Artifact of Doom: Difference between revisions
→Literature
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** Things like this also turn up in his [[Nightside]] novels, but in weirder forms (e.g. the Speaking Gun).
* In P.C. Hodgell's ''[[Chronicles of the Kencyrath]]'', the Ivory Knife and the Book Bound in Pale Leather are this and yet not, in that they're given to the Kencyr by their God, and will be used by the three avatars of God, the Tyr-ridan. The Ivory Knife is the "very tooth of death", a pinprick from which is fatal, which rots and kills anything it touches. Heroine Jame keeps it in her boot sheath for the longest time.
* Horicruxes in the ''[[Harry Potter]]'' franchise. Simply creating one requires the user to murder another human, and Voldemort is the only dark wizard to ever craft more than one. (None other ever dared do so.)]] Crafting one allows an evil wizard to place part of his soul within the Horicrux, enabling him to live forever so long as the Horicrux remains intact. Well, sort of; depends on [[Came Back Wrong|how you define "life"]], seeing as the user becomes a horrid abomination, a dark parody of life.
* The short story ''[[The Monkey's Paw]]'' by W.W. Jacobs. The monkey's paw grants the user's wishes, [[Be Careful What You Wish For|but at a tremendous price]]. "''It had a spell put on it by an old fakir, a very holy man. He wanted to show that fate ruled people's lives, and that those who interfered with it did so to their sorrow.''" The thing was created purely to cause suffering. It's pure evil.
* ''[[The Wheel of Time]]'' has a ''city'' that acts like this. Shadar Logoth will quickly corrupt anyone who stays too long. This isn't much of a problem when you consider that people who enter will quickly get killed by Mashadar, an evil cloud that hangs over the city. {{spoiler|Mat Cauthon}} picks up a dagger on his stay there, and this acts the same way. He quickly succumbs to hating people, and is nearly killed by the taint of the dagger before he is finally separated and healed of the taint. However, Rand eventually finds a way to use the city against the [[Big Bad]] without being corrupted by it, namely by {{spoiler|making its power and the city's cancel each other out, albeit with the side effect of erasing the city and several kilometers of earth beneath it from existence.}}
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* Questing Stones are reputed to be this in ''[[Septimus Heap]]''. No Apprentice has ever retuned after having been dispatched with one of them {{spoiler|, until Septimus is given one and survives the Queste in ''Queste''}}.
* In [[Michael Flynn]]'s ''[[Spiral Arm|The January Dancer]]'', the Dancer, apparently. At one point two characters discuss whether one man who owned it had died when he disappeared—after all, all other owners have.
== Live-Action TV ==
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