The Dark Lord

by Jack Heckel

  “For obvious reasons, I really hate to cut your discussion short, but . . .” I pointed up at the sky.

  “Avery,” said Ariella, “I won’t pretend to understand, but there has to be another way.”

  “No, Ariella. The Dark Lord has to die. It will break the pattern.”

  “What about the key?” said Sam, holding it up. “Can’t we just—”

  “Sorry, Sam,” I said. “This is something that imagination and will won’t fix. I would ask though that once I’m gone you give the key to Vivian and let her go home. I promise you that she’s an innocent.” I reached over and brushed a few strands of hair out of her eyes. “She’s actually a lovely person when you get to know the real her.”

  I thought of one more thing. “Because that part of the pattern will be burned out, she probably won’t remember much of what happened while she was here. Please promise me you won’t tell her what happened to me. She will learn soon enough, but I’d rather she be at home among friends when she finds out.” I glanced at the silent faces. “You can tell her I left her behind.” I gave a short self-mocking laugh. “She’ll believe it.”

  I stroked Vivian’s cheek one last time, and then stood and walked down the steps to a place on the floor of the throne room that was relatively clear of orc ash. I went to my knees and grasped Death Slasher. The group followed me down and stood in a circle staring down at me.

  I looked at Valdara. “Whatever you choose to do, it is going to have to be Justice Cleaver that makes the last stroke.”

  Valdara was not able to meet my gaze. “I can’t do this, Avery. I’m a warrior, not an executioner.”

  “Look at me, Valdara,” I pleaded. She did and I saw the unshed tears in her eyes. “You are not an executioner. You are a savior to your people. Whatever happens, never forget that you are removing a great evil from your world. You are killing the Dark Lord.” She looked away for a moment and ran a finger across her eyes. “And, Valdara?”

  “Yes?” she said, looking back.

  “You are one of the most amazing people I have had the honor of knowing.” I looked about. “All of you are. And I want to thank you for the chance to know you.” I couldn’t help adding, “If it’s any solace, if this works, it will prove the thesis of my dissertation.”

  With that, I closed my eyes and lowered my head. A strange sense of peace came over me. For once in my life, I knew that I was definitely doing the right thing. I had a brief thought that it was a shame that it was the last right thing I’d ever do, and that I hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye to Eldrin, but who dies without a few regrets?

  I took a few breaths—savoring them. The time passed and I wondered how many breaths I would have to savor before she finished me. When more time passed, I opened my eyes and looked at Valdara. She was staring down at me with a cunning smile.

  “The storm really is going to be bad when it gets down here,” I said, and as the funnel was at the top of where the roof to the throne room had been, that wasn’t going to be very long.

  She ignored me and began barking orders. “Rook! Bring Vivian to me! Sam! Give me the key.”

  “I told you already,” I said, slightly frustrated. “She’s not to blame and the key won’t work. Destroying me is the only way.”

  “I’m not going to kill her, I’m not going to use the key, and you are not as clever as you think, Avery,” she said with a wink.

  Rook laid Vivian’s sleeping body on the floor next to where I kneeled and Sam placed the key in Valdara’s hand. She nodded in satisfaction and then dropped the key on the floor. Before anyone could react, she took Justice Cleaver and sliced the key in two. I felt the impact on a mystical level more than a physical one. My mind echoed with the force of the blow. In an instant I heard the music again, loud and bright. It was a song of freedom, the essence of a world unleashed. Reality energy twisted around Justice Cleaver and Valdara. She glowed with power, a goddess of light and justice.

  “Do you think I’m a complete idiot, Avery? Do you think I could have traveled with you this long and not have some understanding of how your magic works?” She pointed Justice Cleaver at me. “Dark Lord, by all the powers of this world, I condemn you and the Dark Queen and all of your kind to eternal exile.”

  Her words felt like an incantation. She meant to seal me and Vivian and every other Mysterium magi out of Trelari. With a great slashing motion of Justice Cleaver she rent a hole in reality. A portal, like a tear in a tapestry, opened and through it I could see Mysterium. It had worked! I realized with a sudden rush of joy that I wasn’t going to die.

  With a laugh I jumped to my feet, and then it struck me that I was being banished—forever. A deep sadness stole the laughter from my lips and the joy from my heart. For the last time I looked about at the people I had fallen in love with, drinking in every detail. There was so much that I wanted to say, but there was no time. The portal was already beginning to shut and the storm was now close enough over our heads that its winds were beginning to whip up the ash and debris in the room. It was time to go.

  Holding Death Slasher in one hand, I bent and lifted Vivian in my arms. I turned about so I could look at them all one last time. “Thank you, for everything. I love you all . . .” I said, and then lied to them for the last time. “And hope never to see you again.”

  With that rather cheeky goodbye, I stepped through the portal. I felt Death Slasher fade from my hand first. I never knew if it was aware of what was coming. The petty part of me hopes to the gods that it did. Vivian transformed next, losing the iron crown as the portal began to close behind us. I turned back at that point and watched as the fortress walls dissolved and beams of sunlight cascaded down on the group, my group.

  The golden age of Trelari had begun.

