteed. Ryuk even warns Light upfront about it: "But there is the terror and torment that only humans who have used it will experience..."
 * The last appears to derive from strictly psychological reasons, because the power to kill with impunity is huge and yet useless, but When All You Have Is a Hammer, everybody starts to look like a nail, and the role of a killer comes to define you, and your ethics are perpetually in crisis...most people don't have Light's perfect narcissism, and kill themselves fairly quickly.
 * Yu Yu Hakusho: the Mirror of Forlorn Hope/Darkness can grant the user a wish, but at the cost of his life. Kurama, who stole it, is quite calmly aware of this, but has no problem dying for his mother's life. Yusuke is somewhat freaked out by his zen.
 * When Yusuke jumped recklessly in in the middle of the wish-granting and told the mirror to take half of his life and half of Kurama's, so he didn't have to see Shiori broken up at the loss of her son, he managed to avert the normal ending. The mirror either was so impressed by this gesture that it granted the wish for free, or more likely took half of Yusuke's life and half of Kurama's life, knocking them out temporarily. This reduced the wish to a mere Cast from Hit Points, and hit points regenerate.
 * Interestingly, it has a small soliloquy afterward where it appears that it dislikes being an Artifact of Doom and wishes more people were like Yusuke, so it didn't have such a depressing name.
 * Zearth from Bokurano: anyone who is chosen as its pilot will die as soon as they've done so once.
 * The Anathema Scythe from Tetragrammaton Labyrinth! It is even more cursed than several hope diamonds put together!
 * The Imperium Silver Crystal from Sailor Moon: Using its full power is fatally taxing. Usagi manages to get around this by borrowing power from her teammates, and in the first movie she actually does die from it, but recovers.
 * The anime version of Kuroshitsuji has the Shard of Hope, a piece of the Hope Diamond.
 * Fairy Tail has the Lullaby, a flute that kills anyone who hears it except the player. It also contains a gigantic demon, which will come out if nobody plays it in a while.
 * Witchblade. Even the original Witchblade may be terminally taxing depending on the host's physiology or frequency of use, and attracts Ax Crazy monstrosities. With Cloneblades, it's rather short one-way road: they have very limited resource, probably due to being neither alive enough to regenerate damage nor invulnerable enough to resist a lot of it in the first place. After a few hard fights, the user starts to suffer physical and possibly mental deterioration, then quickly turns into a pile of glassy shards with a broken Cloneblade sticking out of it.

Card Games

 * Magic: The Gathering
 * Unsurprisingly, a few cards are like this; the most straightforward example is probably Jinxed Idol, which keeps dealing damage to the player who controls it until he or she sacrifices a creature to hand control of it to an opponent.
 * Black magic has plenty of examples that do similar things, although they're not technically "artifacts". Graveborn Muse, for example, is a creature but basically functions like an enchantment or artifact that lets you draw extra cards at the cost of losing life—and it's not optional so if you don't manage to kill your opponent using the extra cards, the Muse will kill you.
 * Nevinyrral's Disk: upon use, destroys ALL creatures, artifacts and enchantments in play, including itself. Global armageddon at the push of a button.
 * In a bit of Gameplay and Art Segration, one of the artwork of the Mox Jet depicted it as this. However, it's anything but in the game, as it's a free black mana source that you can play more than one of a turn. In the right decks, this is a Game Breaker, and it was one of the first nine cards to be banned.
 * Final Fortune, while not being an artifact, has shades of this: It grants you an extra turn... at the end of which you will lose the game. Let's hope you win before that turn is over!

Comics -- Books

 * The Ghost Key from Locke and Key might fall under this trope. If you open a door with it and walk through, you die and turn into a ghost.
 * The Ultimate Nullifier, seen in Fantastic Four and Marvel Comics, can destroy anything, but in doing so destroys its wielder... unless they perfectly understand who they're nullifying and how they work.
 * One of the Cosmic Cubes used in Marvel Comics slowly sucked the life force out of the user every time they used it. The Cosmic villian the Magus had several Cosmic Cubes and similar devices he had to keep locked away in a special machine because direct use would poison him.
 * Superman villain Lex Luthor got cancer from his Kryptonite ring.

