This was news.
But it wasn’t what I’d call GOOD news. This wasn’t one of those happy “your life is going to change” moments. It was more of a sad “your life as you know it is about to end” one. So I snatched the scroll from the orc’s hand and ran straight to the general’s tower.
Actually, it’s our tower. I live with General Gareth Gorey, Commander of the Orc Legions and Regent of the Grim Folk. He’s the guy who took charge of things when Mom and Dad disappeared in that cloud of smoke. He was my dad’s most FEARED military commander and he promised to watch over me should anything ever happen to my parents. I’ve lived with him ever since Mom and Dad evaporated. And by “lived,” I mean cowered in absolute fear.
As I approached the tower, I found him standing in the doorway, huffing and puffing as he always did. The old orc has a perpetual scowl, the sort of look that could silence a dragon or make a harpy stop and think twice about screeching. He snatched the scroll out of my hand just as quickly as I’d taken it from the orc.
“We’re not ready for war,” he muttered as he read. “The ogre chieftain and the goblin queen are arguing about THEIR borders,” he grumbled. “And we can’t fight the elves if we’re already fighting each other.”
His announcement wasn’t a huge surprise. Since I was heir to the dark throne, Gorey tried to keep me abreast of military matters. I’d heard rumblings about the growing unrest. I knew the state of the grim world was rather . . . well, grim.
Ever since my mom and dad vanished, things have been a mess. The orcs have never had an orc king or queen—they’re just too disorganized to pick one. Maybe that’s why they were the first to bow to the Dark Lord—the ones who named him the Lord d’Orc. The rest of the grim folk have their own leaders. And at one time, those leaders served and obeyed my dad. The Dark Lord united the grim folk, but we haven’t had a proper Dark Lord in a decade. Gorey’s just the regent, which is kind of like a substitute teacher. They do the same thing as a real teacher, but no one respects them or pays them any attention. He’s got none of my father’s awe-inspiring powers, or my mom’s. He might be a fearsome fellow, but it takes the almighty power of someone like my dad to keep the grim folk in line. If Gorey tried to lead our people into war, the goblins, witches, warlocks, orcs, and ogres would just end up fighting with one another, acting like a bunch of grimmies trying to check their ranks on the Brute List—and we all know how THAT turned out.
“The elves won’t stop at one attack,” Gorey growled. “They’ll keep at it until they find a way through the hedge!” He looked up and locked his eyes on mine. “When the elves make their way east, Wick, it’ll be open war!” He raised a stubby finger and pointed it at me. “And we can’t gather the grim folk to battle without a DARK LORD!”
Just to make things clear, when Gorey says “Dark Lord,” he’s talking about me.
I’m the one who needs to rise up and unite the grim folk. The Dork Lord. The kid who couldn’t even make the Brute List.
In the 1,011-year history of our people, the grim folk have never fought a war without a Dark Lord.
I grew up hearing stories about the breathtaking acts of sheer malevolence my parents accomplished. Gorey had told me how Dad would call up a swarm of locusts while Mom brewed a tornado of smoke and ash. Together they’d turn a bright and sunny battlefield into a darkened nightmare of shadow and flame.
That’s my legacy. Those were my parents. The Dark Lord and Dark Lady. And now it was time for me to fill their grim and steely boots.
Unfortunately, that was going to be a bit of challenge.
There’s more to being the Dark Lord than I’ve let on . . . in fact, there’s something we haven’t even discussed. And that’s no accident. This story would scare anyone who wasn’t out of their mind. This is the really frightening stuff—the darkest part of my already dark story.
Gorey had told it to me about a hundred times, but apparently that wasn’t enough, because he went ahead and said it ONE MORE TIME.
“To claim your dad’s throne, you must undertake the most perilous quest imaginable, the Journey to the Chamber of Mystery,” said Gorey. Then he dropped his voice a little lower, like he always did—just to make this next part seem more dramatic. “You’ll need to duel with creatures of astonishing strength and unthinkable evil: a giant cyclops, a fanged vampire, and a giant-fanged vampire cyclops. And you can’t do it alone. You need to fight your way to the finish, and it will take an army of loyal and trustworthy followers to do that, Wick!” Then he dropped his voice even lower, to an octave that I hadn’t even known existed. “When you stand before the Chamber of Mystery, you can’t just WALK into it and claim your crown. No! You must PASS through a searing wall of FLAME—through a cascading waterfall of fire and smoke! That’s how you take the throne!”
