Luckily, nobody with the barest modicum of good sense is around.

Siran has been having a sufficiently shit day that he actually can't think of anything he wants to do more than find the nearest cursed city and fight it. This is obviously a stupid idea, but at least it's the kind of stupid idea where the only things likely to suffer damage are Siran and a cursed city, as opposed to the other stupid idea that he has had today, which was rather wider in scope. So. Here he is, armed with a bad mood and a magic sword.

The outer edge of the city still has some remnants of exterior defensive walls, however crumbled. Where the stone has fallen away, thick black hedges crowd into its place, bristling with thorns. The city doesn't seem to appreciate visitors.

He sets the hedges on fire.

They burn like ordinary hedges, though they give off thick clouds of oily-sweet black smoke.

Ordinary hedges don't burn fast enough. Luckily, Siran can fix that.

When there is nothing but ash left in this gap in the stone, he steps through it.

Fresh ashes kick up around his feet as he steps into the city proper.

Or at least an alleyway inside the city proper. The narrow pathway between the outer wall and the inner wall of the building is filled with more of the black, spiky plants, clinging in clumps to the ground, climbing the walls as vines, and twisting into the brickwork. Good thing he brought a sword. 

A flower opens on one of the nearby vines, its deep red petals almost as black as the stem it sits on.

...the flower's kind of pretty. He is not quite in too bad a mood to notice.

The flower has broad petals, and now that it's fully bloomed it's about a palm-width across. The stem it grows on has the same wicked thorns as all the other plants he's seen so far, and it has a faint note of the same oily-sweet smell that came off the burning hedge.

Cursed cities being cursed cities, it's probably horrible in some way, but it's still pretty.

He considers whether he would like to knock down a wall, and then decides to start walking instead.

There's quite a bit of alleyway, still filled with occasional hedges. A few turns onward, the alleyway is completely blocked by another dense hedge. 

More flowers open on the bushes and vines whenever he passes, all the same deep red color. 

He didn't let it get out of hand the last time; it's safe to use fire again. Hedges in his way can be summarily removed.

Then the hedges will not impede him! 

The alleys are rather twisty and similar, though at least the bloomed flowers let him see where he's already been. Where is there to go in cursed cities, anyway? 

This is less stress-relieving than he might have hoped.

After enough turns that he's thoroughly lost count, he draws his sword. The blade gleams with an unsettling shimmer and trails threads of power through the air. He starts hacking at the nearest wall. His sword is best at living things, but it can do stone and brick too if he puts some strength into it.

The wall gives way easily, already degraded by centuries of weathering. 

All the hedges around him burst into bloom, dozens of flowers suddenly standing out. Some of the blossoms are much more red than black. 

Huh. Interesting.

What's on the other side of the wall?

The inside of a rotted-out building, noticeably lacking a floor - though some of the opposite wall has fallen in, making the fall into the basement slightly less nasty so long as one doesn't land badly. 

... odd that he hasn't seen any doors in any of the other walls so far. You would expect more than blind alleyways.

It's a cursed city. A giant maze of blind alleys is not that remarkable.

...he builds an ice bridge to the other side of the building, and crosses it.

He emerges into a courtyard filled with flowering bushes. A broad avenue extends to his left and right: rightwards, he can see what must be the outer wall of the city. 

The other direction has a lot of stairs, but a white-walled palace stands at the top of the flower-lined ascent. None of it seems to have fallen over yet.

This city really has not been as hostile as advertised.

He starts up the stairs.

The hedges quietly close in across the base of the stairs once he reaches the first dais. 

'Kay.

The top of the next flight of stairs is also blocked by a thick hedge. 

What about after he sets the hedge on fire, what then?

The hedge refuses to burn, though it creaks faintly in the heat. The thorns gleam slightly: they look like black glass, each about two inches long, straight and sharp and buried in his throat and his eyes and his wrists and his ankles and his spine and a thousand other places as well.

The concussive crack of the plunging thorns only registers after his body is completely riddled with them, every joint punctured and locked stiff by the glass in his flesh.

—he doesn't hear it. He is kind of busy.

(The fire falters and fails without him.)

He might or might not notice the heavy vines that pull him off the path and into a waiting grave.

It's not so much that he notices as that after a few seconds to get over the initial shock he ignites at a temperature sufficient to vaporize stone.

The nearby hedges, the path beneath his feet, and all the glass thorns embedded in him summarily vaporize. Which is convenient, so long as you don't mind being thrown by the exploding stone beneath you. 

He comes down snarling, wreathed in white-hot flames, heedless of the heat. Fire hurts but fire is his. When he lands in his crater he is no longer quite hot enough to make another one, but the flames that seethe and crackle around him are definitely sufficient to ward off most trivial threats.

