The morning after the chosen’s first night in the castle, the princess is kind enough to show him around the evil castle of dread and terror while you have a meeting with your generals in the evil strategy room of underhanded plotting and scheming. The enemy is employing light magic to scorch the farmland near the borders of your kingdom, shriveling crops and burning small villages to the ground, leaving destruction and death in the wake of their recently begun invasion. One of your sneaky scouts of nosiness, Gregory, is too terrified to speak at first of what he’s seen, but you provide him with a blanket and a hot cup of wicked leaf-water of deepest blackness so he can comfortably gather his thoughts and process what he’s witnessed. He wraps his tail around his leg nervously, clasping his clawed hands as he tries to form the words.
“Th-the enemy, my lord. Th-they’re using h-healing magic as a t-torture method! I-I was the only one of my scouting party to escape capture, a-and I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t bare to observe for long before it was t-t-too much. I-I panicked, your evilness! The way they made their skin boil and swell with cancerous growths a-and…oh dark gods below, the bones, the protruding bones!”
Your hand rests on the lower right side of your rib cage, where you can still feel the stumps of the bones that grew outward and pierced through your flesh all those years ago. You know from experience what those scouts must be going through, and though you’d never show it in front of your subjects, you’re terrified.
As he finishes his tale, Gregory breaks down into sobs, begging for forgiveness from his captured comrades under his breath. You gently tell him it’s alright, that there was nothing he could have done. At least by running away he ensures that this information got back to you. You make a vow to him that the crimes of the enemy will not go unpunished. Once Gregory has been led out of the room, the door closing behind him, you lean back into your spiky black chair at the head of the map table and rub your temples. You ask Jerry if that was the last of the scouts who returned today. He says yes, that was the last one. You thank the gods below, and begin planning a counterattack on the borders, as well as a rescue operation for the captured scouts. You have faith in their capacity to resist revealing valuable information to the enemy, but with torture methods like that…
You push the thought out of your mind for the time being. You have faith in your evil minions, and the amount of subtle manipulation of impressionable children you have to do per day has recently doubled. Over the next few weeks, you start teaching the chosen one how to properly wield a sword. He’s a quick learner, and though you’re still much more experienced and can effortlessly defeat him in a serious match, you know from experience that minions tend to learn better from positive reinforcement, so you’re sure to point out what he’s doing well just as often as you criticize him. The princess sits in on many of your practice sessions with the chosen one, and though she shows no interest in wielding a sword herself, she does pay enough attention to be able to shout out advice to him mid-sparring match, which the chosen one says he doesn’t mind. The two of them were fast friends from the start, and having lived together for almost a month now, they’ve become quite close. Good, you think, rubbing your hands together menacingly. Strong bonds of trust between your minions makes them more powerful. Together with the two of them, you will conquer the enemy kingdom and expand your empire in all its dark glory.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Ethan. You’ll choke.” The princess chides.
The chosen one takes a moment to swallow his food. The three of you are having a picnic atop the all-seeing watchtower of evil oversight, enjoying the view of your land from high up.
“Everyone’s the hero of their own story, right?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“So why do you go out of your way to make yourself seem evil and scary? Don’t you think you’re on the side of good?”
You take a pause to think how to answer. “Oh, well, plenty of reasons, not the least of which being that it’s amusing coming up with overly complicated titles for all the more mundane aspects of my life. But I suppose it’s just that I decided that I didn’t need to prove myself to people who judge based on superficial things like appearances.”
The children watch you intently as you take a bite of your Dark Ham Sandwich of Broken Dreams. It seems they want you to elaborate. You swallow the bite, then continue.
“In my youth, I was feared and hated just by nature of the type of magic I used. Dark magic, they called it. It perplexed me, the superficial reasons for which they would argue that my magic was inherently immoral. Why was necromancy considered evil? Those people are dead, it’s not like they need their bones for anything anymore. Why do we have all these peasants barely getting by, working themselves to the bone in the hot sun, when we could re-purpose the skeletons of the dead and triple our crop output? And sure, demons don’t tend to be beautiful by conventional standards, but I’ve found that they’re fair to a fault, they follow rules to the letter, they have a strong sense of justice, and they enjoy games quite a bit. It seemed to me that they’d make stellar lawyers and government officials. They punish wicked souls in the underworld, yes, but the key word is wicked! I never understood why people frowned upon creating contracts with them. So, eventually, I suppose I gave up trying to fight their perception of me and embraced it instead. I decided I wouldn’t just use dark magic, I’d be a dark lord, king of demons and commander of an army of the undead! I began reanimating a lot of corpses to help me build my empire, had them work at night instead of in the day so they wouldn’t burn to ash in the sun. I recruited other black magi and taught them what I knew about efficient use of undead for manual labor. I started making contracts with hordes of demons, offering them reasonable pay and homes of their own if they’d come live and work in my empire. 200 years I spent building a nation from the ground up. Another perk of dark magic is that it tends to extend your lifespan. With necromancy, dead tissue can be reanimated, and after playing games with demons for fun for about 20 years you get good enough at it to be able to beat the grim reaper in a wager for your life with relative ease. Not that my dozens of active demonic contracts don’t make me functionally immortal in and of themselves. If I die, my contracts become void and all my demonic servants go back to hell, and I’m told they’d rather stay here for as long as possible if they can help it. No stars in the underworld.”
The children stare at you for a moment.
“Two hundred years?!” The princess exclaims.
“Is that why you never take that helmet off? Is it just a skull underneath?” The chosen one asks.
You laugh. You inform the chosen that no, it isn’t a skull, just rather grotesque. You promise to show them both once they’ve finished eating and you’re out of the sun. You burn rather easily in the day.
Later that night, you’re tucking the small princess into bed when she asks you something. She says she was always told back home that light was good magic and dark was bad, but all she’s ever seen light magic used for was to hide any visible bruises before she could make a public appearance, and from what she’s seen, dark magic seems to be the good magic. You pass her her stuffed animal and tell her that in truth there’s no good or bad magic. Magic is a tool, and any type of magic can be used for great good, or great evil. There’s no bad magic. Just bad people. As you blow out the candle and walk out of the princess’s chambers, she calls after you.
You pause in the doorway.
“I don’t think your face was that gross.”
“Yes, well I’m sure it was mere coincidence that Ethan threw up his lunch after seeing it. Goodnight, Penelope. Sleep well.”
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