I shivered a bit. Even the thought of smoke makes my eyes water. I knew the story. But here’s the truth: I thought our truce with the faire folk meant I could take up the journey in another decade, or maybe two. I assumed I had years to master my skills as a warlock AND a leader. But man, was I WRONG.
It was all happening NOW.
“I’m not ready,” I sputtered.
“Not ready?” Gorey hollered. “Hell’s bells, boy. You’re not even close! YOU need to make a plan of attack! You don’t have your father’s magic. So you’re going to need to find some other way to attract that horde of followers. From this moment on, I’ll want regular status reports on your progress. Time’s up. Your mission starts now!” Gorey scratched his horns, huffing and puffing while he thought. “I’ll send every available orc to the hedge. We can probably hold back the elves until the end of the year, but that’s all I can promise. So get to work!”
The end of the year was only six months away. That was it. That was all the time I had left.
I raced off to my room, and the general sat down at the feast table, grumbling to himself about the coming war and cursing under his breath. I was forced to close my door just to silence his gripes. I had a lot to think about. The whole future of the grim folk was on the line. And, worse yet, tomorrow was the first day of school, so I knew I’d have to face all those grimmies who saw me fail at the Brute List.
In the past, stuff like that list hadn’t bothered me, but today it did. I didn’t have decades to gather my horde. I had to do it NOW, which was kind of a problem, given my questionable reputation as the Dork Lord and my generally low level of skill as a warlock. I wasn’t ready for a harrowing, death-defying trek into a perilous land.
And I definitively did NOT have an army of followers. Heck, I didn’t even have a band of disciples. A small group would be impressive. Maybe twenty or thirty strong-backed ogres? A dozen orcs? Six warlocks? But no, I had only two friends: Oggy, my half-orc, half-goblin schoolmate, and Hal the dragon.
That was it. Two followers. An army of two.
My father had thousands of followers when HE marched on the chamber. How did Dad do it? Gorey says he taught himself powerful, mind-blowing spells at an impossibly young age. But even with all that raw power, it took HIM four years to raise his army. I don’t know if I’ll have six months or six weeks to gather MY followers.
I had work to do. So I spent the whole day planning. I found an old journal and scribbled down my ideas, chronicling everything that had happened since yesterday. Becoming the Dark Lord was going to be one tough task, so I guessed future grim leaders might want to know how I did it. Also, if I took up this mission, there would probably be a lot of blood and gore. In general, people LOVE to read about that kind of stuff, so I figured I ought to write it all down. I was about to embark on a grave and terrible journey—a path that would lead to struggle, turmoil, triumph—and, let’s face it, probably a good bit of humiliation.
But most of all, it was going to be epic.*
I scribbled in my journal until I came up with a plan. Well, maybe it wasn’t actually a plan. I didn
’t have all the details worked out. But I PLANNED ON HAVING A PLAN sometime in the VERY near future.
I did have a name, though.
OPERATION DARK LORD
MOANDAY
At long last, I was ready to take the first step toward becoming the almighty leader of the grim world. My army of two just wasn’t going to cut it. No way!
It was time to assemble my legion.
Unfortunately, before I could start gathering that horde, I had to go to school.
Today was the first day of class at Nightshadows Academy for the Grim and Dreadful. Yep, even the son of the Dark Lord Who Vanished has to go to school. No one gets out of it. (Believe me, I’ve tried.) But there’s no special academy for future great and terrible leaders. Even if there was one, it would be really small, since I’m the only kid the Dark Lord sired.*
No. I go to school with everyone else. And because I didn’t want to show up alone, I met up with my best friend, Oggy, before class. It wasn’t hard to spot him. He’s half orc, so he’s a really WIDE friend. Actually, he’s as wide as three warlock friends.
