Page 3 of Morfran, Dark Lord Reformed

BBBLLLAAAAAAAHHHH!

His gaze flew past her, through the window to what she was staring at. Sneaking out from the tree line where his burbling mountain stream burbled were several men dressed in black armor. The sun gleamed down and caught the magpie-and-marigold emblem molded into their breastplates and the silver glint of their long, unsheathed swords, which were sharp as bear teeth—

BBBLL—

Morfran silenced Benjamin’s mounting scream with his free hand. In his other was his sword, already unsheathed. He knelt beside her, seething out, “You’ll keep quiet if you don’t want those swords lopping off that precious head of yours. Now, follow me.”

Of course, Benjamin understood none of that and ignored him to continue watching out the window. The men were coming closer. Morfran sighed, slipped the rope leash over her neck, and lured her out the back exit with a wad of goat cheese.

Morfran chose this five-acre homestead over a dozen others on the market for three reasons. One, it looked like a common farm; two, because he’d always wanted to retire next to a river and decided the stream would do given his current situation; and three, there was a tactical advantage the sloped hillsides behind the cottage gave him in case of an invasion just like this one.

Luckily for him, if the soldiers were going for stealth, it meant Ravana was not here. She’d have ridden in on his old horse, making the weather rage behind her with her magic ring, all while cackling in a way that’d always shriveled his eardrums.

Behind the house a footpath switchbacked up the hill, hidden from view by several tall oaks. He traveled this path now, weighed down by his pack and the kids in the baby carrier. Benjamin trotted behind him, chewing contently on her cheese.

At the top of the hill he knelt low behind a bush, watching the soldiers cross his lawn with quicker speed. Any second now. Any second now, they’d—

The soldier closest to the house stepped on one first. As soon as he neared the grassy space Morfran was eyeing, one of Morfran’s armor-penetrating crossbow bolts he’d buried tip-up weeks ago to create covert booby traps pierced through the leather of the soldier’s boot, and very likely spiked straight into the meaty part of his foot.

The soldier went down with a surprised grunt. All at once the remaining soldiers went on high alert.

“What is it?” one asked, half whispering.

“I stepped on somethin’!” the soldier groaned, grabbing his foot and bending his knee to look at what had just stabbed him from the grass.

“Damn it, Jerry,” he heard one of the soldiers gripe. “You could’ve given away our position.”

“It hurts…” Jerry moaned.

Of course it hurt. Morfran had coated the bolt tip with a mixture of black boomberry poison and preserved it with a wax resin, and when it’d gone into Jerry’s foot the poison had instantly mingled into his bloodstream. He’d coated every bolt tip of his with boomberry elixir and buried each in the ground tip-up in case of moments just like this one. In about ten seconds Jerry would start foaming at the mouth, erupt into violent seizures that’d make him do a strange dance like a flopping fish on dry land, and then the worst would happen.

“Jerry, get up!” a large soldier half yelled, half whispered. “We’re going to need every last one of us to take him.” His gaze darted towards the house, and Morfran gloated, pleased to see that there was fear in the man’s face. “Our queen warned us that he—”

“Whoa, wait, Jerry’s foaming like a rabid dog now.” The man nearest to Jerry stepped backwards—and proceeded to step on another hidden bolt tip.

“Yow!”

This soldier fell onto his back, gripping his foot in writhing pain. Morfran hunkered down, half with curious anticipation, half with dread. He’d only seen boomberry poison work once, and on a much smaller test subject. The bushes were notoriously rare and really only grew in volcanic lands, notable due to their peridot-hued leaves. It was sheer luck he found one down by the burbling stream.

Meanwhile, Jerry was starting to flop like a fish.

The men had halted in their spots, simultaneously realizing Jerry was in a seemingly demonic spasm and that there was something in the ground incapacitating people.

“Necromancy?” the largest man asked, eyes scanning the yard with growing panic.

“No, he hates that stuff, remember?” another man tried to reason. “This is just a trick. Our queen said he likes playing them. It’s just a trick and—”

And then the worst happened.

Jerry blew up.

Blew up might not be the right phrase for it, but Morfran didn’t know how else to put it. Spontaneously popped? Exploded in a horrendous manner? Either way, Jerry was now in several locations in the yard at once, and the horde of soldiers was in an outright panic.

“Don’t move!” the largest soldier began screaming, tossing all thought of stealth to the wind. Beside him, a soldier who’d been pelted in the forehead by a part of Jerry’s foot was lying prostrate on the ground. “Don’t move! He’s using some form of magic that’s fueled by spilled blood!”

Morfran sighed. There had once been a time that yes, he’d had magic. Need a lightning storm to sweep over a group of enemy troops? He could deliver, complete with a static charge that raised their hair in comical sights before electrocuting them. Need shadows to spill dramatically around you while at a dinner party with difficult-to-impress friends? His living shadows could smother the flames in the fireplace like two licked fingers pressed together and darken the room in dramatic fashion.

If anyone asked him (which no one did, as no one recognized the dirty goat farmer as their runaway Dark Lord), Morfran did miss it. Magic was incredibly sparse in the kingdom, and he’d been proud to possess even just a tiny sliver of it. But smashing his ring—which had contained said magic and also happened to be his wedding band—was a small price to pay if it meant Ravana couldn’t track him with hers.