My friend Xerxes, my only friend Xerxes, is dead. He’s been dead for years, with a parody of his soul forever imprisoned in the creature I call my familiar, for "friend" is hardly an accurate term for him any longer.

Who could be friends with a mere eel, after all...?

And not even a true eel at that. How many eels can live out of water, let alone fly?

I digress. I veer too far ahead in my story — not that I feel that this is something I should overly concern myself with. After all, as I have said, I don’t make it a practice to talk about myself. I am not writing this so that it may be read. I am only writing this because the words are inside me as they always have been, only now they are roiling to be let. Let out in a torrential flow.

No, now I will not think — I will merely write, write, write until I have taken all the words I can say from myself and given them over to this heavy journal. Then it will be removed from me and I will never have to remember it again. One binge of the memories I’ve tried to repress should purge the lot of them, I imagine.

* * *

I was not an unhappy child, not originally. I suppose many people who have met me would like to assume that I had a miserable childhood, and that in some roundabout fashion such a thing makes up for all the apparent failures that are so apparent to them in my character. I disagree for many reasons, the least of which not being the fact that while I may have so-called "character flaws" I also have many strengths. Stubbornness, a logical mind, a sharp intelligence, an ability to think outside the square everyone else’s circumstances have imprisoned them in — these are not flaws. No, people say that my cruelty, my vanity, my delusions of grandeur are my failings, failings that being without would make me a much better person.

No, no, being without those wouldn’t make me a person at all.

As I was saying. I was principally a happy child in most senses of the word. My mother was my biological mother, my father a man she met and married long after I was born. That did not matter to me in the slightest, nor did it matter to him; we were the proverbial happy family, with myself as the eldest of what would become six children in total. I was intelligent, quick-minded and clever, and I do not brag. I have a tendency to trumpet my own strengths, yes, but I do not overestimate myself. Man cannot out-reach his own grasp, after all. When I say that I am the most powerful sorcerer of my age, it is only the truth. When I say that one day I will rule the Seven Deserts, that is because I fully believe that I will.

Still, I digress.

My family were not wealthy, but we were far from poor. We were in fact the so-called middle class — never were we at the level of the street rats scampering about our feet, living in our cast-off rubbish. I got to even thinking of them as trash, to be honest with you — the trash of our society indeed. I will return to that in a moment.

Yes, I was effectively a middle-class citizen — and the middle-class will never attain the status of the upper-class for one simple reason. The blood of the middle-class is wrong. Do you understand me? It is wrong. When one is born of a lower caste, one will not rise above their level because whatever gods there may be above us all have decided that they are to live the life that has been assigned to them.

No one may step outside his caste. It is simply not done. One is born to be what they are and nothing more. I was born for greatness, as I will no doubt later explain, but at the time, I was middle-class and destined to be no more than that. At the time, this did not bother me. I knew the way the world worked. I worked within the world.

I worked, and my world went around. That is all there was to it.

I said earlier I do not care for street rats. I still do not. It is not because they are of a lower class than me — I do not believe in disliking people merely for their lot in life, after all. If such creatures proved themselves to be more useful in the greater scheme of the world I wouldn’t care one whit for their background as long as they understood that they could never leave it behind.

No. I disliked street rats because of what they did to my father. We were not a wealthy family at all — we made enough to get by with nothing more to spare. That was our lot in life. My father was a merchant, and was of course a natural target for the filth that paraded about beneath our feet like they were indeed nothing more than mice who could escape our scorn for stealing simply because they were too stupid to understand the concept of work, of price. No, for we call them street rats, do we not? And a rat is a creature of no small intelligence. I know this, for they are my favourite creature of choice for live experimentation when humans are not readily available.

They knew better. They knew that my father worked hard for his living, that he would most likely work himself into a shallow early grave simply to provide for his family. And yet they stole from him. They never tried to better themselves at all. Lower class they would always be, yes, but the lower class does not need to be of the street rat variety. They can work. They can provide. They can make do and make something for themselves.

But still, they take. They take and take and take and never earn, never pay, not unless one of those idiotic morons we call "palace guards" happen to snatch one of the streets and make an example of them. I don’t believe that it teaches them a lesson, however. The concept of such a thing happening to them is alien, because such creatures exist day-to-day by mere luck alone.

And so much luck those creatures possess. Their life expectancies are extremely disproportional to their lifestyles, after all. Yes, I grew up loathing the street rats that populated the gutters about my home. I did not hate them for their position, merely for what they were, and they were thieves. I hate thieves almost as much as I hate beggars — both are the kind of vermin who live off the work of others. No-one can live that way and be a person, you must understand. All life is parasitic, yes, but most life earns the right to feed off others.

Not so the street rats who so often brought my father to the brink of financial and mental ruin.

From a very young age I was known to be exceptionally intelligent — often I would join in the lessons of the elder children given by some of the wandering scholars, coin earned from my father in hand to give in exchange for knowledge. When I did not learn the simple matters of reading and writing, of numbers and histories, I worked with my father to earn the privilege of returning to a make-shift classroom in one of the lower rooms of the house belonging to another merchant my father knew well.

And so, it came about when I was six years old, that I met Xerxes.

He was the son of a palace guard and the most astonishingly loud-mouthed little wretch I have ever had the opportunity of coming across. He was brash and fiercely loyal, quick-witted and loud, and from the moment we met I knew that he would be my best friend. Xerxes possessed in abundance the belief that fueled my existance, the truth that makes the world go around. There is no such word as "free." Everything is worked for. Everything is paid for. To leave one’s bills unpaid is cowardly, weak and deplorable. I detest weakness in anyone.

Though I can only see such minor shades of that intelligence in my familiar now, Xerxes once possessed a brain with a capacity for thought and understanding not dissimilar to my own. That was part of the reason we got along so well together — we simply understood the way we each thought and in a world like the one we live in, such a thing can be a powerful bond. Even as children, we were best friends. It was a friendship that I knew was going to last for a lot longer than anyone else might imagine, for even as a child I had a rock-solid understanding of the concept of time. As it was, at the age of six I had already planned out my life. The plan was excruciatingly simple — it is almost painful for me to look back on it now, knowing who I truly am. No, I wanted nothing more than to take over my father’s business, to make it up into something that would be more than a mere provider, more a profitable business that would allow my father to retire as merely an assistant to myself. He would continue to work, of course, for my mother would never stop working until the day she died — she cooked, cleaned, sewed all day every day after all — and my brothers and sisters could lend their hands to me and help me create what I wanted most.

A business that would never go under simply because of a hoard of lazy, thieving street rats.

Xerxes shared my dislike of the creatures, though not quite for the same reasons I did. Of course he shared the thought that people who didn’t work did not deserve the spoils of such activities, but it was also because his father often complained that his work did not involve protecting the ageing, beloved Queen of our city — a day in the life of a palace guard was more likely to involve walking the streets to rid them of the vermin.

When his father was angry, Xerxes was angry. It was a state of existence I could understand wholeheartedly, for all of my key beliefs and assumptions about life were gleaned at least partly from the man I called father. Looking back on those days now, I do not know if it can be said that I actually loved him; the entire idea of the emotion of love is an alien one to me simply because it is an emotion based on a process of give and take that hardly seems equal to me. After all, one could love and love and love, and never be given the appropriate remuneration for it, while one could take and take and take and never give a thing back.

No, it hardly seems worth it.

Those days I write about for several simple reasons — I met Xerxes then, I grew up then, I began then. Nothing that led to my eventual rise to the Lord of the Land of the Black Sand really started back then until I was seven years of age. That was the age when those accursed street rats almost ruined my father...and that was the age when I came across the once and former Lord of the Land of the Black Sand for the first time.

Destane.

In retrospect, it should have been more obvious than it was what Destane was up to. After all, for being something of a complete eccentric bordering-on-borderline psychotic sorcerer, he was fairly well-respected among the high echelons of society. I eventually came to understand that this was simply because everyone was afraid of setting him off, but that I knew only when I had the rather dubious pleasure of living with the man for the better part of my young life.

Still. Our great Lord from a faraway place was content to prowl the streets as a simple merchant, perusing the stalls with a predatory curiosity that scared all but the most hardy children away — and that was truly the point, for it was only the children of the firmer-minded type that he was truly interested in. For hours he made his way through our marketplace, never once seeming to tire, bright amethystine eyes remaining sharp and intelligent even as the day’s immense heat wilted even the most die-hard shoppers amongst us.

His eyes truly lit up like Eastern fireworks when he encountered mine own, however.

"And who might you be?" he asked me with his rather reedy, thickly accented voice; I was later to learn that Destane did not always speak such. He had an exquisitely deep and hypnotic tone that he strictly reserved for matters of magic only.

"I am Mozenrath son of Akeem," I replied with the smooth, rather dulcet tones of a trained salesman. Even that young, I understood the trade I believed to be mine intimately. "Might I offer you a guided tour through our wares today, good sir? We have recently imported--"

He waved me to stop, elegant hand long and thin where it protruded from the thick, dark swaths of cloth he wore. I knew from then onwards that he was a wealthy man; he did not wear jewels and he did not wear fine brocaded clothes, but his disguise was not clever enough to fool a cloth merchant. While the style was hardly that of the upper class, the material was far too fine to ever be something that a person of the means my father was able to afford. I can only offer one explanation as to why Destane did not use a lesser material for his simple disguise, and that is that one grows so used to the finer things in life that they can not bear the lesser, even for a cause such as his.