Gamebooks

 * Lone Wolf
 * The book The Caverns of Kalte "rewards" you with a big shiny jewel if you screw up a puzzle... which unholy radiation can ends up killing you if you are not warned in time and discard it.
 * Another Doomstone appearing in The Darke Crusade has pretty much the same effect on its wielder, High Warlord Magnaarn. The Scepter of Nyras, on which it is mounted, is a powerful artifact allowing to control the armies of the fallen Darklords... but it is also turning him into an undead servant of the Doomstone itself.
 * The Death Staff from The Legacy of Vashna is also a quite deadly artifact. Just touching it causes Lone Wolf to lose Hit Points, and it drains some more every time it is used.
 * Given their very evil origins (the Doomstones were created by Naar's most powerful servant Agarash the Damned and the Death Staff was forged by Naar himself) this makes perfect sense. The only ones who can use these things without any consequences are supernatural beings of pure evil such as the Darklords and the Deathlord of Ixia.
 * The Big Bad of Book 7 avoided the lethal side effects of using a Doomstone by coupling it with one of the Lorestones in a Yin-Yang Bomb.

Films -- Animation

 * In Disney's Aladdin, nearly the entire contents of the Cave of Wonders, except for the lamp. When Abu can't keep his paws off the shiny, the entire cave collapses with intent to kill.
 * In the 1981 cult classic Heavy Metal, the Loc-Nar is the embodiment of evil, and quickly corrupts and destroys everyone it touches—only those who are incorruptibly pure of heart can resist it.
 * The DCAU title The Batman Superman Movie: World's Finest, a very rare, valuable green dragon statue is known to cause all its owners to die mysteriously. The statue is actually made out of Kryptonite, which, in the DCAU, can be deadly to humans if they're exposed to it over a long period of time.

Films -- Live-Action
""He chose... poorly.""
 * The Ark of the Covenant, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, supposedly grants the owner great power, and may be used as a Radio to God. However, opening the ark releases the Wrath of God, and anyone who looks upon the spirits that are released dies an extremely gruesome death. Arguably, it's less about ANYONE than "anyone who opens/handles/misuses the Ark with bad intent." The ancient Israelites (at least within the movie 'verse) did use it to make armies invicible and topple kingdoms. The Ark leaves Indy and Marion unharmed less because the angels automatically kill than because Indy knows not to look—he respects the power of the Ark and by extention the "Hebrew God whose Ark this is". Belloq and the Nazis ape Jewish rituals (even Lampshaded by one of the Nazi officers) and assume they only need to dress up and say the right words to make the magic box work. They don't die so much because they opened the Ark, but because they did so out of hubris.
 * At least one of the false Grails from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade causes you to suffer Rapid Aging till past the point of death, as Walt Donovan found out rather painfully.


 * As with the Ark of the Covenant, Indy manages to get through the Three Tests (of Penitence, Faith, and... spelling?) and choses the right Grail by understanding there's more to the MacGuffin than just a nifty prize. Donovan and Elsa, again with the hubris... don't.
 * The toy monkey from the Stephen King story The Monkey kills whenever it claps its cymbals, as does the one from rip-off homage Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders.
 * The Cursed Videotape from The Ring has been imitated so many times it could be a trope in itself. Anyone who watches the seemingly mundane video tape dies within seven days, unless they copy the tape and show it to someone else, akin to a video chain letter. This is an example of an artifact of death that actually seems mundane and benign.
 * The protagonists in the little-known sci-fi film Alien Cargo pick up a piece of debris from space that contains a Hate Plague. It ends up killing everybody who's been directly exposed to it.
 * In 2009's Night Train, it's said that anyone who looks inside the box will be dead by sunrise, and the movie's body count bears this out. The box contains Something for Everyone—depending on the viewer, it can appear as diamonds, gold, or anything else valuable enough to make the viewer willing to lie, cheat, steal, and kill to keep it for themselves. Even the characters who overcome their greed and realize it's an Artifact of Doom end up fighting (and dying) over it as a result of their desire to destroy it.
 * In The Grudge, an entire house is this trope.

