Dark Fantasy Winning Features

The Shadow Trials - July 2023 Winner

Hell is Blue by ALBlacksmith99

The Professor --- Morella

Perched on the arm of her overstuffed, velvet sofa, Morella cradled a glass of 'not water' between fingers that had ink stains and smears of chalk, the sum of the evidence that she'd done anything today but nurse a bad temper on the rocks.

The moonshine was helping.

Staring at the ceiling, a ceiling she'd meticulously gotten the staff to paint with the intricate path of the heavens, solar systems and astrological star patterns made her office a downright delight to the scholar's plight, which is to say... thank god for the beautiful artwork above for distracting from grading piss-poor work.

The papers before her were, in all honesty, probably written forty minutes before they were due, all stacked on her coffee table before her. The sorry pile appeared more like a hill than the mountain it was supposed to resemble, and she knew it was simply foreshadowing the anemic theses of her dumb, first-year students.

She couldn't say she wished for more work, however.

She had marked one paper thus far, the scrolled parchment fouled by "extras" presumably from the night before and adorned with grammar that would make a sailor feel like an accomplished intellectual.

She snorted at the pukey page that lay before her, and she could feel her eyes pulsating.

She relished in the bright red "F" on the top of the page — artfully tucked between a stain that looked oddly like the supper from the night before and what was possibly sherry or balsamic vinegar (she couldn't decide) — and circled it to really drive home that fact that when a professor asks for an essay on the nature of astrology, you don't submit a haiku on why your "two-faced" boyfriend is a flighty asshole with his fingers in too many pies.

It could have satisfied her requirements if the student intended to tie it into the Pluto retrograde and determined the universe was telling her to evolve beyond her current circles, dump the douche, and be reborn, a phoenix in the ashes with renewed purpose, but no. The only thing vaguely astrological is "two-faced" which leads her to believe the boyfriend was a Gemini.

"Hmm," she said, observing the page again. "Is that... fucking corn?" Sneering at the page, she pushed it firmly away with a terse shake of her head.

For a moment, she felt pity for the student, but then she remembered... she didn't give a fuck. She wanted to do her own work, not be bothered with adhering to faculty necessities of educating the snotty shits of this pretentious town. Speaking of which...

"Well," she said to herself, putting her glass down and slapping her hands on her thighs as though she'd put in truly back-breaking work. "That was fun," she said dryly, moving to her window to observe the sky.

Squinting, attractively she knew, she tapped her chin and pondered things that were well worth pondering, such as 'what books should I ask the Library for today?' and 'I bet a cake would help me gain the courage to think about possibly maybe continuing to mark the papers'.

You know, the essential stuff.

Sliding into her leather, spinny chair, she used her foot against the desk for leverage to imitate the globe. She, personally, did not subscribe to the earth-is-a-ball theory, and, truth be told, she'd rather free fall off the side of the face of the earth than mark these papers.

She groaned and stopped spinning; the drink combined with the twirling business she'd just engaged in did wonders to awaken a feeling she decided she no longer wanted to participate in, but things had been put into motion that could not be stopped, and her stomach, weakened from no food and moonshine with ice as a mixer, heaved and whooped.