Vorgoloth Cinnabar, Dead-Raiser, Destroyer, Dark Lord of the Unmoving Rock, watched grimly through the scrying crystal as the last of his Night-Gaunts was cut down by a precisely-aimed Elvish blade. They had failed in their mission, though not completely. The Heroes still stood, but not unbloodied. The Elvish warrior had a ragged claw-mark against her collarbone; even with armour, the monster’s claws bit deep. The portly Cleric had his hand pressed against the fallen Mage. Vorgoloth looked on keenly; but the spellcaster finally came back to consciousness, drawing a halting, heavy breath.
The Dark Lord took a pinch of a certain powder, thrust it into the flame of a candle whose oddly-colored tallow and peculiar scent disquieted even his own his counsellors, who stood by him, their arms folded across their chests in an attitude of anxious impatience. Sound, muffled at first, began emanating outwards from the huge, clear gem, accompanying the limited but clear sight of the adventuring party.
“Keya, we can’t keep doing this. The Bard, one of the more inconsequential and annoying humans Vorgoloth had ever encountered, a person whose name the Dark Lord could never quite remember, was speaking now. He was good at talking; not at fighting, not at singing, not at the little cantrips he used to provide mild annoyance to those attacking his comrades—just good at talking. And staying alive; much as Vorgoloth kept hoping the idiot would be killed, the musician was wise enough to spend most of his time hanging on the edge of the battlefield, where the danger was least.
(More than once, the had considered summoning something from deep in the Lowerarchy to go straight after the bard. But that would have been foolish; certain humans can be extremely resourceful when it comes to saving their own skins, and it’s never wise to pay the price of High Magic simply to remove an irritation. If the Bard ever got close enough to being a threat…
….but the Necromancer had other insurance against that eventuality.)
The bard spoke with the earnestness of one who knows that he absolutely must convince the other. “Keya, we know the prophecy as well as you do. Once a year, on the Vernal Equinox, when the twin suns hit the rock in the place between light and shadow, the Chosen One can walk into this realm, and he holds within him forces never before seen on this world. He will come from a place where all magic is dead, so that the force within him has spent his whole young life pressing against impossible barriers, and in so doing, he will grow stronger than any. He shall be the one who is able to defeat the Dark Lord.”
If Vorgoloth really indulged in personal pleasures, he would have kept a list of the reasons he’d celebrate when Pigwen died.
They all knew these things. And yet, that idiot felt it necessary to repeat them, over and over. Why? Did he think that, the thousandth time he told this story, Keya would be more moved than the five hundredth?
The Dark Lord considered viewing something else—the battle in the Eastern dominions, for example, or the search for a few more ‘lost’ books of forbidden magery—but one did not rule an Empire by having a poor attention span. This gathering was important. This ragtag band of heroes were the carefully-selected companions for the Chosen One, each an extraordinary individual, and, in combination, a fighting force which had not been defeated, even by the armies of the Dark Lord.
(And the Dark Lord had to smile at the last. Survivor bias is a terrible thing. The first dozen pitched battles are bursts of adrenaline and fear, and the certainty of upcoming death; and, to be fair, he’d been putting reasonable effort into their deaths. And then, after that, it becomes one’s lived experience; they had survived so many near-deaths, and surely they would survive this one, as well. And eventually, they stopped questioning it. Meanwhile, most other adventuring bands had died. The world began to watch, Vorgoloth began to take a personal interest in them….
He hadn’t planned for things to end up quite like this, but even the most powerful sorcerer could not see the future well, and divination into possibilities was unreliable and tricky; he knew that better than anyone. All one could do was adapt to circumstances as best one might.)
Pigwen was still speaking: “For seven years have we returned to this spot, fighting our way through increasingly deadly forces. Our armies lie in ruins. Our kingdoms are laid bare. The Chosen One comes not forth; and if he did, it might already be too late.”
“We can no longer afford the pain of false hope, Keya. We need to end this quest, for our own safety, and carve out what lives we might.” He paused. “We all survived this day, but will that always be our fate? I cannot bear to think that one of our number will perish.”
The Elf was heartbreakingly beautiful; Vorgoloth didn’t really care about such things, but the bard was visibly smitten, and Keya, in turn, utterly oblivious to anything but her cause. Elves had a tendency not to realize True Love until just after having taken a fatal wound; it’s probably genetic, and helps keep the Elven population stable despite their irritatingly long lives. Vorgoloth had long speculated about the look on the bard’s face if and when that happened. He really, really hoped he’d be watching.
The Elf was unlike the bard; she was succinct. She said, very earnestly, “How can we stand by and see the world enslaved? We cannot give up. Even now, the Dark Lord’s forces loom over the land, threatening all we love.”
Vorgoloth turned to look at Skybreaker, who was Chief-of-Chiefs among the Giants of the North. The huge woman shrugged eloquently. They were Giants; they had no choices other than to loom, or crawl. And they’d done enough crawling before the Dark Lord came to power.
The bard—Pigwin, perhaps? Something like that—the bard shook his head. “I despise the Dark Lord as you do, with every fiber of my being, but this is hopeless.”
Behind them (but within easy view of the Crystal, which was semi-sentient itself and had a good sense for what to show) the mage Aftherath coughed. Vorgoloth hoped he might be spitting blood, but no such luck.
“He speaks true, Keya.”
“We cannot give up hope!”
The priest, who had been silent up until now, glanced over at Aftherath. Vorgoloth had a perverse fondness for the cleric; the sigil-waver wanted the Dark Lord dead, of course, but so did thousands of others. At least this one had never fulminated that Vorgoloth’s demise was demanded by the Gods.
