weee...

*

King du Slomen sighed unhappily. When one got right down to it, he simply didn’t want to be involved in a civil war, or to be assassinated in a moment of carelessness. He certainly wasn’t going to relinquish the throne and surrender. 

Of course it had been a risk he knew he’d have to take if he wanted the crown, and the throne, and the kingship- the way politics worked in Vysk it was inevitable that someone was going to try to stab you in the back, even if you were the best king in history, just because they were ambitious enough to want the small, fake- gold crown on their own head instead of yours. However, du Slomen had always been good at watching his own back and he had a good healthy dose of paranoia in him, above and beyond that which kings inherited after generations of inbreeding. He hadn’t really had much trouble with the occasional assassination attempts thus far. The nearest anyone had come to succeeding was slipping a bit of poison into his wine one night; fortunately, du Slomen had learned long ago to recognize a poisoned drink purely from smell, and the entire scheme had turned into a non-issue.

But now? Rightful heirs to the throne, assumed dead by most of the people? That spelt trouble. That meant a civil war, with people taking sides, sometimes even taking up arms against their own family members. That meant the country torn apart, its rivers reddening with blood… And if the gods or the principles became involved, or were already involved… Divine intervention never ended well.

Ambition clashed with du Slomen’s generally pacifistic approach to ruling Vysk. He muttered a curse unbefitting of his royal station and flicked angrily at a fleck of dust on his otherwise clean desk.

“You’re a very calm sort, for a king, aren’t you?” asked a voice behind him.

Du Slomen whirled around and out of his seat with a sharp cry, his hand flying to the hilt of his dagger.

“Fairly high strung, too,” the voice said with a little laugh. “Like father, like son I suppose.”

There was no one there. Du Slomen was certain of that. That ruled out a mortal or ghost, and therefore an assassin, leaving the possibility of a spectre, an elemental, perhaps even a principle or a god. Or something else that could make itself invisible, but nothing else came readily to mind.

“You knew my father?” du Slomen asked carefully, keeping a hand warily close to his dagger in case whatever the voice belonged to turned out to be unfriendly.

“No. Your son.”

Ach.

“My son?” du Slomen said, trying wildly for bewilderment. Not a lot of people knew he had a son, and he’d like to keep it that way if possible. “I don’t have a-”

The voice chuckled nastily. “Don’t lie. It’s so rude, and anyway it won’t work.”

Du Slomen hadn’t exactly been expecting it to, so that was alright. “So you know my son?”

“Mort, yes,” the voice said with just a trace of sarcasm. “Such a lovely, interesting and overly paranoid boy. He’s working for me.”

Raising an eyebrow, du Slomen said with equal sarcasm, “Mort? Working for a bodiless voice? Somehow that doesn’t strike me as being quite the whole truth.”

“Well, no,” the voice replied amicably. “More like I threatened him into doing what I asked for a few years. And offered other… incentives. Like money. And not dying.”

“I… See…” du Slomen said uncertainly. “And what, may I ask, did you ask him to do?”

“Well…” said the voice, drawing out the word for much longer than was necessary. Du Slomen heard a faint snapping noise and then, suddenly, a small, dreadfully thin figure dressed in purple appeared before him.

He yelped.

“You’re- you’re-” he spluttered.

She raised an eyebrow. “Chaos. Yes.”

So Mort had been forced into serving the most volatile principle ever known, for whatever length of time she determined to be ‘a few years’. Poor boy.

“And what, exactly, is Mort doing for you that you… couldn’t do yourself?”

“It’s something of a longish story,” Chaos said mildly. “Why don’t you take a seat?”

Normally du Slomen would have bristled at being asked to sit down in his own castle, but since it was Chaos, he decided it would be best not to argue. He sat, carefully.

“So. A little more than a year ago,” Chaos began, in a high, lilting voice, “the princesses you exiled after you killed the old king came to Fate’s attention, and he made them Chosen Ones. To overthrow you.”