And such is life — one can never escape the reality of their lineage, noble or no.

"You are the son of the cloth merchant who owns this stall, are you?"

"I am," I replied firmly, now indicating another stack of fine cloths. As I did so, I noticed with sudden perplexity that the cloth seemed to be moving. Perhaps moving is too strong a word for it — yes, the cloth was merely twitching — and then it was gone. Some of the finest cloth my father had to offer, and it was gone. Snatched from the table from beneath the eyes of his own son.

I don’t think I need to tell you that I was not only seeing red, I was seeing crimson, scarlet, vermilion and cerise.

Most of all, though, I was seeing sanguine.

Sanguine.

Blood.

I was screaming for my father even as I vaulted the stall’s counter, pushing past the extraordinarily violet-eyed customer as if he were no more than a useless camel to me. My father arrived from where he had been talking to another merchant at another stall quickly enough for me to abandon my post and run for it — for certainly I was not going to leave my father’s wares unattended when thievery was so rampant amongst our marketplaces! I forget how long I pursued that accursed street rat for. It felt like hours upon hours to me at the time, pushing past slowly moving adults and even slower moving animals, dodging about motionless stalls and leaping over small ledges and walls. Still, it would only have been seconds, I believe. Seconds of eternity that dissolved into mad seconds of speed when I finally caught that filthy little street rat.

I don’t actually remember killing him, I honestly don’t. All I can actually remember is yelling over and over "You didn’t pay for that! You didn’t pay for that!" and continuing to yell it even as my shaken father pulled me away from that loathsome rag-doll of a corpse.

I didn’t see the dark shadow of Destane watching us from the opening of the alley. Not immediately.

The palace guards at first didn’t seem to know how to react to what I had done. The cloth dangling from the fist already stiffening from rigor mortis attested to the fact that he had stolen from our stall, as did the quiet testimony of the violet-eyed would-be customer who had seen the lightening-quick pilfering.

In fact, it wasn’t until I heard the well-known voice of Xerxes’s father telling my father that were we free to go that I awoke from the semi-conscious daze I had fallen into while standing in that alley, light blocked not only by the guards, but by the darkly-clothed figure who stood at the very lip of it, watching all.

Yes, it wasn’t until we were leaving that I turned to see that slumped little body of the street rat crumpled at the foot of the wall I had bashed his brains out against. There was blood trailing down the wall from a much larger splatter where I had presumably smacked his head against as I shook him by his shoulders, but it wasn’t pure blood...it was kind of lumpy, to be honest. When I looked away in revulsion — I was still only a child then — I found that my hands were streaked with much the same.

He’s paid now. That was my first really coherent thought since I had left the stall in the hands of my father. At least the filthy little street rat paid.

* * *

When he came after me, my father had temporarily left my mother in charge of our stall, for we lived in one of the buildings that lined the main market street of our quarter of the city. Destane, our violet-eyed customer, had followed him out of what my father had hurriedly assumed was simply morbid curiosity. I know now that it was a little more than that, but at the time it hardly seemed to matter.

All that mattered was that he followed us back to the stall, where my mother reacted with understandable horror at seeing her first born with a blood splattered face and a piece of fine cloth dangling from one limp hand. "He’s all right, Heba," my father said tiredly, pushing me in the direction of my mother. "Take him inside and clean him up...let him sleep for a while. I think he has just had something of a shock."

"If I might interrupt," came the quiet voice of the customer who had never been, "I would like it if you would close up your stall for the rest of the day so that I might speak with you about a matter I am sure you will find most...intriguing."

Both my mother and my father gave the darkly clad man wary looks, though like myself they could see the obvious signs of wealth about the man — finely cut and made material, hands that had never seen a day of full manual labour, eyes that spoke of a full education.

"I cannot just close in the middle of a busy trading day," my father said eventually. "There is too much chance of losing what could be important business, especially considering that I have just lost a very expensive piece of silk."

He did not hold up the accursed piece of material to prove his point, but I knew what I would have seen had he bothered. A piece of lovely red silk ruined by dust from the flight, tears from the fight, blood from the forced method of payment.

The vermin has paid; why do you keep dwelling on it? Isn’t the world a better place with one less street rat?

"I will compensate you for your losses," the darkly-clad man told my father smoothly, producing a transparent sack of gold to hand to my father. I was later amused to note that my father was more enchanted by the remarkable little sack rather than the contents inside it; I could not blame him. What little I saw of the material assured me that such a weave, such a fibre, was not natural. I later knew intimately the composition of the synthetically generated fibre, for I used the magical filament in the composition of my rather infamous magic-detecting matrix crystals, but at the time it was just magic to me, and especially so to my father.

And thus it came about that my mother, my father, myself and Destane sat about in my family’s rather cramped kitchen. Destane introduced himself with little preamble or fanfare, and I think it is at least partly his rather down-to-earth attitude that made my parents believe him straight off the bat.

I myself believed him merely because I could see his aura. It was an unusual thing, that ability of mine. I had cultivated it since I was a mere child, but with so very little people about me emanating any degree of sorcerous energy, it was a weak ability at best.

Destane, however, blazed with such an intense light that he could have blinded me had I not stopped looking at him the way I did. Whatever else he was, he was a brilliant magician of one kind or another. That was enough to convince me that he would be an interesting man to come to know.

"I will state my reasons for calling upon you here today very simply," Destane told both me and my parents. "I wish to take on an apprentice, and I came to this city searching for an unusual child of unusual skill to take under my tutelage. I believe that your son is this child."

My mother frowned openly, though she did keep her head bowed reverently in Destane’s general direction. "You came looking for a specific child, Lord Destane?"

"Oh, yes," and he seemed not far away from laughing as he said this. "Rumours run rampant about the Seven Deserts, after all. One of the more popular urban legends is that there is the son of a minor sorcerer living as a merchant’s son in one of our larger cities, and as not even the boy’s father knows where he is, why, this child is anyone’s for the taking." He smiled now, enough to bare disconcertingly white teeth. "And such a child would be useful, as it is also said that he has a great deal more natural potential than his father, being the son of a natural born witch...and such a child is exactly what I am looking for." He turned to me then, those amethystine eyes glittering sharply. "And I am looking at such a child now."

I was the first to speak, considering that my father and my mother seemed struck dumb by Destane’s words. "You think that I am the son of a sorcerer, Lord Destane?"

"Oh, but you are," Destane told me with all the delight of the child that I was not. "I sensed it about you when I walked past you, young Mozenrath, but seeing you chase down that street rat...ah, you don’t even realise how much you used your innate abilities to track that little fool, do you? You were just running on instinct." He leaned forward to tousle my head, an action that made me scowl and duck my head away from his hands even as he laughed. "And what instincts you have, my boy!"

"I know that my father is not my true flesh and blood father, but that doesn’t mean that I am the son of a sorcerer!" I retorted, not able to help myself. You see, I had been raised as a merchant. A merchant was what I was supposed to be, destined to be. Believing myself to be something that I wasn’t was not an idea that I was enjoying entertaining. After all, we are what we are.

It was then that I was to find out just what I really was, though.

"You are," my mother said very quietly. "He is right, Mozenrath. Perhaps one day I will tell you the full story behind your birth, but let it suffice at this point that you are the son of a sorcerer. Not a very strong one, no, but a sorcerer all the same." She sighed again now, the weight of her memories seemingly too heavy even for her strong shoulders, hardened by her years of hard house and garden work.

"...but..." I think my mind was walking off without me in tow, at that point. "...I...I can’t be the apprentice of Lord Destane! I am a merchant! He is a Lord! I would be stepping beyond my boundaries! I can’t--"

"Mozenrath, your father was of exceptionally high standing in my home city," my mother all but snapped suddenly; I don’t suppose I need to explain that my mother had never had much patience with my theories on class, do I? "You are of far higher birth than I ever bothered to tell you!"

I didn’t ask her why she never had — after all, she knew what I was like, and I had simply never asked her myself. Up until that point in my life, all I had ever needed to know was that I had a father — it didn’t matter to me who he was, as long as he was there to perform the role required of him.

This new news, though, it changed things. Changed them utterly, in fact.

It didn’t stop me from demanding from Destane, however: "And why don’t you just have your own child rather than taking somebody else’s?!"

"Ah, but I am impotent, my dear child."

"What does that mean?" I retorted perhaps a tad rudely, for my mother looked first shocked, then very nervous as she gave Destane a reticent look. Destane, however, seemed only amused by my reply, for he threw his head back and laughed.

"Pray you never find out," he confided to me between his chortles. "But yes. Akeem. Heba. I will take your son on as my apprentice and heir. For this, I will pay you monthly until his eighteenth birthday to compensate for his loss from your family." The smile his long, lean face took on in that moment was almost feral — or perhaps more lupine. I am not sure. All I remember is that I suddenly expected him to eat me right up, all my more childish fears returning in a cruel deluge of emotion.