“Hi, Oggy,” I said. But he just nodded his head, which was no big surprise. Oggy isn’t the sort of guy who can focus on more than one thing, and he appeared to be locked in a minor scuffle with a gremlin. That thumb-sized thing was putting up an ogre-sized fight. He was tearing the threads out of Oggy’s pocket, which was sort of a bad idea, because the gremlin was sitting in that SAME pocket.
“He’s going to fall,” I said. If that little monster pulled out one more thread, Oggy’s pocket would burst open. “Seriously, he’s going to go splat when he hits the cobblestones.”
Oggy shook his head. He was still trying to grab hold of the gremlin, but his enormous half-orc fingers were just too big to pinch the little guy.
“Oggy!” I raised my voice. “I didn’t see you in the courtyard this weekend,” I said. “You missed the Brute List. Where were you?”
“Oh yeah. Sorry about that,” said Oggy, still distracted by the gremlin. “I found this little guy in the dungeons, and his leg was broken, so I spent Sadderday and Sullenday helping him make a cast.” I peered closer and saw that the gremlin’s leg was indeed covered by a miniature cast made of very fine thread and some sort of goo, possibly earwax.
I was all out of patience, so I reached over, pinched the gremlin between my thumb and forefinger, and dropped him into one of about a dozen other pockets that Oggy had sewn to his tunic.
“He can’t help it . . . They love to take things apart,” Oggy said as he patted the gremlin on the back.
“I can see that,” I replied. “Anyway, I’ve got news.” I needed to talk about the Brute List and Operation Dark Lord, but the first bell rang before I could get in another word. School was about to start.
Nightshadows Academy for the Grim and Dreadful occupies the twelfth of the thirteen great towers that surround the castle courtyard, but it’s a REALLY big courtyard and our school is at the far side of it . . . so we had to hustle.
Oggy and I just made it through the door before the bell rang a second time and the gatekeeper—Mr. Necklebottom, who’s a troll—slammed the door shut. Trolls are natural gatekeepers, so if you’re even a second late, he’ll shut that door in your face and laugh. In fact, he still laughed at us. We were clearly running late and had to hurry up the steps.
Nightshadows Academy is separated into three schools. The Grunt School sits on the bottom floor of the tower. That’s where the little grimmies learn the three R’s: raiding, ransacking, and ’recking. Last year, I graduated from Grunt School, so I headed up to the second floor, which houses our secondary school, otherwise known as Middle Ages School. Oggy is two years older than me, so we went our separate ways. Today, he started the Eighth Level of Darkness, while I started the Sixth. He ran off down a dimly lit corridor, and I went looking this way and that, searching for my first class. Luckily, I found it just before the third and final bell rang, announcing the start of the school day.
I settled into the only open seat as Professor Blackwood wrote the word history on the board, which seemed kind of unnecessary given that history WAS the first class on the schedule. It was also written on the door and on our textbook, which was titled History: Things That Happened in the Past by Andronica Dire, Historian. But the class was half filled with ogres, so maybe it WAS a good idea to remind us of the course name.
Blackwood was a tall fellow, and he wore powerful wire-rimmed glasses that made his eyes look twice their normal size.
He asked us to open our history books and turn to chapter 897. It was titled “Legacy of the Dark Lords: The Disappearance of Abaddon Bal Gorath and the Fate of His ‘Successor.’” I didn’t like the way successor was written in quotes. Also, as I skimmed the introduction, I found two or three paragraphs dedicated to the “dreadful state of the grim folk.” And in them the author used words like dire and hopeless to describe our future. There was even a section titled “Will the Grim Folk Survive?” I wanted to shout, YES! But yelling at my history book would only have earned me a round of laughter. I wanted to keep a low profile after the whole Brute List debacle, so I just sat there and waited for the professor to speak.
After twice clearing his throat, Blackwood said, “We’re going to learn our Dark Lord history this year. Wick, will you please describe Dark Lord Day?”
I groaned. Everyone assumes I am an expert on my parents, but I was only two years old when they vanished. I don’t remember anything about them or the battle or anything else, but I’ve heard the story about a thousand times, so I went ahead and repeated it.
