Page 36 of The Dark Lord Awakens
“Not at all, my lord. Though I should note that his presence may actually be beneficial. Citizens tend to be… more forthcoming when they see your bond with him.”
“You mean they’re terrified of getting eaten if they lie to me?”
“I would phrase it as ‘respectfully cautious,’ my lord.”
Mr. Snuggles nuzzled against my cheek, his scales warm against my skin. Despite his fearsome reputation, he felt more like a comfort animal than a weapon of mass destruction. Which, given what I was about to face, wasn’t unwelcome.
“He’s currently the size of a housecat,” I pointed out.
“A housecat that can expand to the size of a building and breathe shadow fire,” Azrael reminded me with the faintest hint of a smile. “Appearances can be deceiving, my lord.”
9
Lucien/Beau
I’d thought the castle was bad, but the city was a whole new level of medieval dystopia. We passed through the massive outer gates—which, by the way, were decorated with actual skulls, because apparently subtlety wasn’t in the dark lord design handbook—and entered what my tour guides proudly called “The Midnight City.” I would have gone with “Health Code Violation: The Experience.”
The streets were narrow, winding affairs paved with uneven black cobblestones where they were paved at all. The rest was just packed dirt mixed with something dark and sticky that I desperately hoped wasn’t what it smelled like. Buildings leaned against each other like drunk college students at two a.m., as if they’d collapse without their neighbor’s support. Everything was built from the same black stone as the castle, though here it was cracked, chipped, and covered in a film of grime.
“This is the main thoroughfare, my lord,” Azrael announced with completely unwarranted pride. “The Avenue of Endless Torment.”
“Charming name,” I said. “Let me guess—the side streets are called things like ‘Disembowelment Lane’ and ‘Screaming in Agony Boulevard’?”
“Indeed, my lord,” Azrael replied, missing my sarcasm entirely. “Though Screaming in Agony Boulevard was renamed Shrieking in Agony Boulevard after the Great Semantic Dispute of the fourteenth century. Three noble houses were exterminated in the conflict.”
Over a synonym. Fantastic.
We were attracting quite the crowd as we walked. Demons of all shapes and sizes pressed against the buildings to let us pass, bowing so low I worried some of the more fragile-looking ones might snap in half. Most were humanoid, but with the usual demonic accessories—horns, tails, extra limbs, skin in colors not found in human dermatology textbooks. They wore simple clothing, mostly in dark colors, much of it patched and worn.
What struck me most was how thin they all looked. Not the aesthetic, runway model kind of thin, but the “when’s the last time you had a proper meal” kind of thin. Even the children—and yes, there were demon children, which was both adorable and terrifying—had hollow cheeks and spindly limbs.
A sickening wave of dismay crashed over me. This wasn’t how I’d designed Iferona in the game. Sure, it had been a dark realm, but there had been functioning markets, proper housing districts, even basic sanitation. Three centuries of neglect had transformed what should have been a functioning dark kingdom into… this. A wasteland of suffering.
Mr. Snuggles sensed my distress and nuzzled against my cheek, but even his warmth couldn’t dispel the cold horror settling in my stomach.
“Azrael,” I said quietly, fighting to keep my voice steady, “what’s the food situation here?”
“Most citizens receive one meal per day, my lord,” he replied with clinical detachment. “The higher demons require less sustenance, of course, as they can draw upon magical energies. The lower classes are more… physically dependent.”
One meal a day. And from the way he said it, this wasn’t some recent crisis—this was normal. This had become their reality while Lucien slept. While I was busy living my ordinary life on Earth, completely unaware that this world I’d created had become real and fallen into ruin.
A small demon child, no higher than my knee, peered out from behind her mother’s skirts. Her eyes were too large for her gaunt face, and her skin had an unhealthy gray pallor. When she noticed me looking, she ducked back into hiding, trembling visibly.
These people were terrified of me. Of course they were—I was the Dark Lord, their ruler, the one who’d been absent for centuries while they suffered. Even if it wasn’t technically my fault, I couldn’t help feeling responsible. I’d woken up in this body, in this role. That made their welfare my problem now.
“Who’s in charge of the city itself?” I asked, struggling to focus on practical matters. “Is there a mayor or something?”
“Sir Formalitee oversees daily operations,” Azrael replied. “He awaits your pleasure in the city square ahead.”
Sir Formalitee? I vaguely remembered creating that character during a particularly mind-numbing staff meeting at work. My boss had been droning on about “adhering to proper formalities in customer interactions,” and I’d zoned out, designing a demon bureaucrat whose entire personality was following procedures. I’d thought I was being clever with the spelling.
Now that clever joke was a living person who’d been managing a dying city for who knows how long. The disconnect between my game design and this grim reality was dizzying.
The city square was less of a square and more of an irregular polygon, with a dried-up fountain in the center. A small platform had been erected beside it, where a demon in an absurdly elaborate uniform stood waiting. He had gray skin,small spectacles perched on a long nose, and a clipboard with at least five hundred sheets of paper attached to it.
As we approached, he dropped to one knee, somehow managing to keep his spine perfectly straight in the process. “Dark Lord Lucien! Sir Formalitee, City Administrator, at your service! As per Protocol 7B, Section 12, Paragraph 3, I hereby formally welcome you to your Midnight City and present myself for your inspection and/or disembowelment, whichever you deem appropriate per Appendix J of the Dark Lordship Visitation Guidelines!”
He said all this in one breath, which was impressive. Less impressive was the implication that my standard greeting might include disemboweling people. Was that what Lucien had been like before? Was that the kind of ruler he’d been—someone who casually eviscerated city officials as a form of greeting?