Alarm bells went off in du Slomen’s head. Chosen Ones? Surely he wasn’t that terrible a king?

“I think, mostly, it was because his skewed sense of justice wouldn’t let him allow you on the throne when one of them legally should have been. That or he just doesn’t like you for some reason. Anyway, I, being Chaos, naturally have to stop him, if only because it annoys him so terribly when he doesn’t get his way.

“So, they travelled from the mists to a ruined castle belonging to a ghost named Lord Ollie, and I went there to find out what the situation was, and your son Mort happened to be there. So, after I found out that he was an experienced thief and con man, I asked him nicely-” she abruptly paused and cocked her head to one side as if listening intently to something du Slomen couldn’t hear, then corrected herself, “or threatened nicely, depending on your point of view, I suppose- if he could, well, sway Fate’s little Chosen Ones onto my side. And, by extension, your side.” She inclined her head slightly in du Slomen’s direction.

“I… see.”

Chaos nodded with false enthusiasm. “Yes, indeed. He’s made some progress, at least. Morgan- the younger of the two, in case you’ve forgotten- seems to be coming around to his line of thought, though he’s managed not to bring it up at all… Kay, on the other hand, is rather… shall we say… passionate? about killing you."

Du Slomen flinched just thinking about it. “She sounds… very… pleasant,” he said uncertainly.

“Oh, she’s a psychopathic, ambitious little thing,” Chaos said dismissively. “Archmage Ketlevik has been helping her go over the battle plans… and recruitment strategies… and tactics… So you’ll have to handle the situation delicately if Mort doesn’t manage to stop Kay from fulfilling Fate’s little prophecy.”

She drew a quick breath to continue, but du Slomen held out a hand to stop her. “Wait… There’s a prophecy? What prophecy?”

Chaos waved a hand through the air. “Fate wrote a prophecy, stating that the princesses would return, kill you, lead the land from the turmoil of your reign- not that there’s much turmoil to be led from- et cetera et cetera et cetera. A bit of a non-issue, anyway, prophecies haven’t been used in serious change in hundreds of years. Don’t worry about it.”

“But… Don’t prophecies always come true?”

“Only if people hear them. The only person who heard this one was quite deaf, and mostly mute to boot. I made sure the guy intended to hear the prophecy was… otherwise engaged. Specifically, I hired a couple of thugs to jump him as he was on his way to the alley in which he would accidentally hear the decrepit old crone start spouting the less-than-amazingly-written couplets before she keeled over and died.”

“Um. Thank you?” du Slomen said.

Chaos shook her head. “Don’t thank me. I certainly didn’t do it for your benefit. I just enjoy watching Fate gradually loose his temper over a period of several years, staying up far later than he is used to and becoming very prone to accidentally making things explode. It’s unbelievably good fun.”

“Great…”

“The only real downside is that Mort’s, ah, mental health seems to be degenerating. Rapidly.”

“He’s… he’s going insane?” du Slomen asked, blinking rapidly.

“It would appear so,” Chaos replied, flashing him a brilliant smile. “Rather more quickly than most would in similar situations. I suppose he has the… inbreeding rampant in noble circles to thank for that.”

Du Slomen felt a quiet flicker of fear somewhere around the region of his spleen. “Why is he going insane?”

Chaos merely shrugged. “As near as w- I can tell, it’s because of the increased exposure to the essence of randomness that I leak constantly. Rather unfortunate, but there you are.”

There wasn’t a chance that he could go mad, was there? du Slomen wondered. Just from this brief meeting? He was more inbred than Mort was, after all- Mort was half common, after all, it followed he would likely be less susceptible to madness and the other less-than-wonderful perks of being a member of the noble class... Du Slomen sighed unhappily. The famous blue blood was all very well and good until you found out it was caused by a nasty mutation which, later in life, was likely to cause blindness, muscle and bone degeneration, memory loss, internal bleeding, and madness.