Literature

 * Several from the Harry Potter series:
 * The Elder Wand is an extremely powerful wand, but only in the hands of its rightful owner. Incidentally, one can become a wand's rightful owner by defeating its current owner, so for most of its existence its owners came to sticky ends, as so many people assumed that 'defeat' actually meant 'murder'. Credulous types like Xenophilius Lovegood believe it has a curse placed on it by Death, but skeptics like Hermione think it just attracts attention. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
 * The Peverell ring is cursed by Voldemort to rapidly kill anyone who owns it. Dumbledore very nearly succumbs to the curse, and only survives thanks to quick thinking by Professor Snape. He still believes that it will probably kill him within a year.
 * An opal necklace seen in the second book has a placard claiming it has killed a dozen previous owners. In the sixth book we see it in action.
 * Redwall's Tears of All Oceans (six large pink pearls kept in a velvet-lined shell case) seem to have this effect despite the existence of actual magic in the books being dubious. The evil Emperor Ublaz is so desperate to have the pearls that he has an entire tribe slaughtered to get them, then the corsairs who picked them up fight among themselves, resulting in at least one death. During the obligatory riddle-based treasure hunt to find them when they're planted in the Abbey, the search leads to the death of an Abbeydweller. Not to mention Ublaz himself, after getting the pearls for his crown ends up getting killed by a Snake he had previously cowed.
 * The monkey's paw in The Monkey's Paw. It will grant you three wishes. Your third wish will be for death.
 * The Shining Trapezohedron from HP Lovecraft's Haunter in the Dark. Gazing into it allows you to see into the audient void and learn things man was not meant to learn, but the downside is that it also summons the god Nyarlathotep (or rather one of his many avatars) to hunt you down and kill/possess you.
 * Vasher from Warbreaker actually makes use of one of these in his combat strategy. His sword, Nightblood, is an Empathic Weapon that telepathically tempts nearby people into drawing it. It is also an Artifact of Doom that makes its wielder murder a bunch of his friends and then kill himself. Vasher doesn't actually use it as a sword; he throws it into a group of enemies, sheath and all, and waits for them to fall for the Schmuck Bait.
 * The Traitor's Sword or Sword of Straw, in Amanda Hemingway's book. It's been passed down from King to King, but can be safely wielded only by the one destined... The problem is that many people have taken the chance that they are the one destined. It doesn't invariably kill the wielder, but may cause them to kill someone else!
 * St Michael's Sword from Preston and Child's novel Riptide is a good example as well. Spoken of vaguely as a sort of Spanish Excalibur(though even older than the Spanish in origin), it's written in legend as having the power to kill anybody who looks at it. It's also the grand prize item in an extremely difficult to penetrate treasure hoard, buried in the depths of an extensively booby-trapped island and sporting a legendary curse to boot. The mysterious lethality of all this becomes clearer as the story progresses....
 * The eponymous device carried by E.E.Smith's Lensmen is essentially benign, but is characterised by its tendency to kill anyone who touches it except when the Lensman who's matched to it is wearing it. ANYONE, whether they are actively attempting its theft/misuse or not. This is such a terrifying prospect that Virgil Samms specifically asks Mentor the Arisian what happens to it when he dies. (It disintegrates.)

Live-Action TV

 * Babylon 5 has a machine relic from an ancient civilization capable of transferring life force equivalently between people, so while it was an Artifact Of Death and Life, it still killed from overuse. It's telling that its use in that civilization was as a form of capital punishment.
 * Battlestar Galactica has the 3000-year-old Lion's Head Nebula Beacon, which the Cylons found and which began killing them. It was covered with a mucous substance that really was snot—snot with a disease to which humans had evolved immunity but the Cylons hadn't. All the Cylons on the base star that picked up the beacon died, all because "someone forgot to wipe their nose", according to Adama.
 * The infamous Tiki idol from the Hawaiian Brady Bunch episode.
 * ... which was brought back (and referenced as such) in an eighth-season episode of Scrubs.
 * Supernatural has the rabbit's foot, which gives fantastic luck to whoever touches it—as long as they manage to hang onto it. Unfortunately, it always ends up getting lost or stolen... and then the luck goes bad. Really bad. We're talking Final Destination bad.
 * "The Glove of Myneghon" in Buffy the Vampire Slayer might just qualify. Although the glove bestows great powers on the wearer, it can never be removed and seems to have said wearer at its mercy as well as giving her (Gwendolyn Post) the power to draw lightnings. Besides, if the wearer is right-handed and wears the glove on the right hand, I foresee some difficulties regarding trips to the loo.
 * 'La Fin Absolue du Monde' in the Masters of Horror episode "Cigarette Burns". Pretty much anyone involved in the production of this film-within-a-film died because of it, as do people who try to go look for it.