My mother paled, and suddenly anger recoloured her lovely features. I look a little like my mother, you know. I have her coal-black eyes, for one, and her pale ivory skin that she has cultured her whole life from always working indoors or working outside in her garden while wearing much protective cloth about her features. I don’t have her long, thick, richly brown hair, though the tussled curls we certainly share.

For the first time in my life, I began to wonder what my father looked like. "You can’t just stride in here and take my son from me!" she suddenly shrilled, standing up so quickly that she knocked her chair right back. "He is mine, you understand? MINE! I will not allow you to--"

"I will not even go into the simple fact that you can not stand up to a sorcerer of my calibre, witch, and merely point out the reason why you fled here," Destane told my mother mildly, not even bothering to stand up from his comfortable position in another chair at our table. "If your former lover discovers your child here, he will kill him. Simple as that. He will not allow a child of his own blood to survive, not when that child is not only a bastard, but a child of far greater magical ability than himself. It simply would not sit too well with his plans, shall we say?" And that lupine, satisfied expression Destane’s face had originally held deteriorated to a look that was cruelly smug now. "And if you do not let me take your son, I will tell his father where he is, and leave it to him to dispose of what he does not want at all."

I think I stopped breathing for a minute there.

"I have hidden from him for eight years now," my mother said eventually, eyes very bright in her roiling fury, fingers tightly clenched into fists at her slender sides. She was shaking uncontrollably, but I don’t think she actually even noticed it. "I can do it again."

"Ah, but this time, you’ll have a well-trained sorcerer on your tail, and let me assure you, Heba, I could find young Mozenrath here anywhere now that I know his energy signature." He dropped me an almost affectionate look with these words. "Ah, the legend of the little lost untrained son of a sorcerer is true beyond my expectations; he is a remarkable child."

"If everyone knows that my son is his son, why has he never come to find him himself?" she demanded of Destane, temper flaring up again very violently. "Why should I fear him now when it’s obvious he could have come long before now?"

"Because even though young Mozenrath here is no small fry in terms of innate magical emanation, to detect the frequency pertaining to his bloodline one would have to be in very close proximity to him." Destane’s smile was once again very feral as he spoke. "Your former lover simply has not had the opportunity to come here to explore for himself just yet. After all, his work does keep him very tied to his own city, doesn’t it?"

My mother remained silent. In fact, my mother never again said much at all — my last memory of her words was the muttered curse she directed towards Destane as the man began to make arrangements with my rather shaken father in terms of their pay-off.

Their pay-off for me.

When I left with Destane perhaps two hours later, travelling on my own over-sized camel with Destane on my right side, both of us flanked, led and followed by darkly clad guardsmen, I got the last look I ever had of my family. They stood just inside the thick city gates as we tramped out upon the back of those beasts, and I glanced back long enough to see all of them silhouetted marionettes in the growing gloom of the falling sun.

Then they closed the city doors and they were gone. All of them. It was as if they were covered in my mind by a sandstorm so complete that I knew I would never find them ever again. I never did, in the end; they died long before I ever even considered returning to the city I was only born in, not conceived in.

I still haven’t returned. When I do, it will be in glory, to lay siege with my growing armies to that palace and claim it all for myself. I will work for that glory and I will deserve it, for after all, I am a Lord. I am a Sorcerer. It is my right to take these things because I will earn them, and because I am Right. My blood is correct.

I will be the ultimate ruler of these sprawling sands. There is nothing more to it.

* * *

People all over the Seven Deserts knew the rumours of Lord Destane, Sorcerer of the leaden Black Sands that covered his little corner of encroaching gloom. I suspect people still do know those rumours of Destane very well; I have not advertised my usurpation that much — though personally I don’t think of it as an usurpation, more a reclamation on behalf of my kind — and I have no need to. They will all be my faithful subjects when I achieve my goals, and until that time it does not concern me that they should know who I am.

All the better to have the element of surprise, I think. But to return to the whispers about my master and mentor. Not until we were several miles from the walls of my former city did Destane bother to drop the disguises. I do not merely mean the disguise he himself wore — and up until then I myself had had no idea that the guards, so eerily silent despite their fit and strong young bodies, were nothing more than what they appeared to be. Of course I had heard rumours about Destane’s attempts to create an Army of the Undead, but up until that moment I hadn’t really thought much of the rumours that Destane was truly a necromancer by trade. It really didn’t concern me that much as a would-be cloth merchant at the time, after all. A weakness I had often had for magical tidbits, yes, but there had been so very little need for me to delve truly deeply into that chapter of dark wonders. Now, however, a different world had opened its gates to me...and I fully intended to grasp the opportunity with both hands in the end.

In the end may have been a good word for it, yes.

Still. I watched in intrigued silence as Destane raised his hand to his guardsmen and waved it rather idly, almost as if he were merely waving to them. So much more than a wave, however...no, this wave wrought a change in those once-were-men with such a startlingly swiftness that I might have fallen off my horse if I had not been the most self-possessed seven year old these deserts had yet seen.

"What’s the use of pretending when all this will belong to you one day, after all?" Destane asked me rather offhandedly while I merely stared at the...creatures upon those camels with a mixture of utter revulsion, and utter thrill. I can not even begin to explain to someone not in my position how much that made me realise that I was coming home.

When you are born with magic lurking deep within the molecules that code for everything in your being, being exposed to it so dramatically is enough to make one realise that Life...Life is Good.

It was like waking up from a dream to find myself thrust into a reality that was in all actuality more surreal than had been my dream. It was like pieces of a puzzle that had fit together perfectly well being rearranged into a new picture, that while more disjointed and expressionistic than the original, was more visceral. More real.

I was going home. While it may not have been home in the more literal sense of the world — I was not born there, after all, and I have no intention of dying here when there are more aesthetically pleasing places for me to conquer and make my permanent residence — it was home in the sense that even from this distance, I felt the beckoning finger of a power far greater than myself.

A power that would be myself one day.

We travelled deep into the night. While I have never been a night nor a day person, I found that mantle of darkness a comfortable one to wear. As time passed I came to wear dark colours much of the time, actually. The blackness that surrounded me stole into my deepest self so quickly and so silently that I did not even notice it. Perhaps that is only because there was a gap in my soul made for such a creature, but it does not matter. Truly, keenly I felt the aura of that place touch and join with my own, and the peace that entered me then was exquisite.

Yes, I was a man made for such things.

We pulled our camels to a stop not far from the gates of a brooding city. I had not noticed the plains of grainy yellow sand become the smooth paths of black sand I now realised they were. The night was without moon, after all, and desert nights are all all-encompassing in their bleak silence.

"Welcome to the Land of the Black Sand," Destane announced to me with all the pomp of a salesman selling wares that he in fact knows nothing about, save for the price that he will hideously inflate. "This is the capital, which I have christened Necrosia." The smile he gave me once again bared those shockingly white teeth; I remember wondering at one point why none of them were sharpened. He was a vampire of sorts, after all; he lived on the suffering of others.

I would say that he taught me to do the same, but honestly, I was a better pupil of my own school more than I ever was of his.

"Necrosia?" I echoed, rolling the word about my mouth as if I found it distasteful to say. "Has it always been called that?"

Destane laughed again at this question on my point — that slightly too-high, slightly too-loose laughter that was one of the few really obvious indicators of his insanity. As I have above indicated, Destane could very well pass for sane when he felt the inclination — his eyes did not hold that wildly uncontrolled fire of the truly mad, the involuntary movement of those without their minds intact, the disjointed rambling of those disconnected from their proper senses.

"It had another name," he confided to me, leaning far enough over on his camel to whisper in my ear. It’s a small wonder the idiot man didn’t topple off the creature, actually, but I was quick to learn that Destane was the proverbial cat with nine lives, and he usually landed on his feet. "I like mine better, though. Rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?" He said it again, breath hot and uncomfortable against the auricle of my ear. "Necrosia." That was the first word I ever heard in utter in that distinctly poetic sorcerous tone he did possess in abundance, and it made me shiver — and it made him laugh that politely insane laugh not three centimetres from my ear drum. "Isn’t it just beautiful, little apprentice?"

And before I could reply — before I could even think to reply — he had pulled back to seat himself firmly in the saddle and pointed towards the building that sat apart from the rest of the decaying metropolis he seemed so impossibly, erringly proud of. "The Citadel."

At first I thought I thought the maniac was just pointing out another landmark for my reluctant perusal, but as his mamluk guard began to move off, with Destane now leading, I found I had to spur my camel ahead to follow what had apparently been an order.

At a canter we approached what I assumed — correctly, not that such an assumption was hard to come by — to be the Citadel Destane had spoken of. Indeed it was, as he indicated to me with that same childlike enthusiasm that had struck me as odd earlier. We abandoned our camels at the front door as the sentries opened the heavy wooden gates for us — I say abandoned because Destane literally leapt off his and almost skipped through the front door; I simply had to hurriedly dismount and all but scamper (such an undignified manner of movement) after this strange Lord — and came inside. The place was as dark as a mausoleum, though the torches flared into brilliant existence as Destane distractedly waggled his long pale fingers at them as if in habitual greeting.