  Chapter 33

  ABD

  People say that you can never go home. I don’t know who these people are or where they live, but they’re full of it. I made it home just fine, thank you. Granted, the portal let Vivian and me out in the middle of a Magicology final, but that class is worthless so the students undoubtedly learned more about magic from our appearance than they had the previous fifteen weeks of the semester.

  Anyway, after escaping the proctors, I dropped Vivian in her room—literally. I dropped Vivian on the floor trying to carry her to her bed. Not my fault. The room looked like it had been ransacked, and I tripped over a stack of old class notebooks and a hair dryer before I’d made it two steps through the door. I didn’t know it then, but I would never see Vivian walking through those halls again, but that story comes later and I’m already way over my page count.

  Once I had her off the floor and into her bed, I made my way back to McKinley and my crappy dorm room. I opened the door. Let me repeat that. I opened the door! Apparently, Dawn fixed the doorknob in about five minutes with a couple of screws and a screwdriver.

  Eldrin and she were sitting on the floor, heads bent together over an enormous glowing map of Trelari. By the way Eldrin was rocking and shaking; he was upset. She had her hand on his back and was whispering to him. It was an intimate moment I wish they’d been able to have without me barging in, except of course I was the reason he was upset.

  It turns out that to follow my progress through Trelari, Eldrin had invented an incredibly powerful and complex scrying spell (that he has decided not to publish because of the privacy implications). When Valdara’s portal sealed behind us, my signal went blank, an indication in Eldrin’s mind that the entire world, and presumably me with it, was gone. I’m not sure that sorry covers something like that, but, Eldrin, when you read this, I’m still sorry.

  After the apologies and the inevitable good-natured insults that followed the apologies were done, we ordered a pizza and I got the whole story of how I came to be talking to Griswald and not Eldrin in those desperate last moments.

  “I’d been working on the new monitoring spell for a while.” Eldrin gave a furtive and haunted glance at the map he’d been examining when I entered.
“Anyway, I’d tuned it for Death Slasher . . .”

  “Wait, how’d you do that?” I asked, snagging the last piece of pizza.

  “Simple,” he snorted.

  “Don’t show off, Eldrin,” Dawn said.

  “It was,” Eldrin protested. “How many things in the multiverse are a mixture of Mysterium reality and 2A7C?”

  “Trelari,” I said firmly. “The world is called Trelari.”

  He nodded, but I could see he didn’t understand. Why would he, after all?

  “The point is, the only thing I know that has that composition is your stupid battle-axe. The spell found it right away and in five minutes it was clear the weapon was in Griswald’s office. The only question was when to get it.”

  Dawn rolled her eyes, which showed the classic signs of someone that has studied arcane morality for a number of years: pitch-black pupils surrounded by brilliant-white whites. “He means that he was delayed for a day or so because he was engineering a fault in the subworld observatory so no one would be able to track 2A . . . Trelari’s approach.” She turned to him and scolded. “By the way, I heard that they are going to need another month to fix the thing and that you also sabotaged the auraometer, which you only did to get back at the magus in your department that likes to look for burnt-sienna worlds.”

  “It’s burnt-umber and he’s an ass,” grumbled Eldrin. “All I wanted was five minutes on the auraometer to see if it could tell me anything about Trelari’s stability state and he refused because it was ‘reserved’.”

  “It’s still mean,” she said, but then casually rested her hand on top of his and intertwined her fingers with his.

  He glanced down at her hand and then up at me and blushed. In the future I would definitely need to give them lots of privacy.

  Pretending not to have noticed anything, I asked, “And Griswald?”

  Eldrin shrugged. “After the observatory, I cast an imperception field on myself and staked out Griswald’s office until he’d left for the evening. It should have worked perfectly, but I forgot about his stupid imp. Anyway,” he said, looking at me through his bangs. “I don’t know why you’re always complaining about Griswald. The guy was pretty cool about it, although he has some messed-up ideas about subworld quantum orbitals.”

  This reminded me that Professor Griswald had been very cool and very helpful, and that I hadn’t checked in with him yet. So, after a shower, which was blessed, I headed over to the Subworld Studies building. It was the middle of the day and Griswald always had office hours at this time.

  After waving my hellos to a few of my less-prickish classmates and picking up my mail, which was all junk, I made my way to his office. On the third floor, where the tenured professors live, there is always a hush to the air. The professors themselves are typically hiding from students behind closed doors, and the students won’t dare come up unless driven by desperation, because the typical professor’s answer to any question is extra work for the student. This made the fact that I found Griswald’s door partially open extremely unusual.

  I put my ear to the opening and could hear his imp wheezing away within. I knocked lightly and waited for an answer. When none came, I called, “Professor?” Still nothing. I pushed the door open and peered in.

  His office looked almost normal. The shelves that lined the sides of the long room still groaned beneath the weight of the papers and books that covered them, most of which hadn’t been read in thirty or more years. Beside the door, his blackboard was still covered with arcane magic circles, symbols, and equations, each one written erased, revised, and rewritten until what remained was an incomprehensible blur. The broad window behind his desk was open to catch the afternoon air, as it always was unless it was raining. And on a stand beside the desk sat his imp, a kind of part orange-haired monkey and part something you would expect to get if a witch doctor shrunk a grumpy old man down to around two feet tall. The imp stared at me and wheezed. That was normal. But two things about the room made me pause on the edge of the threshold.

