‘Bring me the god slayer’ Althu-urk bellowed.
Sweeping his crooked fingers downward in a scything slash, the Demon-wizard of the quantic steppe cut through the plume of noxious green haze that billowed from the dread-cauldron before him and caught an unexpecting underling across the back of its head.
Drawing himself up to his imposing full height, the Demonic regent Althu-urk let out a single triumphant laugh as the Dorilorna tesseract lay before him now completed. Three lines of evil almost impossibly converged by the twisted magic of a time before reason, a time before gods.
Dipping his hand into the concoction of broiling viscera, Althu-urk muttered a seven thousand year hex and beseeched the dead gods of Anumum Moria that this new poison may send verdant fields barren and decay the ocean’s tide.
‘What concoction of twisted, vile, derangements be’ith within this vessel m’lord?’ Cortney the ghoul lisped through a barren lower jaw and his dentally overcrowded mess of an upper palate. ‘Oh mighty one, for whomst rivers of blood shall twist and coil through the landscape so that they might spell thine own name; he who claims the souls of past and future as his trophy; he who–’ Cortney continued with his beeshement for some time… ‘–and lay no misplaced sock found.’ Fully completing his bow, the hunchbacked Courtney untangled himself from his knees and resumed a suitably sniveling posture.
‘Fool!’ The dread lord spat hesitantly–he had yet to commit Courtney’s name to memory and it had now been too long into their working relationship for him to ask what it was without it being awkward–,‘I have formulated a poison of such malice that the stars will hide their radiance in fear of being noticed, an elixir of maddening evil, beyond that of the totality of human corruption, a draught of such deadly ingredients that no page could contain the recipe of this ichor, be it in scrawl or in symbology. Oils that an alchemist would hardly care to sell; herbs that the Druids of the Eastern Gate would describe as inorganic; funguses that even cave trolls would turn down on account of them being a bit too runny; I have assembled all these horrifically affordable ingredients and then combined them into something truly evil.’
‘Affordable?’ Courtney questioned, forgetting his place and mildly taken aback by that choice of adjective.
‘Yes oh cretinous one! Only the cheapest, most disgusting ingredients from each corner of the seven kingdoms. I have assembled this poison from things that shouldn’t be sold, things that even the most immoral peddler would consider throwing away…if given enough time.’
‘Well the seven kingdoms isn’t really that big-’
‘SILENCE!’ Althu-urk bellowed, hoping that his underling wasn’t beginning to question how much money was left in the Doomvaults. ‘Now fetch some jars from the neighbour’s recycling, we must sell this post haste.’
{——–}
Some days later in a tavern quite structurally imbalanced from the scars of thrown axes and errant sword swings, a knight made a flippant comment that had bruised the ego of Benson Coppersnatch, lord of Mudflat and coward supreme.
From a vile, marked with the symbol of death, he laden this knight’s wine with poison and awaited his victory.
An hour had passed and yet illness had not overtaken his quarry like the potion seller had promised. In fact, not only did the knight’s eyes keep their normal levels of bloodlessness, it also seemed that his acne had slightly cleared.
This would not do. Not only had Benson paid a good sum of money to buy this poison from that walking monstrosity of tooth decay, he had risked his life doing this for absolutely no result.
Letting the fury of curiosity overtake him, Benson gathered up enough bravery to question this knight.
‘Good sir!’ He paused to make his voice take on less of an accusatory tone, ‘might I have a moment of your time?’
Looking over toward the twisted knot of emotions that was befalling the small man who just spoke to him, Sir Boris the unpoisoned, slid a chair outward and gestured for the man to sit down.
‘I’ve come to ask how you are, err…feeling?’ said Benson, deciding not to sit down and instead holding the chair in front of himself as a slight barricade. ‘Well? No cough, water on the lungs, that kind of thing?
‘I am fine,’ Replied Boris ‘Are you a doctor by chance? Do I look pale?’
‘No, quite the opposite–vexingly–are you sure that all’s well? No chance of even a small amount of nausea?’
‘Not at all friend, I feel quite well to be honest.’
Waving goodbye to the strange little man, who looked to be simultaneously at the point of abject rage and outward depression, Sir Boris coughed with the sudden onset of a slight hiccup.
Feeling somehow bolstered in strength the knight loudly laughed to the bartender, ‘Ha, goodman! This merlot has a mighty kick to it, I feel like my top lip has gone numb…wait, have I grown a moustache!?’
And so ends the tale of Sir Boris, the unpoisoned of Pinkerly valley, a knight of good fortune and conflictless existence. His story shall forever be etched into the memory of those who saw him blossom into a fully grown man that night.
Through sheer masculinity alone, the once pimple-faced Boris not only willed a full and glorious moustache into existence, but then winked at a scullery maid and caused her to promptly faint, albeit that may have been from a long day on her feet and a lack of hydration.
We may never know.
J.McCray
2020
Sunday Short Stories 