"Now, now, my little apprentice," he told me as we strode down those hallways, "you will find me a most erratic master, I dare say. I have my good days and I have my bad days, and then..." He stopped then, so that I ran straight into him. I did not bother to apologise — as a matter of fact, I wasn’t much in the habit of apologising even if a situation was my fault. Mistakes are mistakes, after all, and if you spend the rest of your life brooding over them what is the point? Mistakes are there so you know not to do it again.

Destane, however, gave me little time to ponder such little mysteries. He spun about and came down to my level, amethystine eyes glittering like the teeth of a hungry rabid wolf as they looked deeply into mine. The madness I suddenly saw hidden away in those crystal orbs was disconcerting...that was my first real experience of Destane’s quiet madness.

The next, of course, was his actual words.

"...and then, little apprentice, I have my mad days." He laughed then, loud enough so that in a child’s reflex I clamped my hands over my ears. This only made the necromancer before me laugh harder, all but falling over in his mirth.

"Oh, but I think I will enjoy you, little apprentice Mozenrath!" he chortled, leaping to his feet again in one fluid movement. "Try not to catch my beloved insanity, however, will you kindly? It just won’t do much for the either of us!" And then he was all but flouncing away from me, long black robes trimmed in crimson red trailing behind him like the unkempt hair of an old crone of a witch.

I followed him. What more was there for me to do? Though Destane was now openly displaying the madness he had not seemed to bear in my home city, the man was the closest thing I had to my true father. This was the man who could open up that mysterious world of magic that some part of me was beginning to want so badly that it was a physical ache somewhere deep in my abdomen.

I came across Destane leaning over the balcony of one of the upper rooms.

For a moment it crossed my mind that I should go over there as silently as an accursed street rat and push the madman to his death on the hard packed sand below. I didn’t, but the reasons were more practical than moral. After all, that man, as mad as he might be going, still had yet to teach me anything about sorcery...and besides, I had no doubt that while those mamluks didn’t have enough thought to rebel against their master or even to forget their duties for a moment to sew a stray arm back on, they would rend me limb from limb for killing Destane.

I wasn’t in the mood for that, not really. I had all the time in the world to bring them over when I understood them, didn’t I? For even then I did not like Destane at all. It didn’t matter to me that he was going to seemingly happily hand over his kingdom to me when he eventually died. The main thought in my seven-year-old mind was primarily that the man was going to be a raving lunatic in several years at the very least, and screaming lunatics will never a sultan make.

They’re better off dead, really. Less trouble for all of us.

"That is Nociceptas," Destane informed me as I joined him at the edge of the balcony, and now his voice was positively gleeful as he pointed out a distant city that was also a part of the so-called Land of the Black Sand. "I recently made it as is Necrosia, a virtual wellspring of the life force of the dead." He gave me a slap on the back then, like a father might do to a son, but I don’t think he really knew what he was doing because he whacked me hard enough to almost push me off the balcony.

...actually, he probably did know what he was doing. After all, weeding out the weak is a necessity when you are in a line of work such as our own.

Still, I had the reflexes of a cat, so to speak, and I was more than capable enough to get a decent hold on the balcony railing before I flipped right over it. Destane didn’t notice this at all; he was apparently enjoying letting his madness have fun run of his senses to make up for the façade of sanity he had been forced to endure earlier.

"You make these cities into..."

"Metropolis into Necropolis," Destane told me with another of those disconcerting grins he wore so well. I was already beginning to wonder if the man had always been mad; while some of us are natural born leaders, others of us are natural born nutcases. "You see, my little apprentice, the Undead are a startlingly rich source of sorcerous energy." He indicated the mamluks milling about below us with another of trademark laughs, almost flipping the railing himself in his mirth. I actually must note here that Destane wore his dark hair loose, like a cloak of not-quite-black ink. I never saw it in any other style, and I never ever saw him even once drag a bunch through the coarse fibres.

"Why is that?"

"Already eager to learn? You will be a little demon of a student, won’t you?"

Destane asked of me in a tone that was distinctly surprised satisfaction, before laughing uproariously as if at some wonderful joke. "Little apprentice, taking the life force of a man in the manner I do lives you with glorious amounts of energy for experimentation and to increase your own mana, while leaving you with a gloriously malleable shell that will be loyal to you as long as you weld that power over them!" He sounded so insanely proud of himself as he brightly announced to me: "I formulated the spells all myself, you know. All the best wizards do, it’s an honest to goodness trick of the trade. Would you like something to eat? Yes, I think you’d like something to eat." And then the tall, lanky madman was all but dancing down the hall again, this time remembering to snatch up my wrist and take me along for the ride. Only my quick reflexes saved me from a nasty sprain, but I didn’t learn my lesson then.

Destane was physically stronger than most people ever could have imagined him to be. Over the years he broke my right arm three times (twice in the same place) and my left arm once (I think that was actually a genuine accident because he always dragged me about by my RIGHT arm normally) and dislocated my right shoulder more times than I can remember. In many respects I do not believe that Destane saw me as a real person, more a rag doll slightly more intelligent than his mamluks that he could truly make into a creature slightly more sane than he himself was.

I didn’t know until later how true that analogy actually was.

In return, I did not see Destane as a person either. The man was mad. Such creatures should not live the lives we sane people do. It is, after all, not their place to do so.

Let me tell you more about Destane’s madness.

* * *

As the years passed, with me under the erratic tutelage of the most extraordinary necromancer, Destane’s madness grew. The entire Seven Deserts had known that the man was unstable, which was why they let him alone even as he pulled a cloak of darkness over increasingly large areas of his kingdom and apparently turned all his subjects to zombie-like shadows of their former selves. They did not concern themselves with the fact that he might extend his shadows to their doorsteps, and I can understand why they did not. Destane did not have the desire to expand his territories, at least not then. He was content with mutating what he already possessed, and his madness forced him to stay closer and closer to his own home rather than move outside the comforting Blackness about us both.

Like I said, the man was mad.

I could ignore such a thing in face of what he taught me, however. The basics were all I needed to learn from the man at any rate — I was always a much better teacher of myself than I ever was as a student of another. When Destane tired of teaching me, I would turn to the books myself. Destane’s attention span was unpredictable at best, but I always read and studied and undertook my experiments for as long as I could school my eyes into staying open. With my single-minded nature, that was most of the day and night.

Sleep held little interest for me. I am not one to dream much. Not now that I know what I want is within my grasp, after all.

My so-called mentor had been correct when he told me had days that were Good, Bad and Mad. Perhaps Ugly would be a better substitute for mad however. It was those days that sought to break my spirit, after all. Good days involved simple lessons, occasional explanations, helpful demonstrations, and were the best days for learning with Destane, if there was such a thing. After all, even on his so-called Good Days that inherent thread of madness would never entirely leave him alone. Often his mind would wander off while we were in the middle of a complicated extraction process, leaving me to hurriedly figure out for myself how to release the pressure and where to inject cooling solutions and further reagents before the entire apparatus exploded. Like I said, those were the Good Days.

Bad Days were when Destane wasn’t only out to lunch, so to speak — he wasn’t in for a single meal. He was irritable, cranky and tended to use the stray mamluk for target practice whenever he felt the urge. I usually avoided him on such days. Though I was increasingly growing in both knowledge and skill in magical matters, there was far too much that he still held over me. My innate talents outweighed his dramatically, but until I could control those powers, I could not manifest them. I had nothing to conduct them through, after all, and until my mind provided me with a suitable outlet, there was not much point in even believing that I could.

The Ugly Days are truly what gave me the greatest pleasure in remembering when I effectively killed Destane. You see, Bad Days merely involved Destane wondering off into another world where nothing, least of myself, could possibly be perceived as a threat. I think he only liquefied those unfortunate mamluks out of a twisted kind of pity he felt for them. You see, while I care not for such creatures — they cannot be returned to human form, after all, and I think men who allow themselves to be turned into such farces deserve every thing that they get — I think Destane had a slight feeling of guilt over his alchemical experiments.

How many times must I point this out? The man was mad.

It was on the Ugly Days that the darker things happened. Destane getting it into his head that I would not be a decent sorcerer unless I could learn to accept pain. Destane suddenly convincing himself that I could perform a complicated spell that an ancient wizard would be lucky to achieve without killing himself in the process. Destane falling into the delusion that I was against him in every way (what does it matter that he was right? I never proved it to him until the end, it was just his paranoia) and punishing me in a variety of interesting ways for my apparent betrayal.

I became intimate friends with many torture devices by the end of it. It’s no coincidence that I know everything there is to know about such things — I have first hand experience of what it is to be at the mercy of an Inquisition of sorts. Those were the Ugly Days, days that I was in fact fortunate to live through, and days that increased in incidence as I grew older, as I continued to understand more about the dormant magical spirit that existed somewhere deep inside of myself.

I didn’t like Destane. I never had. The man was mad, after all.

But it was truly those Ugly Days that made me hate him.

* * *

"You need an heir, Mozenrath."

Those words, spoken with utter carelessness when I was eighteen years old, were enough to startle me out of a rather complicated alchemical experiment. In fact, I spilt one of the reagents all over the thick wooden desk in my surprise, and as my experiment was an involved investigation on the pyrokinetic properties of a delicate powder I had generated the week before, the reagent was unfortunately flammable.

