The Cursed Blood

magic, mad glowing eyes as red as blood and wide with ecstasy peering to the blackened heavens.
Thin lips splayed wide in a monstrous roar, revealing teeth filed to a point as he held a dagger over a clearly enchanted naked woman. Her limp body hovering over a savagely carved altar of black stone, lit with countless squat gutted candles.
While at the time I was dead sure there was no way I should have been able to read it, read it I did, and wished I hadn’t. The wicked man’s name was Eric Von Clampett, Arch Wizard of the Black. Obviously, a relation to the egg tossing hillbillies we’d encountered at the diner and outside the apothecary.
“Gave me a bit of trouble, that one did,” Gramps harrumphed unhappily as he peered down at the illustration with a distant, dower look. “A bloody monster, he was too… And sadly, still is. Got him locked up in the catacombs in France.”
“He’s not dead?” I asked. To be honest the picture was dated 1412 A.D./H.R (After Death in mundane Human reckoning) so at the time my aching brain couldn’t comprehend that such a thing lived THAT long, or that it hadn’t been killed (I guess I was a savage bugger even back then and none too bright cause Gramps had already let on that he had been the one to take the evil wizard down).
Gramps chuckled at this and again shook his head. “I know what you mean. He was as wicked as they come, boy. But you may as well learn this now. Life’s not fair, and we don’t always get to slay the things worth slaying no matter how much it’s right to rid the world of their filth.”
He sighed and ran his fingers over the page. He does this often, and I get uncomfortably worried the man relives it all with each picture far more painfully and acutely than any are meant to. Can you imagine? Having to teach it all but see each and every demon, Orc, Troll, and monster and every grotesque, bloody horror they’d done, and you’d seen in the worst moments of your life all over again with each lesson you taught, every day?
The worst of humanity can be butchering, murderous things, but there’s something beyond normal evils and cruelty that comes with the wickedness of the darkest Fey. It’s like a highly contagious virus or cancer that pollutes and corrupts whatever it touches, leaving even the good and pure blighted, dark, and dirty.
You know how if you’ve got a bowl of apples and one starts to get those ugly soft, dark spots then, if not removed from the bowl, they all start to get them? Yeah. It’s just like that, but with people. And when you’ve suffered that rot long enough, no matter how much you regret or repent or clean and scrub and wash at the stain, it never comes out.
Trust me, I know.
To this day I’ve no clue how Gramps slept at night having lived what he had seen what he’d seen over his many long years of service. Though truthfully when he forgot his pills, he unintentionally woke me many a night when that horrific blight infected his dreams. Warping them into nightmares that left him thrashing and sweating in his bed. Those bad nights it was Manx that nuzzled him out of it and when he woke—many a time, it took a moment for him to remember where and when he was, but I digress.
Gramps peered down at the grotesque image on the page with a look of simmering resentment. “It was decreed by the High Council that he be taken alive and entombed rather than face death for his crimes… I still don’t know why,” he explained, the words as I remember them had a sour ring. As if he tasted something foul and bitter with each syllable. Fear and anger all but dripped from each letter. Carefully he turned the page, and the wizard’s list of crimes nearly made my belly empty my breakfast on the floor.
The man had been horribly powerful—a mass murderer, sadist, torturer, and the master of a cruel cult of deadly assassins who call themselves the Nameless. Silver Masked, dark things of death that are more wraith then Fey. They were even at times referred to as the Black Death, as it was rumored that they had killed even more in service to their vile master in his quest for power than the plague of old ever had.
Evidently, he had even tried to rise to the vacant and lofty rank of Dark Lord. A terrifying and long thought defunct distinction to most in the magical world that would give him supremacy over all Dark Fey. Empowering him to call them forth from their dank, wet burrows, deep places and dark holes to form a hoard that would be as an evil scourge to wipe the Earth clean with a merciless flood of blood and murder the likes of which the world hadn’t seen in ages.
He had been stopped just in time, but not before much tragedy had befallen the world under his murderous reign of terror.
“When does he get out? ? Hopefully not soon?” I asked anxiously. I’d heard my parents talk about this kind of thing when they thought I was out of earshot. Admonishing the unfairness and dangers of ever letting such monsters free on the other side of legal technicalities, plea deals, or reduced sentences paid for with testimony and ratting that mundane newspapers seemed to love outlined in big bold lettering on their front pages. So, this couldn’t be far off from that, I’d thought. He had to get out sometime, right?
“Hopefully… Never,” Gramps answered darkly. “But that’s what those fools you met this morning are hoping after. They dream of a day their illustrious relative rises from the catacombs and burns the world again with his evil.”
“Why would they want that?” I’d asked. It was a horrifying notion, even for