Myths & Religion

 * The Necklace of Harmonia in Greek Mythology was cursed. It did not harm to Harmonia herself (she being divine) but every mortal descendant who owned it came to a bad end, or brought misfortune on her family. Betrayal, murder, and tragic deaths followed the necklace from legend to legend.
 * The Hope Diamond, anyone?
 * Supposedly the Spear of Destiny makes one invincible in battle. However, if lost, the former owner will quickly meet his end.
 * The Ark of the Covenant in The Bible. If anyone who wasn't specifically authorized to touch the Ark did so, God would kill them right there. Even one guy who tried to prop it up when he noticed it was slipping out of the hands of the priests. For the record, he had it on a bull cart instead of having it carried by 4 people like it was supposed to. If you're handing a holy artifact, you'd better damn well carry it like it's supposed to.
 * Claims are often made nowadays that the historical ark was some sort of capacitor or otherwise was electrically charged, and therefore the smitings of non-priests who touched it were because they weren't wearing the holy (and electrically insular) robes of the priests. These are likely apocryphal, supposing a far greater knowledge of electricity than existed at the time.
 * MythBusters tested this. It is possible, with the technology of the time, for the ark to have been electrically charged. We just can't prove that it was. (The relatively low power of the shock might not be much of a divine smiting, though.)
 * Older Than Dirt: Princess Ahura: The Magic Book is a New Kingdom Egyptian story (c. 1100 BCE) about prince Naneferkaptah, who covets the magical Book of Thoth, buried in the river in six nested boxes and guarded by snakes and scorpions. He digs it out, kills the guardians, and obtains vast magical power, but the offended gods promptly cause the death of Naneferkaptah, his sister/wife Ahura, and their son.

Tabletop Games

 * Dungeons & Dragons has many of these, called "cursed magical items", such as the hand and eye of Vecna, especially if used together.
 * ... and which led to the player-versus-player trap The Head of Vecna. To use the Hand, you must first cut off your own hand and attach the Hand to the stump. To use the Eye, you must put out your own eye. The Head of Vecna would have been a sort of instant Artifact of Death
 * The AD&D 2nd edition rules gave a chance of accidentally creating one of these any time a character crafts some magical item.
 * Most daemon weapons in Warhammer 40,000 tend to lead to their owner's death eventually. That is, if they're lucky... But if they're very lucky, it leads to death and ascension to Daemon Prince.
 * The Spear of Ulthanash is a specifically mentioned example; it was once considered too dangerous to use because it binds itself to the user and slowly drains his soul, until the Tyranids attacked the Craftworld where it was sealed away and Yriel had to take the Spear from stasis to kill the central beast of the Hive Mind and drive the Tyranids from his home.
 * The Sword of Khaine in Warhammer Fantasy Battle is an immensely powerful weapon forged at the beginning of time by the elvish smith god. Unfortunately, it tends to bring doom and madness on anyone who wields it, most notably the man whose son started the great elvish civil war of eons past.
 * The Champions Universe of superheroes had the Juggernaut suit of power armour which can turn any ordinary schlub into someone able to throw down with the strongest superhumans on Earth. However it's powered by a tiny but improperly shielded nuclear reactor so you'll be dead in a matter of months after starting to use it.
 * Many of the more powerful (almost exclusively evil) artifacts in Warhammer Fantasy Battle Fantasy Battle fall into this trope. Especially Skaven—not only can their normal "wonder weapons" decimate their own troops, but the magic items can cause madness, burn the skin off their arms, turn them into gibbering spawn or even suck them into hell. This doesn't stop them being used extensively. Well, when your army has an explicit rule called Life Is Cheap (a.k.a. "coratteral damage"), you should think about what gadgets you strap yourself into.
 * FATAL is full of these. Any piece of magical armor you find has a 7% chance of having an effect that will kill you. And these are uncursed items. But if you're actually playing FATAL, instant death is a fairly tempting prospect.

Toys

 * Bionicle: the Ignika, Mask of Life. One of its purposes is a reset button for the Matoran Universe... by taking away all the life in the universe should there be things like a never-ending chaotic conflict. And the more conflict in the universe, the shorter its countdown to death is.