Destane, who had been seated in his usual chair, flicked on hand in apparent disgust at the mess I was making and dissolved the flames into useless light energy. I had to wince against the bright explosion, but as it died down, I saw Destane watching me with those sharp eyes, dulling week by week with his encroaching madness. It was a cross between a Good Day and a Bad Day, the afternoon he chose to drop that delightful little bombshell on my world. Frankly, at that point I was just relieved that he wasn’t choosing that precise second to switch over to a full-fledged Ugly Day. I’d had enough of those this lunar month to almost want to kill the man stone dead with the nearest blunt heavy object I could find.

I hadn’t, of course. I simply didn’t have the focus through which to channel my powers, and I was too close to that now to simply kill Destane now. It would be more efficient to let the old man dig his grave before I threw him into it, after all.

While I have pointed out many a time that I prefer to work for all that I have, I am not above a little time management. Destane would provide an easier path to full sorcerous ability than my own full time tutelage, after all. While I could teach myself spells and incantations, the making of solutions, emulsions, suspensions and other potions both medicinal and toxic, magical and more physical, it was only Destane who could guide me onto the next logical step in my studies.

I needed him. I needed a madman. How low the mighty must sink before they reach so high.

His newest plot was simple — I needed an heir, so I was to get the girl he provided me with pregnant. Quite a plan from quite a madman, I must admit. I also must admit that the girl he gave me was certainly not unattractive. She was not what I would have chosen for myself had I been given the opportunity, perhaps, but she was still attractive enough, I suppose. Long dark hair, wide black eyes. Her body was almost anorexic, far too skinny and full of bones and not much more, and her eyes had a far away look that assured me Destane had procured for me one of his own kind.

This slave girl was mad.

That made me angry, actually — what use did I really have for a mad girl, after all? — but Destane seemed dead set on his idiotically impractical plan. He forced me into a room with that girl, and locked us both in with a magical ward, laughing all the while that until I did something with that girl, I wasn’t ever coming out.

Huh. Not bloody likely.

It was actually Destane’s room, that was what surprised me the most about this surreal situation. I supposed he figured it might put me in the mood — I didn’t have a room of my own, after all. Not a bedroom like this one, at least. Beds were useless to me when I usually slept at my desk so that the moment I woke up, I could continue where I left off. In fact, I did wonder if there were any other beds in this mausoleum of a Citadel, but it didn’t really interest me that much.

Sleeping with this girl did not, either. The so-called pleasures of the flesh have no meaning to my mind, you must understand. They are brief, transitory emotions that are so quickly gone they can not even be properly harnessed for sorcerous use. I have heard of employing certain sexual methods in order to raise one’s mana, though the idea has never appealed to even my academic side, let alone my sexual side. I dislike to be touched as a general rule; even these days, only Xerxes can get anywhere near me without being punished for it later. In my opinion, touching another person should only be done to bring pain — otherwise, the entire exercise is worthless. Only hurting someone through touch brings any profit — touching someone for love has no benefits associated with it.

I digress.

Destane told me I wasn’t coming out until I did something to the girl, right? So I did do something to her. It wasn’t what he had in mind, no, but it was useful to me in a languid kind of manner. You see, up until that point, I hadn’t been entirely sure how much blood I could let a body of before the subject stopped breathing. That girl was a good start in finding out how much it might have been. I’d never really tried it before, you see, because it really is a waste of a perfectly good body. This girl, however, had no other uses that were apparent to me in this room, so I did as I pleased.

Afterwards, I prowled the room quietly. The resident madman of this Citadel kept a sparse room, I had to say; the only thing I found to be of any interest was in fact a closed oak box shoved unceremoniously under his bed.

I drew it out — it dragged a bit in the congealing blood on the floor, though I figured that was really more Destane’s problem than mine — and threw it open. It wasn’t locked, which didn’t make me terribly interested in the contents...for who wouldn’t lock something precious away?

I was in for a nasty surprise, however.

The damned thing almost immediately started talking to me.

It looked fairly unremarkable, I must admit. It was really just a thick, heavy brown gauntlet with black trim, but it was actually alive. Not alive as I am alive, no, not alive as Xerxes is now alive, and certainly not alive in the manner Destane now lives. No, the gauntlet was possessed. Whether the spirit inside it had once been in the form of a human, I can not say. I do not know if I will ever be able to say. Still, it knew exactly how to talk to me. It told me of what it could offer me if only I would wear the gauntlet, if only I would let the spirit anchor itself to my soul. For you see, then the Gauntlet would be the medium for me to pass my power through so that I could utilise it — a transformer, of sorts. It would buffer any backlash I would receive from being untrained to call upon the power I held deep inside myself, and it would do one more thing.

As long as I kept my energy levels high, as long as I continued to be filled with sorcerous energy, the Gauntlet would keep me alive.

Forever.

I put it away and waited for Destane to return to me and the bloodless slave girl.

* * *

I was silent at the immense dinner table Destane and I shared with the shadows of a dozen torches that night. Silence was not alien to me, for rarely would I communicate with my rapidly deteriorating mentor with simple niceties, not with his unstable mind ticking over like an inane clock behind those perturbing violet eyes.

"Why did you do it?" Destane’s tone was very mild. I suppose the madman was having a Good Day now, not that I cared much either way. I was more interested in poking at the food one of the lesser and more domestically-inclined mamluks had placed before me. I wasn’t sure if it was actually dead. I was wondering what would happen if I poured salt over it, in fact; after all, certain insects bubble and roil rather delightfully when you overload them on sodium.

"You need to have an heir, Mozenrath, and you might as well begin now." Destane wasn’t eating either, but once again, what was unusual in that? Destane was as skinny as a one of the torches lining the walls about us, and he kept that look merely by eating in his rather anorexic fashion. "After all, you can have as many children as you want, though you only want to keep the one that shows the most natural potential." Destane seemed thoughtful now. "And it might be good if you had a few bad ones first, anyway. I’ve never had any infants for experimentation, after all. Never much saw the need." His long fingers were tapping the table absently now, in the rhythm of a chant I recall him teaching me when I was eleven and a half. "Still, if they are available, what would be the harm in that?"

I didn’t much care for what Destane was saying, and it had nothing to do with the thought of experimentation on humans barely excreted from the womb. No, I myself agreed with him that it would be interesting — very little is truly sacred in the pursuit of absolute knowledge — but I just didn’t care to be the one fathering these laboratory subjects. I didn’t care for the thought of my own children at all.

"I am not going to have any children whatsoever, Destane," I told him. I never bothered with titles; Destane frankly didn’t care. It was his inability to enforce his authority over me in these little ways that was really the source of my growing disrespect for him, for even though he often beat me for absolutely no given reason, he never even tried to enforce the most rudimentary elements of subservience in my speech.

Not that I would have complied with him anyway. I do not kow-tow to anyone not deserving of my respect, and such people are rare and far between in this maniacal world.

"Why not?" Yes, it was a Good Day; on an Ugly Day Destane might have tried to set me on fire. He wasn’t terribly good with his pyrokinetics, actually, but he did know enough to make my core temperature rise by an almost lethal seven degrees.

The human body is so very frail. I should know, I’ve experimented on the useless thing enough times.

"That girl was not of my standing," I returned evenly, suddenly viciously stabbing the thick, gluttonous mound that took up most of my plate, bathing in the sauces that covered it. The short, strangled squeal it uttered assured me that those damnable zombies in the kitchen still hadn’t clicked to the fact that not only did I not like my food raw, I liked it dead.

I continued poking at it as I spoke to Destane; I think that one stab had actually killed it. I always did have good aim...unfortunately, though, it rendered my potential salt experiment useless. Sure, the body was fresh enough that it might have some reaction, but unless the creature was alive, how was I supposed to gauge the pain of the situation?

"Not of your standing, Mozenrath?"

"Of course not," I snapped back, now fairly sure that Destane was indeed now having a relatively Good Day after all the adventures of before. "If I ever marry, it will be a woman suited to me. She must be highly born of a man in full control of his mental facilities–" Destane laughed at this, the idiot — "and able to follow the instructions of her husband." I flicked my hair out of my face with one pale, long-fingered hand; the action reminded me that I really had to cut it sometime soon. It was always falling into my face whenever I bent over my chemical and sorcerous apparatuses in the lab. "But if I marry, it will only be for matters of procreation...and I have no need for heirs, Destane." I then snorted again, unable to prevent myself from saying the next words. "Unlike you, I have the stamina for immortality."

Destane almost fell off his chair laughing at this. I’ve told you many times that the man was insane, haven’t I? Truly, I should have put his out of his delusional little world years ago. Such a pity that the timing had just never been right.

"No, I don’t, but that’s because I know what it is," Destane chortled as he righted himself on his chair — he’d managed to half-fall out of it in his earlier mirth. "You’ve been talking to it, haven’t you?"

I stiffened.

"You think I wouldn’t know?" This seemed to amuse Destane greatly for he actually fell out of his chair this time. When he got back into it — it always stunned me how that frail stick of a man never broke when he fell out of chairs onto stone floors or walked into brick walls as was his habit — his expression had become so deadly serious that I was quite taken aback.

So much for the Good Day. Pseudo-Good Day might be a better word for it, yes.