The hedges retreat, thinning away all around him.

He takes a deep breath and keeps walking. His aura of flame fades slowly. He's reluctant to let go of it, but it's hard to hold onto when it hurts so much.

Nothing immediately tries to kill him, but there are certainly plenty of stairs between him and the center of the city.

He keeps walking.

Would he care to step obligingly into another semicircle of thick hedges?

He'd really rather set them on fire—

—but he probably shouldn't, so soon after the last time. He goes after them with his sword instead.

There's another set of loud cracking sounds as the bushes' thorns leap for him - particularly his eyes and his sword arm. 

A lot of thorns meet his sword's aura of destruction and disintegrate before ever reaching him.

A lot, but by no means all.

His arm is mostly protected; his eyes have no such luck. He stumbles. Wavering threads of power billow from his sword's blade like nearly-invisible smoke, vaporizing everything they touch, but when they run into Siran they flow harmlessly over his skin.

- there's a slight click to his right as something shifts on the ground, and a whistle as of something sharp being swung - 

He flails his sword in that direction.

There's a sharp intake of breath, a sizzling noise, and then he no longer has a sword hand. 

Thorns slam into him from behind as his sword clangs against the ground, pinning him down with sheer weight and mass. 

He growls.

He just barely retains the presence of mind not to immediately light himself on fire again, but he can't think of an alternative, so he just—doesn't do anything. Except hurt. There is a lot of hurting going on here.

He's dragged away from his sword, face-down across the cobblestones, the vines closing in, crushing, thorns biting into his skin. It's not going to kill him anytime soon, but there is definitely a lot of pain going on. 

Well of course it's not going to kill him.

Seriously inconvenience, though, that one it's managing just fine.

Most of his attention is taken up by pain; he devotes the remainder to the very important task of not lighting himself on fire. He has no idea where his sword even went, he has no idea how close he is to the edge of the city, he could do some real damage if he let loose here the way his instincts are screaming that he should. He will not explode, he will not, he will fucking well not.

He never sees the swordblow that strikes his head from his shoulders.

He has a moment to notice that everything hurts a lot less all of a sudden, but not enough time to figure out why before he falls unconscious.

The Queen of the cursed city methodically dismembers the body, separating each limb at the joints with a butcher's finesse. Her vines drag the pieces away in five different directions, to be buried as far apart as they can be within the city's confines. 

She takes his head and heart for herself. With one last look back at the place where her challenger fell, she walks on inwards, towards the deepest dungeon of her small empire.  

She leaves her sword unsheathed for now, and a guard of flowers to watch each broken piece not under her personal care. 

The wide pool of blood she leaves behind remains still and silent... for another minute or so.

Then it starts to ripple.

It flows against the pull of gravity, bunching up in a space relatively clear of thorns. There keeps being more of it, piling up on itself, shifting and wriggling into uncertain shapes that flow into one another with no clear boundary between them. An amorphous blob at one end looks now like a head, now more like an arm, now a sloppy tentacle melting into itself and starting all over again; similar protrusions form and collapse and re-form in seemingly arbitrary locations.

Gradually, over the course of yet more minutes, the shapes refine their form and number and placement. He has a head and five limbs - three - four - three - no, four again - and now he's got bilateral symmetry, look at him go - and hands, fingers, toes even - a recognizable face, with a mouth and a nose and two eyes -

At the point where he has eyelashes, sweeping curves of wet blood curling up from the edges of his glossy red eyelids, he begins to solidify. A few seconds later, where there was previously an unsettlingly precise simulacrum made of fresh blood, now there is Siran again.

He opens his eyes. Blinks several times, to clear the blood from them. Wipes his face with wet red fingers - scowls - conjures a sudden shower of water to rinse away the mess.

Once he can see properly again, he looks around.

A small hedge stands guard over his discarded sword, a few yards away. 

Nothing stirs.

He's lost all his clothes in assorted violent incidents.

(What—or who—even was that? Well, he's not going to find out just standing here.)

He conjures another outfit, unusually plain for him; he's a little too frazzled still to concentrate on fashion. And then he reaches out and calls his sword into his hand.

The hedge's thorns snap around to follow the sword's path, blue flowers twinkling in their depths - 

But they don't do anything more. 

Well - fine.

He finds the path again, and starts walking.

There is the occasional small bush, but he is not confronted by any thick hedges for quite some time. 

The boulevard eventually ends at the steps of a somewhat more palatial ruin. Four pairs of stone double doors face the street, the fact that they're still standing despite their obvious wear a testament to their craftsmanship.