The story of Sam and Henry, the Sorcerer King’s son and his prisoner, as they become much more than that individually and to each other, and realize that you can’t maintain a relationship or an evil empire on malice alone. Featuring a nonconsensual relationship, a lot of rape, a lot of graphic violence and torture, some mutual Stockholm syndrome, an ever-shifting status quo and a creepy centipede demon.
“Hey, hey, Derek, let’s go on a trip!”
Derek woke up to Scott crawling out of his ear. It was the middle of the night, he could feel it. “Scott, I’m sleeping.”
“I know, stop cheating on me with other demons,” Scott accused, pinching his lips.
Derek snorted. “Sleep is an angel. Tiredness is a demon.”
“Can a sorcerer clan have magic users who aren’t sorcerers in it?” Levi asked, tapping his pen annoyingly against a book.
“Yes,” Sam told him, tinkering with a collar.
“Okay. But why? Clans are bound together by their shared spellwork and their demon contracts, and those won’t bind non-sorcerers, and they can’t do our spellwork, so…”
“Those will bind whoever we include in them, and it doesn’t matter when we’re banishing all our demons anyway,” Sam interrupted. “Spellwork is just spices that you put on food to disguise the fact that it all tastes the same otherwise.”
“I…guess so?”
From what Henry had told him, the Shen’keit Fissures were a bunch of fucking holes in the ground that were full of snakes and gemstones, in that order. Why the fuck anyone wanted to go into them was a mystery, but some people were fucking stupid.
“This is super cool,” said Levi, as they walked through a fissure. “We don’t have anything like this at home. How many of the snakes here are venomous?”
“All of them,” Henry told Levi. “Except for the Svekchaj. It’s harmless but it camouflages itself to look like a lot of other kinds of snake.”
“Shit,” Levi said, sounding impressed. Sam had to admit, that was a pretty good way for a weakling to survive. It was kind of like the times Todd had had a knife. “How do you tell the difference?”
It turned out necromancy wasn’t even that fucking hard, it just had a stupid trick to it and now that Sam had figured it out, he was a necromancer.
Most necromancy was apparently more fiddly and stupid than sorcery was, but raising up the ghost of a dead asshole was the easiest thing a necromancer could do. The hardest part was finding something that Solomon had owned, but his books and shit were lying around the castle. After that, it was just tapping into the weird power that was adjacent to the Forces that Sam had never noticed. He held a length of chain in his hand to focus the power like Derel had suggested, and he took a breath.
“Are all the doors locked?” Sam asked.
“Yeah,” said Henry. “I checked.”
Sam wanted to make him check again, but he didn’t. If Henry said they were locked then they were locked. He pulled on the cuff of his coat, having decided that he wanted him and Henry dressed for this. So he had on the boots he liked best and a coat that swept the floor, and some other clothes that Henry had picked out for him. Maybe that was a mistake, maybe he should be naked. That would piss Solomon off, and he deserved to know that everything Sam did was something he’d hate.
Sam was turning rocks into salt when the atmosphere of the tower changed.
He scowled. He had to practice with his stupid god power, and he’d made a point of coming up here to one of the towers they barely used so he could do it without anyone bothering him, and now there was this magical feeling in the air that he knew to associate with fucking Derel. Sam had been wondering when he’d intrude again.
Have you nothing better to do than create condiments, little sorcerer? Derel asked, his presence filling the room.
“Why do we have to do this every year?” Sam muttered, leaning against Henry in the car as they fucking finally drove home. He was already taking his tie off and unbuttoning his shirt.
“Because we’re criminals and if we don’t occasionally do a charity benefit then it makes us look bad,” Henry told him, putting an arm around Sam.
“Fuck that. Next year I’m taking over the world so that it doesn’t matter if people think we’re evil.”
“Todd’s Law could be extended to a lot of other crimes, if you think about it,” said Sam, as Todd toweled him dry after his bath. “Not just rape. We could abolish prisons and just have everyone who’s committed a crime be a plateau butt-boy.”
Todd rolled his eyes, moving down to do Sam’s legs. Sam wasn’t talking to him, he was just talking out loud to annoy him. He’d made up some stupid law where rapists had to wear cock cages and get fucked by everyone and he thought it was really funny.
It was really funny, but Todd hadn’t said that because Sam wanted him to hate that it was named after him. He kind of did, because Todd didn’t think things should be named after him and besides, it would make more sense if it was called Derek’s Law.
Sam hated listening to petitioners so much. Henry had told him that there was a new justice system in place so less stuff had to get brought all the way to him, but all that meant was that he didn’t get to punish people for crimes anymore, and it still felt like a lot of people coming to him complaining about bad things that had happened to them. All Sam did was give people food because their crops had gotten sick or whatever, and it was boring.
Why did crops even get sick? Plants didn’t have lungs or dicks, what could be making them sick? But lots of people had sick crops in the southeastern corner of the plateau, and they thought Sam could do something about it.
Fortunately, Henry had warned Sam that this was going to happen, so he knew what he was supposed to say. “The crown feels for your plight,” Sam told the group of farmers, who’d brought a bunch of sick plants that couldn’t turn into food for him to do something with. “Even my power can’t cure this disease. But I will bring in as many resources as I can to help our people through this crisis.” Sam hadn’t really thought plants being sick was a crisis, until Derek had explained to him that diseases could spread even among plants and that the plateau didn’t produce much of a food surplus.
“Hey, Levi.”
Levi started, but looked a little relieved when he saw Derek. He’d been sitting at a table in the library masturbating. There were only two tables, so it wasn’t like it was hard to find him. “Hi, Derek. I’m not in your way, right?”
Derek shook his head, sitting down next to Levi. “Never,” he said with a smile. He hadn’t known that Sam and Henry were planning to come back from their meeting with a new boy. A new clan member.
“This is going to be really fucking annoying,” Sam grumbled, picking at his shirtsleeves. He shouldn’t have had to be dressed already.
“Yeah. But we kind of brought it on ourselves,” Henry reminded him.
“You can just say I brought it on us.” Sam sighed. “It’s fine. It’s just James, at worst he’ll pout at us and complain about how he thought we were friends. I knew trying to kill him was a mistake.”
“Then why’d you let Cassiopeia try it?” Henry asked, in the same neutral voice he’d been using the whole time Sam had been complaining about this.
Sam managed to tear a hole in his sleeve, and fixed it with Chaos. “Because she would have anyway.”
How Best to Use a Sword 