"My telepathic abilities are weak at best, but I can hear that idiotic spirit chittering away in its box as well as anyone else can." Destane’s eyes were glittering strangely as he said this, and I was wise enough to be wary. His eyes only took on that cold sane insanity when he was about to go into one of his patented Ugly Modes. "It offered me the same immortality, of course. Not that I wanted it...and you, my dear little apprentice, should realise better than anyone else the notion that there is no such thing as pay without work." He was grinning at me suddenly now, those white teeth almost like the whites of a dozen little eyes peering from his mouth in the darkness. "Talk to it if you like, Mozenrath, but it won’t give you what you want. There are better ways of obtaining your so-called immortality." And suddenly his seriousness left him, along with the nagging feeling I had had that made me wonder if he was going to lose his rather legendary temper again.

Such a day I was having, and we hadn’t even gotten to the really critical part then.

"But to speak more of your heir," Destane went on, as relentless as a dog with a particularly tasty bone. "It might be useful to break tradition, so to speak," he informed me, then drinking his goblet of wine as if it were little more than water. He had already finished off at least two carafes this night, and still he drank. I myself was only on my first glass. Alcohol of any kind has never interested me much, except as a reagent or solvent of some sort. I prefer to be in control of my senses, after all.

Destane, however, wasn’t in full control of his mind when sober or drunk. "What do you mean?" I asked him in a voice that was chilled. It didn’t actually matter how I spoke to Destane, to tell you the truth. The man only heard what he wanted to hear and nothing more.

"My predecessor was also unable to have children of her own," he told me oddly happily. "So one night she went for a walk, searching for a child with the hints of true innate sorcerous ability, and I was the first one she came across." He raised his glass in the air as if toasting the memory, before drowning his throat in the burning liquid. "She found me first, in amongst the colony of slaves not half a mile from the idiotically lively city this used to be...and so she chose me, stealing me from my cradle amongst my people as we slept." He gave me a disconcerting look over the rim of his glass, then winking at me over the rim of his glass. I shuddered. "Quite the romantic little story, isn’t it?"

No, it wasn’t. Not when my quicksilver brain really began to peruse what the madman had just revealed to me in no uncertain terms."...you’re not of noble birth?"

I sounded so idiotic. I must have been in shock.

Destane started laughing again. I hated his laugh. I hated his insanity. I hated him. Oh, why couldn’t I have had a sane teacher? It would have been so much more taxing to overthrow a really clever, cruel and calculating mentor, rather than this raving lunatic. The only thing Destane ever held over me was training, and I knew now that there was a focus for my much greater raw power...if only I could get my hands on it.

Immortality. Power. Freedom from the need to train under a borderline psychotic. The Gauntlet offered me all these things and more...

The true path to become the ultimate sorcerer I was born to become.

All these thoughts flicked through my mind in a second, and finally there was only one thought screaming in my brain. The most important one. The one that stuck the most because the concepts behind it were so very fundamental to my existence.

He’s not of noble birth...he’s of the slave class...but you are not. You are of noble birth! He is stealing your place! Your place! You should be the Lord, he should be the Slave! The order is broken down! Restore it! Restore it before it all falls down!

I sometimes wonder if I am or ever have been schizophrenic.

* * *

Even though I knew from that moment on that Destane could no longer hold that throne, there wasn’t much I could just suddenly go and do about it. After all, I was hardly a sorcerer of Destane’s calibre, not at that point, not at that age. Though I had already begun to study complex and ancient spells and stories — such as the legend of The Book Of Khartoum, among other things — I was not ready to challenge someone like my mentor.

At least, not until I had indulged in a little so-called self-improvement.

* * *

In retrospect, had I waited, I never would have had to do what I did to gain the power that I have now. Patience has never been a virtue of mine, I am afraid. Though I knew perfectly well at the time that if I continued to study for several more years with added hours of secret, private study that Destane was not aware of, I would be able to overthrow the old should-be slave with ease, the voices at the back of my head just kept screaming that this was all wrong, that Destane was meant to be a Slave and I was meant to be a Lord, and that...well, who can live with THAT?

Not I.

The only problem I truly had was obtaining that Gauntlet. I still fully believed that Destane thought I wanted it for the immortality the cajoling spirit that inhabited it offered me, not realising that I truly wanted the heavy thing as a focus for my innate talents. In the end, why should he have feared that I would overthrow him? He was giving me the dying kingdom anyway, and he knew he was of use to me as a teacher. That was how I saw the situation at the time, anyway.

Unfortunate for him that I had found a way around such things.

Destane was a madman, as I said, and there were obvious times when his psyche deteriorated enough to allow me plenty of opportunity to slip into that room and take that Gauntlet. In fact, I began to hear the spirit in that Gauntlet everywhere in the Citadel, not just while I was in the vicinity of it...and often it would ask me to come, ask me to be one with it, to accept all that it had to offer me and give it chance to live again. So often it would call to me that Destane was at the other end of the Citadel, Destane was otherwise occupied, Destane was not listening!

I could have found opportunity enough myself, but that Gauntlet did choose to make things easier for me in that respect. Everything would have gone according to plan, had Xerxes not chosen that particular moment to drop in rather unexpectedly on my mentor’s kingdom.

* * *

Xerxes did not come alone — oh, not by a long shot. In fact, he was part of an army. Not that recognising him amongst the warriors from my former home city surprised me all that much — he had been the son of a palace guard, after all, so it was only natural that he would go into such a line of work.

No, I was more surprised that my former Queen would think that attacking Destane’s stronghold of a necropolis would actually have anything for her to gain by it. The things people do in their insanity...I mentioned earlier that I was slightly concerned that I was schizophrenic, did I not? That is not something I admit to many people. In fact, I haven’t the slightest idea why I bothered to write that down here; I will have to burn this missive after all, I feel. But yes, I could not bear that thought. I still can not.

It explains why I have something of an uncontrollable temper when people dare to try and tell me that I am maniacal or insane, actually. Never mind that now.

Neither Destane nor myself was concerned by the approaching army. In fact, the pair of us watched Destane’s mamluks kill three quarters of the army and capture the remaining one quarter in silent disinterest from the highest vantage point the Citadel could offer. The battle, as I remember it, stretched on for perhaps an hour and a half at most — I am rather pleased to note that my improvements to dead muscle tissue of the cadavers before the embalming process strengthened them in their undead service, though the creatures still fell to pieces with startling regularity. For some reason, when a mamluk was created, his skin just didn’t hold together as well as it used to against shear stresses, no matter how well embalmed it was.

I made a mental note to look into increasing the elasticity of the underlying layers of the epidermis during preparation of the corpses. It might make it more painful for the subject, perhaps, but methods are methods. As long as they are efficient, as long as they work, there is not much concern needed for the little things.

Watching the prisoners being filed into the depths of the Citadel, into the deep, dank dungeons below — I was relatively familiar with them; I had been locked in them on a regular basis between the ages of eight and fifteen, and had spent half my sixteenth year down there at one point — I noted with some curiosity that Xerxes had actually survived the carnage.

Interesting.

I can not actually explain at all why I decided that I had to see him. After all, by the age of eighteen I did not care at all for my former memories of being that cloth-merchant’s son. I was colder these days, much more interested in the pursuit of ultimate knowledge, ultimate power; the concept of friendship seemed more something I should study for means of later exploitation in others than indulging in it myself.

I felt nothing. I still feel very little. Everything about life is for me to use to earn the right to take anything that I want from anybody who does not deserve it. That is my right, and exercise it often I always shall.

Informing a gleeful Destane that I felt I should go and garner some information from the prisoners, I took my leave of him. I don’t think he noticed; he was too busy cackling like some overgrown child over how well his beloved army had killed the invaders, never mind that it had actually been my improvements to the cadaverous soldiers that had resulted in such a rapid victory.

Down into the deep prisons I went in search of my friend, and I did find him relatively quickly. I was actually strangely happy to find that his screams were not amongst those that rattled at the back of my mind until I used a small spell to block the irritating noise out. A part of me wondered why the mamluks were already torturing the prisoners — surely Destane hadn’t had the time to give the order, and I rather imagined he was still out on the roof rollicking in his laughter like the madman he was — but the greater parts of my higher mind simply didn’t give a damn.

After all, the only prisoner I was interested in wasn’t dead from being pressed into a sarcophagi of nails, being stretched on a rack, having his head squished into a delightfully oblong shape by a mask with long screws.

"And what brings Xerxes son of Arjun to my home without so much as an invitation?" I asked him coolly. At first, I thought he did not hear me, for he did not even raise his head from where it rested on his knees. I was about to repeat myself — something I am not terribly fond of doing — when Xerxes looked up, those wide black eyes incredulous.

"Mozenrath?"

"Who were you expecting, the Sultan of Agrabah?" I could not keep that element of scorn out of my voice, but I frankly didn’t see the need to. Everybody about me was idiotically stupid in comparison to my immense knowledge. They deserved whatever sarcasm I felt like meting out. "But you didn’t answer my question, Xerxes." I spared him a slightly cruel smile. "I don’t like it when people don’t answer my questions — it makes me upset." I indicated the screaming behind me with a disinterested flick of my hands, as if I were in fact responsible for ordering such things to be carried out.

