The Dark Heir (SHORTLIST - Open Novella Contest 2019)

Miracles Abound; Also Destruction

Gerald may have been just a magician, but he was also gifted with the second sight. This manifested itself in a showing of auras around people, which usually told him a whole lot of utterly useless information about them.  If he had been a more enterprising and less scrupulous sort of man, he could have become wealthy through blackmail, but he wasn't, and he considered his second sight to be a mildly unpleasant curse most of the time.

On this day though, all of his usually unpleasant gifts were made extremely useful when he saw Lorred D'Kay walk up the stairs into the castle entry hall. He had never seen an aura like Lorred's. It was blacker than the night sky with fire and lightning shooting out randomly here and there, and seemed to stretch back to eternity. On his head perched the image of a bloody crown made of human bone.

Thankfully Gerald's second sight also told him the meaning of his visions, which was good because it was generally an underrated and understudied magic, and if the possessors of it had had to guess at the meanings, they would have all gone insane. Lorred's aura didn't really need any explanation, because fire and darkness and an eternity of pain and suffering pretty much make themselves apparent to the beholder instantly.

Gerald used all of his abilities of being an extremely plain, and easily forgettable, man to press himself against the far wall and go unnoticed. It was a job well done, for what he didn't know is the Dark Lord was particularly keen on finding and shutting up those with second sight.  They were the only ones who could really see him, and he'd already dispatched three on his way to the castle.

One he turned to soup and ate for dinner.  One he turned into a bug and then stomped on just when the woman-turned-bug thought she might escape into the grass.  The last he killed by stabbing in a duel because it had been a long time since he'd dueled anyone and was keen on feeling his sword plunge into human flesh, and really enjoyed seeing the surprised look in his opponent's eyes who was sure the sword had been in his other hand.

It had been, but then he wasn't a Dark Lord for nothing.

Gerald might not have been so lucky if it weren't for the fact that the queen descended the marble staircase at the back of the hall just as Lorred ascended the front hall stairs. While there had been an initial hullabaloo surrounding what precisely the queen had done with her singing, the king quickly hushed everything up with a lot of gold and more than one sexual favor. Those who wanted the later really didn't care what the queen was doing and mostly wanted an excuse to play tummy sticks with the king.

The queen was looking radiant that morning, for everything she had done which caused the aforementioned hullabaloo was done with the express purpose of calling Lorred D'Kay to her, and she was aglow with success, and also a lot of glitter. She'd put on a very good front for those few days, but in reality years of marriage with no hope of intimacy, children, or any chance of divorce (this was only a thing in the land of New York City, as shown in the tales of Robin of "The Hood," where there seemed to be quite a lot of it going on), despondency finally got the better of her, and her sanity sagged a bit under the prospect of eternal virginity.

Her desperation for an out from her bejeweled prison opened her heart to The Book Of D'Lorde, which appeared to have been misplaced at some point by a librarian. It was in the cooking section rather than the religion section.  The later is where she first searched for an answer to her woes and, like so many before and after her, found only disappointing metaphors and promises of freedom after death.

The Book of D'Lorde (which is another name Lorred D'Kay was given over the millennia) was never actually incorrectly shelved. Like most religious miracles, The Book always appeared to the one who needed it at precisely the moment of their greatest vulnerability, wherever they were standing at that moment.