Video Games

 * In Fate Stay Night, on the final path Shirou gets Archer's arm, and consequently most of his ability with Projection. On the other hand, using it is guaranteed to kill him.
 * In Dragon Quest I, there was a chance of you getting Cursed Belts and Cursed Necklaces from certain chests. They did nothing good except strangle you, yet bizarrely they sold very well. There's a big market for suicide/homicide items in Crapsack World Alefgard, apparently.
 * Castlevania
 * Oddly enough, the Vampire Killer in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin... to the Morris family. Though they're related to the Belmonts by blood, they aren't innately able to use the whip; the Lecarde family can perform a ritual to give them that power. Unfortunately, doing so causes the Vampire Killer to leech the soul from the wielder; overusing it causes them to sicken and die. Jonathan's father was killed by this. Jonathan himself is safe, because it takes more use than is covered in one game.
 * In Order of Ecclesia, Dominus. Its three forms when not combined all do damage to you, but when combined, everything (you included) dies. Aria of Sorrow and its sequel also have a soul that steadily drains your health while boosting attack power.
 * Ecclesia also has an equip item that turns you into a One-Hit-Point Wonder in exchange for hefty stat boosts; You'll probably die thanks to its effect plenty of times.
 * The Life Orb of Pokémon fame gives a 1.3 power boost to attacks but costs 10 percent of your health every time you attack. Other moves, such as Healing Dance or Memento, do certain helpful things while the Pokémon faints. The Life Orb is less of a problem in Gen V. The ability Sheer Force gives certain moves a power boost and can then stack the power boost with the Life Orb and somehow negates the Life Orb's recoil damage. However, this trick only works on moves that normally have positive secondary effects, such as Flamethrower.
 * Uncharted: El Dorado is a giant golden statue which turns out to be a golden sarcophagus containing a dessicated mummy—which carries an anthrax-like plague which turns all it infects into zombies. It destroyed the Spanish colony on the island and, centuries later, did the same to the Nazi team that had come to find it.
 * Final Fantasy
 * One of the items you can find in some of the games is the Cursed Ring. Its effect varies from game to game, but VI and VII fit this trope.
 * VI puts you on the clock by Condemning you at the start of a fight—you die if you don't win or escape the fight in 60 game ticks. OTOH, it also lets you learn one of the most powerful One-Hit Kill spells in the game at 5 times the normal rate. You can subvert the curse with a Lich Ring (this turns you into a zombie and invokes Revive Kills Zombie logic—death spells heal you instead).
 * VII is similar. It gives whoever it's equipped to a good stat boost, but there are two major downsides to it: The first being that as soon as the battle starts, the person who it's equipped to has Death Sentence cast upon them, which kills them after 60 seconds have passed (unless you finish the fight before then), and the second being that once it's equipped, it's a physical nightmare to unequip unless you meet certain conditions. Tifa tends to make the most of the curse since two of her weapons get big power boosts when she's Condemned.
 * Also featured in Crisis Core - Final Fantasy VII. It gives the stat boosts, but inflicts Curse upon the user which stops their DMW from spinning, preventing Limit Breaks and Level Ups.
 * VI also has another "cursed" item, the Cursed Shield. It adds Condemn and a smorgasbord of bad status effects, and has terrible stats. But if it's used enough it'll become uncursed and transform into the Paladin Shield, a high-stat shield which is also one of the few ways to learn the Ultima spell.
 * In the PlayStation 2 Shinobi, main character Hotsuma wields Akujiki, a cursed sword that devours the souls of whoever it kills. If he does not kill constantly, the sword will turn its hunger back on him, weakening and eventually killing him.
 * The Rune of Punishment of Suikoden IV is a decidedly powerful rune that grants powerful magics to the wielder. The possessor can generally destroy entire fleets of heavily-armed battleships with ease. But such attacks consume a tremendous amount of energy and can easily kill the wielder after using ONE of those blasts. Even worse, the rune itself is heavily hinted to be somewhat sentient, and will actually manipulate events in order to force the wielder to use the rune as such. In other words, if you're unlucky enough to gain command of this rune, you'd best make sure your will is up to date.
 * Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. After your suit has been corrupted by Dark Samus, you run the risk of becoming fully corrupt and turning into Dark Samus (thereby resulting in a Game Over) whenever you enter Hyper mode. This can be averted, however, by exiting Hyper Mode before the corruption starts, or by firing rapidly to prevent the Phazon overload.
 * As a Genius Bonus, the Space Pirate logs in the first Metroid Prime mention that Space Pirates exposed to Phazon began firing indiscriminately. The scientists mistook this for a symptom and euthanized the test subjects.
 * The Black Marker, Red Marker and Golden Marker in Dead Space all qualify as this trope, in that their presence causes severe hallucinations, mostly of (deceased) friends or relatives; this might be a way for them to communicate with humans, though, given that they were probably designed to deal with radically different lifeforms. It's implied that the mere presence of a Marker is too much for the human brain to handle, and most people who spend too much time near them end up committing suicide in a grisly fashion, whether that's because the Marker commanded them to or not.
 * World of Warcraft used to have a wearable cursed trinket as a quest item, until they removed the "wearable" part away in a patch. You were never supposed to actually wear it, simply deliver it to a questgiver, but if you did wear it, it would quickly sap away at your character's life (note that this part is clearly signified in the item description as part of its effects). Nevertheless, some people would pass up on the experience and actual (lackluster) rewards provided by the end of the chain and would choose not to complete it, keeping the Artifact of Death instead because believe it or not, there are situations where quick death with no durability damage can be useful.
 * Grand Theft Auto IV and its expansion packs have the diamonds. Of everyone who comes into contact with the diamonds only the three protagonists (it is a videogame after all) and the random character (perhaps because he didn't actively pursue them) lives. Four exceptions is a lot but so many other characters do die and the diamonds are the common element.
 * The eponymous Elysian Box from Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box. Eventually, it's revealed that its notoriously lethal fame is the reason why it's so fatal. The box is made from a material that releases powerful hallucinogenic fumes that makes people experience what they believe. Since most people expect death to befall them when they open the box, that's exactly what happens. The reason why our heroes survive is that they were skeptical of its reputation.
 * The amulet from Solatorobo kills whoever it choses for the Rite of Forfeit. You'd think with a name like that, Red would be a little more cautious about agreeing to help with this Rite - after all, what exactly is a big enough forfeit to seal a monster like Lares?
 * While in-story it's an Empathic Weapon of evil, Soul Edge in-game is this for most characters in Soulcalibur II, whether its gradual over time or whenever you hit attack, though in some cases if you land a hit get an equal amount of health back. And everyone has their own version of this, even the guest characters.
 * Wizardry is fond of "cursed" (not removable without the special spell) items. A lot of them—including otherwise useful ones—also has negative Regeneration value and unless offset by equal or greater Regeneration from another item, drain a Player Character to death very quickly.
 * Nethack has the Amulet of Strangulation. It's usually generated cursed so you can't just remove it before it kills you. And it will kill you even if you happen to have unbreathing as an intrinsic (it cuts off blood flow). The only way to survive a cursed amulet of strangulation is to pray to your god.