(Actually, the thought that had been forefront at my mind then was that I really had to go and check on that new torture device I had so recently developed and see how it was working. I had tested it on mamluks already, of course, though that was hardly telling. The creatures don’t even bleed! Most inconvenient, but there’s no way of leaving such a living liquid in those slaves. After all, it would just begin to rot, and eventually degrade the entire body. Such a waste of a perfectly good cadaver...and I knew, I’d tried it enough times. Destane had even threatened to hang me by my hair from the nearest tower if I didn’t stop wasting his beloved mamluks, come to think of it.)

"I can’t imagine that there would be many people to interact with here in this mausoleum anyway," Xerxes retorted, same old fire present that I remembered in that scruffy-haired seven year old. He made me laugh — Xerxes almost always made me laugh. Except now, that laughter was really more in scorn than in admiration. "Touché, old friend," I offered with a dying smile. "However, that has indeed made me a tad antisocial." All pretence of friendliness was gone now as I leaned in, eyes glittering dangerously. "I don’t play well with others, Xerxes. I will only warn you once, and feel privileged to have that much warning." I grinned rather broadly at him then, though my grin was more akin to a wolf’s than a human’s, I suppose. "The warning most people get is 'I think I’d had enough of you now’ and then a rather prolonged and messy death." My grin was getting uncomfortably maniacal now; I really had to stop it, but I couldn’t. "Good thing I have plenty of household help to clean up the remains, isn’t it? I understand that it is simply hell getting bloodstains out of stone."

"You’ve changed."

So controlled, that one sentence. It made me smile again. "We all change for the better as we grow older, Xerxes. Why, look at you — you’re all grown up now, and look what a fine specimen of a soldier you’ve become!"

Xerxes ignored my falsely impressed comment and stood, moving closer to the bars, but not near enough that I could touch him. There was a wary look in his eyes, but he was unafraid still. "I had no idea this is where you were. I thought you were dead." Once again his eyes moved to the mamluks who passed through the corridors. "Though I suppose that might be debatable."

I laughed in disbelief. "Really, Xerxes? Me, dead? I think not. One has to be embalmed rather messily while still living to become one of my mamluks." I leaned in closer to the bars, voice dropping to a conspirator’s whisper as I did so. "I can show you first hand, if you’d like. We’re always in need of a few extra hands around these parts."

Once again he ignored my threats, instead frowning slightly as he searched my eyes with his own. "They’re not your mamluks. They belong to Destane. That is why we are here — the Queen decided that enough was enough and it was her duty to exterminate the lot of them." Xerxes actually laughed then, a wry, low chuckle. "We are certainly doing a good job."

"Yes, didn’t you do well?" I asked of him facetiously. "But really, the Queen wanted to exterminate them? My, my, my, how mad we get in our twilight years, eh?"

I had expected him to defend his Queen’s honour — that is, after all, what soldiers are for — but Xerxes seemed in the mood to surprise me again and again and again. "She is mad, Mozenrath. Perhaps as mad as Destane himself, perhaps more so. She shouldn’t be on the throne." He then gave me a rather querying look, as if sizing up my adult form and finding that while the body and voice had changed, the basic mental characteristics had remained unchanged. "I find it strange that you haven’t disposed of Destane, actually. Don’t you despise the insane, Mozenrath?" He chucked again, very dryly. "Of course, this might perhaps be because you seem to have gone completely around the bend yourself."

He shut up fast a moment later — I don’t think until then he truly believed that I was the apprentice of Lord Destane of the Black Sands. But the feral glow in my eyes, the aura that flared into life about me — how was he to know that I couldn’t really direct that power, not without a focus like the Gauntlet? — the way my voice dropped into a animalistic growl ...yes, I think he believed then.

"You say anything like that again and I will personally see to it that ten ravenous rats with blunted teeth are assigned to chew off each of your ten fingers," I hissed to him. "Of course, this will be done after I have dipped the tips in molten lead, after I have personally pulled out the nails. And that is only the beginning — I know what pain is, Xerxes. I know even better how to cause it...and for you, I’d make it special." My voice was sweet, almost cajoling now. "We’re friends, after all."

Xerxes had backed away from me slightly, but his eyes still seemed to indicate that he was more interested in me than what could happen to him. "If you are the apprentice of a madman, why haven’t you overthrown him yet?" So interested, he sounded! "You certainly seem to have the mindset for it, after all."

"I was just about to," I said with mock disappointment. "But you and your lovely little army came and interrupted everything! You see, Xerxes, that is exactly why one should wait to be asked over to play, rather than dropping in so unexpectedly. It’s not very good manners, anyway."

Such fascination Xerxes was watching me with now! What was it that made him so intrigued? Certainly, he seemed to have little interest in the army he had fought with, the Queen in whose name he served, his very own life. "Why do you think you deserve to be Lord, Mozenrath? After all, didn’t you tell me so very many times that only a noble man of noble birth could ever become a Prince of any kind?"

"I am of noble birth," I snapped back at him. "Completely and utterly. And when I am ready to take on that final power that awaits me in a chamber upstairs, I will prove it to that madman of a former slave." I grinned at him then, not quite realising that I was almost baring my teeth in a manner similar to Destane. "I’d ask you to join me, Xerxes, but I don’t think it’s really quite your scene."

"You are a Lord?" he asked, again ignoring my jibe.

"As is my destiny," I replied, not arrogant at all. Why should I be arrogant when I was right? "You should realise that this is my true calling, Xerxes. To be the Lord of this land, and then the Lord of ALL Lands." I leaned in closer to his cell, once again unable to stop that rather maniacal grin I was unwittingly inheriting from that madman upstairs. "Realise it, Xerxes, and I might let you live." I savoured the word in my mouth like a fine wine — is there anything more heady than having direct control over somebody else’s life?

"I could realise it if you tell me what you mean." Xerxes’s words were so level that they utterly surprised me. I had expected him to be more afraid of me. But you know, Xerxes never was. Even as his later form, the form of my eel familiar, he was and is never directly afraid of me. My temper might make him think twice upon occasion — if he can ever be said to actually think, that is — but afraid of me? Never. It was that fearlessness, which I can only assume sprang forth from our earlier friendship, that saved his life.

That is, of course, if saving his life is indeed how one could describe what I did to him.

That is why I did it. Standing in front of his cell, my hands folded decorously behind my back, I could not help but coolly explain the entire story of my realisation of Destane’s true birth and my subsequent plans to my best friend. I simply couldn’t help it. After all, for the last eleven years of my life, I had had no-one to talk to the way I had used to talk to Xerxes. There was only so much one could confide in one’s mentor, after all, particularly when one wants to dethrone said mentor.

After all the way I had treated him earlier, he was suddenly my confidant again. It was positively eerie...I did not like it, but something compelled me to go on with it. I suppose that it really was just a latent desire to have a real friend that had never really left me, but I don’t know enough about such things to say.

"You can’t let Destane kill me," Xerxes told me rather fiercely in at the end of my story. "We were friends, weren’t we? By Allah, Mozenrath...I’m your friend. I always have been since the day we met! And now look at us...me, the army officer trained in the protection of the royal sector, and you, destined to be the Lord of an immense kingdom..."

"What are you getting at?" I was irritated now that he seemed to be ignoring the story I hadn’t had to give him.

"That if you want me, Mozenrath, I am yours in service forever! I will be the captain of your guard! I will be your confidant and your advisor!" That spark I remembered so well from our joint childhood was burning in his dark eyes now. "You think I would betray my friend over a city I barely care for, a Queen gone mad? I am yours, Mozenrath! Save me now and I will spend the rest of my life in service to you." He reached through the bars at that moment to grab my hands in his own; they were large and tanned against my own pale, blue-veined long fingers. The calluses there were rough against my smooth, unbroken skin.

"Trust me, Mozenrath," and he caught my eyes with his own as he pulled me closer to him, so that we both leaned our faces against the cool, dirty bars of his prison cell. Our lips were bare centimetres from each other as he whispered his next words.

"I love you as I would love my brother, Mozenrath, and more. You are a Lord, and I am your Servant — that is the way that the world is built, yes?" His eyes were filled with quiet passion, quiet strength as he searched my own. "And more than that, I am your friend. I will be by your side always if only you would save my life now."

I was speechless, my hands tightly held in his. When his large, wide fingers squeezed mine more tightly, in a reflex action, my longer fingers curled about his in return.

"The only way I can protect you, Xerxes, is by performing a spell of polymorphism," I told him in a tone rather unlike my normal one (it was really too shell-shocked to be my normal eleganance), not daring to drop his gaze. There was so much of my childhood friend in that gaze, you see, and I think that even then I knew that I was going to lose that sharp intelligence in those eyes. At that moment, though, it really didn’t matter to me at all. All that mattered was that I was going to lose all of my friend unless I did something. "I don’t know if it will work, and I’ll have to even get Destane’s permission to do it, because if I show up with an unexpected familiar with a prisoner going missing at the same time, he will suspect something."

Xerxes was so unafraid. "What do you plan to do, then?"

* * *

"I want that prisoner for my experimental work."

