TUMBLR Prompt: After being chosen in an elaborate contest and ritual, the Grand Sorcerer defeated you and banished you to the Dark Realm for 1,000 years. When you finally return to defeat the new Grand Sorcerer, you discover that the position has since devolved into a largely ceremonial and bureaucratic role.
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A thousand years is a long time to be bitter. The Dark Realms might sound like a cool, goth inspired hangout but I can assure you that it is not. The Dark Realms are an absence, an utter lack of anything. Imagine if you can being buried in a hermetically sealed box. It’s not warm but it’s not cold either. There is absolutely no sound. It’s so terrifyingly quiet that your own heartbeat and the sound of blood in your veins becomes a maddening din. The utter lack of light is beyond any moonless night, far beyond any dark dungeon, even deeper than any forgotten cave, miles below the surface of the Earth. It is so complete that it contains everything and nothing. I am a master of willpower, a powerful sorcerer able to conjure and enchant. I have walked through flames and endured indescribable tortures. In this place, this Dark Realm I began to hallucinate almost immediately. It was that dark, that quiet, that still and that isolating.
I spent a thousand years in this personal hellscape. I spent a thousand years thinking how everyone I had loved, everyone I had ever hated, everyone I had ever known was going to be dead for centuries. I burned with rage. I screamed for decades. If I could have killed myself I would have a hundred thousand times over- but there is no death in the Dark Realm, only the suffering of an in-between permanence. Only the ticking of time and eventually, the slide into madness when you lose track. Has it been a day? Has it been a year? What if this is permanent? What if a thousand years was some big joke and this abject, empty nothingness is all that remains of reality? What then?
My return was like rebirth. A jagged scar of light formed in front of me and widened as I felt electricity return to my limbs. My eyes were open! I could see! I was screaming and I could finally hear myself.
I fell from the tear in reality covered in a sludge of ectoplasm and coughing thick black smoke. My hair was gone, my body was impossibly white and pale, studded only by pink scar tissue and blue veins. I had not one tooth left in my head and my tongue felt like an intruder in my dry mouth.
I fell from this tear and landed bodily on an ornate desk with a wet slap. The woman sitting at the desk screamed in fear and disgust, nearly going over backwards in her chair. I felt energy surge into my body. Too long had I been in the place of nothing, too long had I been cut off from the vital forces of life.
I screamed back at her and flopped off the desk, taking a strange lightweight box with a tangle of wires and stack of papers with me to the floor. When I stood up, greasy, singed and naked as the day I was born the woman was running down a long hallway screaming at the top of her lungs: “Security! Help! Someone! Security!”
I knew right where I was. My eyes burned from the light and my ears were crusted with fluid but I knew I was right back in the Grand Sorcerer’s Tower. I had been banished from this very spot a thousand years ago.
The rage built instantly. I felt my powers all coming back to me. I could bend reality to my will, I could command the elements, I could summon anything I could imagine. I waved my hand and the screaming woman’s head exploded. Not exploded, but absolutely vaporized into a hanging cloud of red mist. Her body took an impressive six or seven more steps before crashing to the floor. The pressure from her heart painting the too-clean walls near some tall metal doors.
I spun around facing the high, ornately carved doors with all their wards and protective seals and screamed out: “Come to me Grand Sorcerer! Your day of reckoning has come!”
I didn’t recognize my own voice. It was guttural, demonic and possessed a venom I had never been capable of before my time in the Dark Realm.
Nothing moved, nothing happened. I stalked forward and threw a surge of energy, powerful enough to bring down a house at the door. I expected this to be the equivalent of a loud knock- the Grand Sorcerers tower was impenetrable, no magic user had ever been able to bring it down. I tried and wound up in hell for a thousand years.
To my surprise, the doors blasted right off their heavy hinges. The sound would have been deafening but I was already struggling in the hearing department. Beyond the doors was the Grand Sorcerer’s chamber and library. I braced myself for a counterattack. The Grand Sorcerer had defeated me once before, he was probably even stronger after another thousand years of practice and research.