Web Comics and Web Original

 * In Beyond the Canopy, it's strongly implied that the Remnant kills its anchor (a.k.a. the person who takes and uses it) after a few days. This is a problem because the protagonist, Glenn, is the current anchor.
 * Every other person, place, or thing cataloged by the SCP Foundation.

Western Animation
"Cornfed: Isn't there a legend about the Sharon? Huntz: Legend? I don't think so. Oh, I suppose you could find some peasant who would say the diamond is cursed...that its very presence can unleash the ghastly spirits of its former owners...all of whom died in unspeakable terror and agony, vowing to return to torment ANY WHO DARED TO POSSESS IT!!!
 * Happy Tree Friends takes this trope to its logical conclusion in the short "Treasure These Idol Moments". The idol found can kill off any Ridiculously Cute Critter in seconds.
 * Roger's golden turd, from American Dad. Two men discover it, and one kills the other so he can keep it for himself. He then kills himself by driving his car onto railroad tracks after he finds out his wife is cheating on him. Later, a cop investigating it steals the turd and takes it home, but regrets it and decides to turn it in because he's going to retire in a week and is afraid he'll be found out. His wife then poisons him to prevent him from doing this.
 * The Broodwich of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Anyone who ate the whole thing would be transported to another dimension where they would be axed to death.
 * In Aladdin: the Series, Mozenrath's gauntlet, which is the source of his power but is slowly killing him.
 * The short cartoon Awfully Lucky has the Paradox Pearl, which grants its holder incredibly good luck—followed immediately by incredibly BAD luck.
 * Played with in Duckman and Cornfed in Haunted Society Plumbers with a diamond called the Sharon Stone.
 * Beat*
 * Dramatic Thunder*"