"Honestly, Mozenrath, I give you everything you ever want — when will you stop nagging me for even more?" Destane replied peevishly as he scooted about his laboratory, which was in effect quite different from mine. My own at least had organisation — Destane’s was a maze of mess and chaos caught in a hurricane of disorder. "I don’t want you to mess about with any of my prisoners, I need them to create more mamluks. I think you have wasted quite enough perfectly good bodies on your pointless experiments this year!"

"If it weren’t for my pointless experiments, you wouldn’t have any prisoners at all!" I abruptly exploded, suddenly sick to death of this madman and his inability to understand that I was the Lord, and that I was the master, and that this was truly my Citadel!

I almost killed him right then and there, actually. Perhaps I should have. But if Destane suddenly just dropped dead from a burette through the neck, there was no telling how his mamluks might react. For Xerxes had been right — they were not mine, they were his. I would have to have no small degree of power to convert them to bending to my will, and if I killed him now, I couldn’t be sure that I could get to the Gauntlet before I was overtaken.

Dead and shambling they were, but they were strong, and they moved fast. I had seen to that long before now.

"And if it weren’t for me, your father would have found you and killed you years ago!" Destane exploded right back at me, turning on me with such viciousness that I stepped away from him in a grand hurry. As things turn out, it was a lucky thing that I did; he had grabbed the nearest bottle to him to throw at my head, after all. The acid bottle whistled by my head with barely centimetres to spare, reacting violently with the wall behind me. "Get out of here, you ungrateful, worthless brat!" Yes, this was turning into one of his patented Ugly Days all right. "And stop thinking about that accursed Gauntlet already! It is NOT for you! You can’t handle it! Nobody can handle it!" Screaming now, he was; such lovely fire in those amethystine eyes! Really, it would have looked so much better had his madness not been tainting the whole lovely effect.

"Just because you were too weak to accept the spirit, it doesn’t mean that I’m not!" I shouted back, the words entering my mind and exiting through my lips before I could even realise that they were there. And indeed, there was a simple explanation for it.

The Gauntlet was whispering in my ear exactly what Destane needed to hear.

"Just because your body is too old and too weak to take on such an immortality, it doesn’t mean that mine can not in your place!" I all but shrilled at him. "I know what you want to do! You want to train my body to handle vast amounts of magic, to imbue itself with all my innate talents, and then you want to KICK ME OUT! You didn’t want me to be your heir, you wanted to BE me! There is no chance in hell that you will do that to me, Destane! NO CHANCE IN HELL, DO YOU HEAR ME?!"

He paled abruptly — but not out of fear. No, far from it, really. He paled out of pure fury. And his fury was great — I had found that out plenty of times over the years.

"You are my servant no matter how much free rein I have given you over the years," he hissed at me, his temper flaring into brilliant life along with his incredible aura. "I let you have your way so often simply so you would train that remarkable body of yours so well that I would not have to later — I see now I should have been stricter with you, idiot child." He crossed to me faster than I could see, slapping me with such force that I was thrown first into the wall, then into a crumpled heap on the floor. Towering over me, Destane, all but spat in disgust upon me. "You think you can stop me now, Mozenrath? I think not. I’ve deliberately kept you weak, deliberately kept you from ever finding a true focus for that lovely, lovely power of yours." He laughed then, high and broken. "And you even thought me too mad to notice your desire to get rid of me! It will never happen, Mozenrath. You simply do not have the ability to kill me." And he grinned down at me, teeth bright and shining ly white. "You will not take the Gauntlet, and you will not release that precious friend of yours from the dungeons below." His tone became mocking when he saw my incredulous eyes. "Of course I knew he was your friend. I recognised him from when I first knew you...oh, Mozenrath, I knew you for a long time before I ever decided to take you away." He turned from me in disgust now, long dark hair flapping like a single raven’s wing as he returned to his work. "Let your friend escape outside the Citadel, and my mamluks will kill him. Let him loose in the Citadel, and I will kill him myself." His laughter was dry now. "Go and play with your toys, Mozenrath, and leave me be. You’ll be leaving me permanently soon enough, anyway."

I left him — what more could I have done? I wanted to kill him. So desperately, I wanted to take the nearest bottle of poison and pour half the bottle down his throat, then tear a hole in his abdomen so I could fill his intestines with it for faster absorption.

Oh, I wanted to tear that madman to pieces. I really did. I did later, actually — such is the benefits of turning enemies into mamluks; you can tear them to pieces and then put them back together to save them for another day — but at the time, I was more after blood.

Still, all I could do was go downstairs. Down to the dungeon to Xerxes, where I opened the alchemical text I had brought with me and demanded that he took the potion I had brought him.

Destane was right — I couldn’t let Xerxes free, let him be my cohort in my usurpation. He’d be recognised and killed all too quickly, and I myself would be immune from a similar fate merely because Destane needed me alive if he was going to steal my body so that he could wear the Gauntlet as he wished.

So I didn’t let Xerxes free.

I let my eel familiar free instead.

* * *

He was never meant to be that way. I performed a spell on him that would change his form — but as I have said, Destane kept me weak. I could not accurately perform any magical spell because I could not tap into my own innate abilities to control the magic directly. The transformation went both well and badly...it did not kill him, and it left him in a coherent, mobile, enchanted form.

It blasted his brain, killed his personality, however. While I was left with a loyal, living servant, I had lost whatever there had been of my friend in Xerxes.

In the end, though, it didn’t matter. I had a creature who would slip upstairs to go where I could not, to intrude upon Destane’s bedchamber, to take that Gauntlet and give it to me as the madman continued to sleep. I had a creature who watched impassively while I woke the madman with my new found power, watched me with pride and awe as I commanded those mamluks to be mine instead of his.

I had a creature who was loyal to me and to me alone.

...it is...difficult for me to even remember exactly what happened when Xerxes dropped that glove into my lap, when I slipped the heavy Gauntlet over my hand and lower arm. I briefly remember pain — but mostly, I remember the voice in my head carolling in delight that I could live forever now, if only I could find enough power so that the spirit within the Gauntlet could continue to provide me with life enough to live. It drains me, you see. Drains me of my life to augment its own parasitic existence. I did not care — I still do not care. Everything must be paid for, worked for, even a power such as this. That was my only thought as I climbed those stairs to meet with my mentor for that final confrontation...a confrontation that wasn’t really one at all, for there was no competition.

I was better than he was.

That was all there was to it.

* * *

It was over.

The slave was back in his place.

The Lord was back in his place.

I sat in my throne, my familiar at my side, my newest slave standing silently at my door as a tiny fraction of my extensive guard.

Even now, I can still recall that incredible feeling of lightness that filled every inch of my body upon realising that I had restored balance to this kingdom, that a properly born king sat upon his throne and the lowly born seat-warmer had been relegated to his proper position. It was simply...wondrous. I can barely explain it.

I can not remember making Destane, however. I can not recall performing myself the process of live embalming that results in a Mamluk of my army, though Xerxes will assure me in his stilted, limited vocabulary that he watched me do so. Actually, Xerxes is reluctant to talk about it, and will only do so when I force it from his wretched throat.

I hate him sometimes. Xerxes, I mean. I hate him as much as I love him, because even though he is as my friend said he would be, he is not my friend anymore. He is my servant, he loves me dearly, he would kill for me, die for me, do anything for me, and for that I fear that I must love him as my only true compatriot in this dark world.

But I hate him. I hate his small little brain, his confused little thoughts, his disjointed speech, his inability to think outside the box that I have imprisoned him in in the form of that little flying eel body. That is why I will abuse him verbally, physically, emotionally, mentally. I can’t help it. I hate him because he is not the Xerxes who was my friend.

He’s just a parody.

I can’t stand it sometimes.

And yet, I still love him.

I have little more to say about my early adventures and education. All I intended to write down here was my earliest memories, of how I came to be here. I have no desire to write of Aladdin, of his princess bride, of his idiotic genie and his familiars that have more intelligence in their claws and paws than my poor Xerxes could ever have in his entire muddled eel brain. They are still at the forefront of my brain, you see. They are all wrong. A street rat as Sultan. It is not right. It does not make sense. A princess who does not stay in her pampered place in life. A Genie who is free and does not grant wishes as his lot in life dictates. A monkey that dresses in clothes and behaves as a greedy human child might. A red parrot with a mouth the size of the river Nile and a knack of placing himself far above his true position in life.

All of them are wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.

And yet while I am right, I am the miserable one. I am the dying one, this Gauntlet stripping away my life force more quickly than I ever believed that it could. I need more power or it will kill me to survive on its own to await a new host. It has already eaten away my entire right arm — and it will continue to do so until I sate it with enough power to calm it. If I do not...I will die.

Yet I will not let it be that way.

We were all born to die, and we all eventually will, no matter how many promises of immortality are given us. I won’t let it end this way, though. I will fix things so that the Order is restored and then all will be right again. I will take my rightful place as ruler of the Seven Deserts, and I will live my life for as long as I can with this curse on my right hand.

Still, it’s worth it, you know. I took the Gauntlet to restore order to a frenzied world — and to destroy the likes of Aladdin, those people who are so often given that which they do not deserve, I will wear this Gauntlet into eternity.

That is to say, if it does not wear me.