I recognized the Grand Sorcerer’s robes immediately. An old man with a pudgy face, overly combed grey hair and wide, terrified eyes dropped the heavy leather bound book he was carrying when the doors came down. He didn’t glare at me, he didn’t throw up any force fields in defense or make the floor open up under my feet. He stood there, dumbfounded, mouth agape.
“You are not the Grand Sorcerer.” I challenged. I knew he wasn’t. The Grand Sorcerer was a terrifying and ageless man who wielded his power with such calm and concentration that he was thought to be immortal.
“Impostor!” I lunged forward and conjured a ring of whirling flame around the man, just inches from his ancient robes. I nearly lost my concentration on the spell when the man screamed and flung himself to the floor in a near fetal position.
“I am the Grand Sorcerer! I promise! Please, stop!” The man begged. I cranked up the heat until he began to sweat. I couldn’t understand why this was so easy. This should be a pitched magical battle for the ages, not a one sided bitchslap of an old man.
“Liar! Coward! Where is he? I have been banished to the Dark Realm for a thousand years! I will have my revenge!” My voice pitched and I dropped the ring of fire to the floor. If the Grand Sorcerer was going to try and trick me with a feeble old man, I was going to fuck up his sacred library until he showed himself.
I threw up my arms and muttered an incantation, the books all around the library, stacked floor to ceiling nearly three stories high all began to shift, drop and swirl. Like a hurricane of arcane texts they circled the room, battering tapestries, destroying shelves and upending furniture.
The old man covered his head and shrieked.”Please, please! I can explain everything! Just please stop!”
This was getting annoying. I dropped my arms and the maelstrom of books fell lifeless to the floor. An avalanche of pages and broken spines, every wizard’s nightmare.
“You try my patience old man. Explain. Now.” I punctuated my demand by raising my right arm and crushing my hand into a fist, like squashing a ripe orange. The old man was lifted a few feet off the ground and held immobile by an invisible force threatening to crush the life from him.
“The Grand Sorcerer’s don’t banish people anymore… The last one to do that was over six hundred years ago! Please, you have to believe me. I am an elected official! I am in charge of the magic that keeps the street lights on and the fountains flowing! Nothing more!”
I blinked in disbelief. The old man sounded so genuine. It had to be a trick.
“More lies!” I cursed at him and raised my arm, he flew towards the ceiling. Screeching with fear as I upended him so he could stare down at the three story drop, his feet brushing the ceiling.
“Last chance. Where is the Grand Sorcerer who banished me a thousand years ago?” I demanded.
“Please… he died. He died two hundred years ago… food poisoning actually.”
I released my spell and let the man drop.
“We thought you were a mmmmyyyyytttthhhhh!” he screamed as he plummeted to the floor. I caught him at the last second, inches from dashing his brains all over the floor.
“No one gets banished anymore…” The old man sobbed. “We just do paperwork…” actual tears flowed down his cheeks. “I do children’s parties for fucks sake!”
I think this was the point that my brain exploded. Or at least that’s how I remember it. A thousand years in the terrible darkness all to be forgotten. My lust for revenge would never be slaked. My entire existence a thing of the past, sorcerers merely bureaucrats who could perform parlor tricks. I felt the blackness overtake me again. The Dark Realm rose up within me.
I killed the old man. I killed every last security officer that responded to the call. I killed every last office worker, minor sorcerer, every innocent bystander, every fucking rat in the walls and bug under the carpets. I brought the whole tower down in one giant glut of blackness and despair that reached to the center of the Earth. The Grand Sorcerer is no more, with my final blast of destruction all the magic of the world was consumed and gone forever.
I deliver pizzas now and every Thursday at 3pm my therapist tells me that the Dark Realm is a really bad metaphor for my depression and that I might need to think about increasing my medication.
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