“On Dark Lord Day, we celebrate the Dark Lord Who Vanished, my dad, Abaddon Bal Gorath the Terrible, the seventy-ninth Dark Lord of the Grimhold and the last in a line that stretches back one thousand and eleven years. A decade ago, when the faire folk attacked the dark and intimidating but otherwise peaceful Grimhold, my dad fought their ultra-vain, super-pompous leader, the ‘good wizard’ Galorian. The battle raged for three weeks. And in the final confrontation, the great spell casters met in the throne room of the Grimhold. Galorian struck the Dark Lord and Dark Lady, aka my dad and mom, with his enchanted Sword of Seemingly Unquestionable Truth. It made my parents vanish into a cloud of smoke. Only my dad’s scepter remained, which was a good thing. My parents had put a piece of their magic in it. So even though their bodies were struck down, their spirits survived. Galorian had won the fight, but his victory lasted about two seconds,” I said.
Then I told them how Galorian blundered into my dad’s throne of black and broken glass and cut himself into a million pieces. It’s my favorite part of the story, so I may have gotten a little carried away with the details. I described every inch of the throne. I talked about the mounds of broken black glass and the glistening steps that led up to them, the braziers that swirled with white-hot flame and the lava that spilled out of them. Then I went on about Galorian and how he slipped on the glassy stairs. “I think his arm landed in a pool of lava and his head was never found,” I added with a shrug.
“Yes, Galorian was always a BIT of a klutz,” said Blackwood, cackling. Then he asked the class what happened next. Rats Wormfinger, our resident Dark Lord wannabe, immediately raised his hand.
Apparently, Rats’s great-great-great (not sure how many greats, but I know it’s a lot) grandfather was a Dark Lord. I know this little fact because Rats NEVER fails to mention it. Honestly, I’ll say something like, “What a grim day,” and Rats will reply, “Yes, I think every day must have looked like this one when my grandfather was the Dark Lord.” Seriously, he talks about the guy like he ruled yesterday. But that Dark Lord reigned over our lands four or five hundred years ago, and he was just their in-law. Still, Rats and his dad act like they’re next in line to be the Dark Lord if I ever kick it or that wall of flame fries me.
I’ll be honest here. I’ve heard there are plenty of ways to die on the quest to th
e Chamber of Mystery. Everyone knows this, and I’m sure Rats has pictured me in each of them. But our tradition says that I get the first crack at the Chamber since I’m the heir to the dark throne. However, if I fail, it’s pretty much open season. Anyone who can gather an army and summon powerful, breathtaking feats of magic can give the quest a shot, but remember, I get to do it FIRST.
So I threw my hand up again, just to keep Rats from answering. Blackwood called on him anyway. And for no reason at all, Rats walked to the front of the class, as if HE were the professor. Rats even cleared his throat twice, exactly as Blackwood had done.
“The battle was over,” Rats said. Then he straightened the folds of his robe, just to get everyone’s attention. “Our grim and wise ruler had vanished, leaving only a cloud of smoke and his scepter, and the Wizard King was dead. Both sides had lost, so we called a truce. That was the end of the fighting, and since then we’ve had peace and happiness throughout the Known World. But we all miss the Dark Lord Who Vanished and the mayhem he wrought.”
Rats went on about the former Dark Lord, reminding everyone how great it was when we HAD one, how awesome and powerful he was. I swear Rats looked right at me when he mentioned how he could make lava flow from the sky, just to remind me that I couldn’t do that stuff. At least he didn’t know about the elf attacks. Gorey had kept them a secret, or I’m certain Rats would have said something about it—just to make our situation sound even more hopeless. Still, he did his best to paint a bad picture. “The dwarves have a king, and the elves have a great lord. The faire folk live in harmony, but the goblin queen can’t walk into the same chamber as the ogre chieftain without starting a fight. Nowadays, we’ve got no one to unite us.”
I thought that last part was a bit of an insult. After all, I was the Dark Lord’s heir. The grim folk might not have a leader, but I was working on it!
Confessions of a Dork Lord Page 2