  The first was that Griswald was not there. He was always there at this time. I don’t mean a kind of sometimes always, but an always. You could set your watch by Griswald’s schedule—secondhand included. Still, I might have been willing to overlook that oddity had it not been for his desk. After years of sitting across from professors as they hunted around for some vital piece of paper or a pen or paperclip or glasses or anything else, I can say that their desks are never clean. In fact, I am convinced that they are enchanted so that once a thing is placed on their surface it can never be removed again, which would explain why the quantity of things on a professor’s desk only increases over time. All of which is to explain why I got a sick feeling in my stomach when I saw that Griswald’s desk was bare save for an envelope, a single bound manuscript, and a small wooden box.

  I walked over to the desk and stared at the pile of things. There was a glow of magic around them. I looked at it out of the corner of my eye, which is the proper technique for examining such things. It was a personalized concealment circle, which are devilishly tricky to cast. A personalized concealment circle will reveal whatever it is concealing only to the desired person, but more than that, an advanced circle like this one actually makes the concealed items only exist for that person. This meant that I was the only one that could see and touch these things. To everyone else Griswald’s desk would be empty . . . unless he had other concealment circles meant for other people, but let’s not get lost in semantics.

  A note was stuck to the top of the box. It said, “To Avery Stewart, Congratulations and best of luck, Professor Griswald.” And in tiny lettering on the bottom: “3L9E.” It was the coordinate to a world.

  I tucked the note in my pocket and picked up the box. Something knocked about inside. I tried to find a lid, but after a few minutes I became convinced, despite the rattle, that it was made from a solid block of wood. I’d have to figure it out later, or more likely I’d get Eldrin to open it. He was mad about puzzle boxes.

  I took up the manuscript next and had to catch the edge of the desk to keep from falling. It was my dissertation! I flipped open the cover and found Griswald’s signature. I’d graduated! And there was another wonderful surprise. Paper-clipped to the inside cover was a letter from the editor of the journal Majic indicating that not one but two chapters from my dissertation would be published in next month’s edition, and one would be the cover article! I was a full magus and had a publication coming out in the most prestigious journal of magic.

  There is the joy of love at first sight and of seeing your child being born, but slightly below that and to the left (not that I have a child) is the feeling of completing your dissertation. If you have four or five years to spare I would highly recommend it.

  My elation lasted until I opened the envelope, which also bore my name in Griswald’s slanty scrawl. Inside was a short letter from my former professor that would change my life and the history of The Mysterium University, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This was what the letter said:

  Dear Avery,

  I’m sorry I cannot be there to celebrate the completion of your dissertation. It was either leave in the middle of the night (or midmorning as it were) or be taken away by force. It may not have been the courageous choice, but I chose the former.

  I am afraid that Vivian’s decision to enter your experiment has put you and her in grave danger. Had we known she was a subworlder we never would have shared the information we did with her. But we did and it nearly got the two of you, and many other innocent people, killed. For that, and many other things, I want to apologize. Only know that we have always had the best of intentions.

  While I have been able to cover up much of what happened in Trelari, there are those within Mysterium who know, and who will not like it. I have done my best to make it difficult for the university administration to discipline you by approving your dissertation (the easiest decision of my career), and by ensuring the publication of your resu
lts in a high-profile journal (although, truth be told, most of the credit for that goes to your exemplary work). I have also made my recommendation that you be put up for my (now vacant) position within the faculty in the Department of Subworld Studies. It would be unprecedented and cause an enormous ruckus within the faculty if they were to refuse that request. I hope this means that you will have additional good news soon, but do NOT relax and be careful!

  As you will soon find out, if you haven’t figured it out already, not all is as it should be in Mysterium. I hate to be dramatic, but there are dark forces at work within the university and they are not a group that you should trifle with. And yet I would urge you to do just that. Trifle! I’ve spent the better part of my career working with a group of triflers and I wouldn’t go back for any reason. In time, one of my trifling colleagues will contact you. You will have to decide your own course. All I will say is that Mysterium is wrong, but it will be up to you to discover why for yourself.

  Assuming my plans work and you become a professor, you will have a great deal more free time. That is one of the best perks of the job. Use that time to think. The more time you spend thinking, the more you will come to realize how wrong Mysterium is. I had my own epiphany while sitting on the quad one day watching a group of novices playing invisible plasma Frisbee. Never forget to go and sit in the quad now and then. It’s really a lovely place.

  Enjoy whatever comes next. I doubt that we shall see each other again. It has been a privilege and an honor being your mentor.

  Warmest regards,

  Prof. Eustace K. Griswald

  P.S. Please take care of Harold for me. He is too set in his ways to want to leave the university. He is a good imp, and only bites when he’s hungry. I’ve left his asthma medication in my top left-hand desk drawer. A final tip: butterscotch candies—he loves them.