In fact, Edwic the Seeker was the foe whom Vorgoloth respected the most. Edwic had been a small-town rector when the Dark Lord’s forces first stormed out of the night and carved the bloody beginnings of a blasphemous Empire. Edwic had used every ounce of mana at his disposal to hold off the enemy as long as possible, and to repair as many damaged bodies as he could, worrying a bit less about their soul than about their ability to continue living. When his little hamlet had been crushed, Edwic did not stop to mourn, but rather sought out ways to be of assistance to whatever remained of the bright and shining Kingdoms.
It shames, Edwic, I think, that the Gods have denied him so much of his magic now. Vorgoloth assumed it was shame; he could not read minds, but he could get some sorcerous measure of another spellcrafter just from a good, hard look. For some reason, Edwic had much less force of grace than he’d possessed even a few years before, and as neither the cleric’s body nor his mind seemed to have weekend, Vorgoloth had come to an ugly little confusion: Edwic no longer believed, very much, in the grace or goodness of the Gods.
And why should he? He’d seen his world shattered. He’d seen his home and family destroyed, and then he’d seen the homes and families of others torn apart, if they stood in the way of the Dark Lord’s ambition. The Gods were real; no-one who got magic through prayer could doubt such a thing. But if the Gods preferred a world that was not in the thrall of a necromantic despot, they gave no sign, and they gave no assistance.
Finally, it was Ixbal, the Mage, who spoke.
“Keya, it’s been seven years. The Chosen One is not coming.”
Had it been? Truly?
There’s much to do in the making of an Empire. There’s much to do in conquering a world. Vorgoloth was relentless; his war-chiefs were efficient, and organized. But he didn’t put much time into his personal life.
Seven years?
Seven beautiful, glorious years.
And…was this to be the icing on the cake? Vorgoloth made a pass over the crystal, and it pulled its sight closer to Ixbal’s face.
Ixbal did not look well. Once again, while his companions were in physical battle, he had sent his mind forth to do psychic combat with Vorgoloth Cinnabar.
For a long time, Vorgoloth had held back against the mage. This was not simple sadism, although tormenting his would-be mental assassin held pleasures. But Vorgoloth had a much greater concern. For the first few years, he hadn’t really known their respective strengths.
Vorgoloth was the scion of no noble house, the prodigy of no spellcaster family, the inheritor of no barbarian kingdom. He had been scarcely more than a child when his powers had manifested. He had been essentially an orphan, strange, misfit, misunderstood, abandoned, wandering.
When Ixbal’s mind has first found his, he had panicked. His astral body had turned and run, and he had very nearly been killed; he’d driven the mage back only with extreme difficult and at great psychic cost.
This had given Ixbal hope. Ixbal had thought him to be vulnerable, never realizing that the Dark Lord was merely ignorant at the time.
Heroes never really understood the path of Shadow. They saw it as an all-encompassing thing, one which might have been an eternal enemy.
They thought it all went according to some order: the Dark Lord was always there, dormant, but awakened at some point; and then the Chosen One would arrive; and then they would battle unto death and rid the world of Evil.
Had Ixbal known the age and knowledge of the sorcerer who’d first fought off his attack, he might have understood things sooner. But it wouldn’t have been a story he wanted to believe, and that made a fatal difference.
Keya was making a speech now. Vorgoloth, finally, was satisfied, and tuned her out.
They were demoralized; they were crushed. As they had been, increasingly, for a very long time. Still he watched them. They were formidable, and while he could not see any way they could pose him a serious threat at this point, he was careful. After all, the world is not always so kind as to make every threat obvious.
He also didn’t think they’d ever see what happened. And again, by now, he wasn’t entirely sure if the knowledge would help them. But he wasn’t going to take that chance.
There had been a Dark Lord when Vorgoloth, a mere stripling, had stumbled through the portal, ten years ago.
The Heroes weren’t fools entire; the various rulers of various nation-states had been combing every village, every city, every encampment for years, putting out word that there might be One living among them who could stop the Dark Lord.
They clearly had not considered the idea that the Chosen One might not want to do so.
Her name had not been ‘Vorgoloth’ then; training herself, finding, and slaying the warlord, and taking his place, had not been easy. Her raw magical force was more powerful than any in this world; but power alone isn’t enough. It’s why she’d studied, why she’d fought, why she’d apprenticed with Vorgoloth, and why, having killed him, she took his name and face. She was strong; she wasn’t unbeatable. Far from it. Like Ixbal, Vorgoloth had nearly killed her. And in the first three years of her reign, she’d been challenged many times. She had sufficient resources to defeat any attack she could imagine now; but it’s not usually the blows we anticipate which strike us hardest. So she kept up the masquerade; it wasn’t pleasant, but it was rewarding. She continued to rule, and to expand her dominion; and she hadn’t been killed yet. Being unable to find a smooth way to transition into her own skin and her own name….that was a problem for later.
Her eyes strayed back to the scrying stone. Once again, the companions had vowed to remain together and continue to fight Evil until the day they could find the Chosen One.
She was tempted, now as ever, to show them exactly where the Chosen One could be found. But one who reigns over a vast land must needs put personal pleasures aside sometimes. Their deaths would give her pleasure; but their lives were being lived out as Beacons of Hope, and even they didn’t know that they were pointing everyone in the wrong direction. They were her first line of defense against, ironically, themselves.
The Chosen One was, indeed, inherently stronger in magic than any inhabitants of this world. But that would never have been enough, not in itself. It wasn’t the power, but the will that mattered; and beyond will, it was strategy, planning, and sacrifice.
Vorgoloth/Jennifer, the One Who Chose Darkness, shrugged. She waved a hand and the image of the adventurers blurred out and went dull. “That’s that,” she said. “Looks like we’re still in the clear.” She looked around at her counsel, then turned back to the scrying stone. “All right,” she said. “Now show us the crop yields of the Eastern farms. I’d like to see if we broke the drought in time.”
