Barely an apple’s throw from Harsizzle Road stood the castle of Cathoon. It was a dark and empty place, the likes of which you only find in the best of fairy tales. It was the kind of place that no decent sort would ever call home. So, for that reason, it was a good thing that the castle’s occupant could never be called decent.
In that bare and chilly place lived Queen Druciah, a heartless creature who took delight in the misery of others. Just the sound of her name brought the tiny hairs to attention on the back of the neck.
Tall and gaunt, it was apparent that she had once been a woman of great beauty. Nearly six feet tall, her body draped in blue velvet finery, she still shone with the glow of power. She moved gracefully and with an elegance fitting her royal position. A golden crown set with only the most precious of jewels rested on her brow, her fading auburn hair tied up in a bun.
Druciah looked down from her perch in the hills, watching her subjects as they came and went. It was harvest time, and the village folk were busy. Farmers and their elder sons took their crops down Harsizzle Road to market, while their wives and children handled much of the daily grind. She wrung her stiffening hands together as she watched them through her spyglass.
Clawing mournfully at her thinning hair, she looked with hate upon the young men who went about their courting of the young and lovely village maids.
This made the queen angrier than anything. Seeing the attention that was lavished on beautiful young girls made her blood boil. It wasn’t because she hated them. It was because they diverted the attention that she wanted for herself.
Unfortunately, Druciah was cursed with the sin of vanity. The one thing she hated most was that she was getting old, and seeing all those young men and women together only drove that point home.
Though aging was a natural part of life and the way of the world, the queen could not accept that it was happening to her. Every morning she rose from her bed, knowing that there would be a new wrinkle here or a crow’s foot there.
She expected at least one new addition daily. Her once pristine skin was becoming loose and mottled. Small moles appeared where there were none before, and the worst insult of all was the hairs, which seemed to appear as if from out of nowhere. It was these stray hairs, more than anything else, which drove her mad.
It seemed like every day there was a new hair. First, one would show up on her cheek, and then another would sprout from her nose, and the next one from the side of her ear. And heaven forbid if one of the hairs happened to protrude from one of the moles? Well . . . there was really no point in going there . . .
“Why is all of this happening to me?” she shrieked, grabbing her ruby-handled tweezers. With a tug, she plucked the unsightly whisker from her cheek and wept into her hands. It seemed there was nothing she could do to halt the march of hated time.
She sent for the land’s best and brightest, offering a fortune to anyone able to create a potion for keeping her young. With their mortars and their pestles they tried out a thousand combinations. She hired astronomers and astrologers, chemists and alchemists, but none could provide her with the answer she lusted for. She just kept getting older and more obsessed.
Soon no amount of white lead and vinegar makeup could hide the wrinkles. Every plant and root was crushed and applied to her face, yet nothing seemed to help. If anything, her skin grew worse from all the applications, becoming chalky and pale. Her hair was dyed with a mixture of saffron and cumin to give it color, but it only made her smell like the inside of her chef’s spice cabinet.
Nothing worked at all. There was no earthly element, animal, vegetable, or mineral that could give her what she wanted. Even the most expensive periwigs and fine hairpieces adorned with diamonds could not make her happy.
Despite her compulsive behavior, she was still a powerful woman. Though thin, she had the strong neck of a ballerina, and she held her head up proudly through her queenly ruff. Her eyes were those of fierce determination.
If she had only just accepted the inevitability of time, she would have matured gracefully. And if she opened her eyes and looked around, she’d have realized that the world around her was aging too. But she couldn’t see it, and would not accept it. The constant denial turned her sour.
As a young princess, she was beloved. Everyone in the kingdom talked about her and what a fine ruler she might one day become. She had men and women falling over themselves for the chance to be in the same room with her. Every eligible man in the kingdom desired her hand, but no one was good enough. She’d play childish games matching one suitor against another, all the while having no real interest in either. She’d found it so amusing to watch people jump at her every beck and call.
The Grand Balls she staged upon becoming queen were among the finest ever conceived. Everyone who was anyone begged to be invited. The castle resonated with music and laughter late into the night. The palace walls were adorned with the most intricate tapestries. Works by the country’s most respected painters hung in nearly every room. Intellectuals and men of high creative bent became regular fixtures. Yet if there was one single thing that stuck out among all the fine accoutrements featured at her gala affairs, it was the ornately carved ice sculptures imported from the frozen land of Nordlingen. Anyone fortunate enough to see the ice sculptures came away from the experience amazed. The attention to detail by their creators was astonishing. Scenes from the mythological past came alive in the works of virtuosos. Even the placement of the sculptures was executed with purpose. They were set methodically to take advantage of the lighting of their surroundings, and shone like diamonds from most every viewing angle.
Druciah laughed as she turned her suitors away one by one, prince by prince. The worthy ones who might really have loved her were the first she cast aside. She thought their honesty pathetic and considered them weaklings for their genuine efforts to win her heart.
As the years progressed, the Grand Balls, banquets, and other revels continued, as did the queen’s indifference. The stone walls echoed each night with the sharp words of ridicule with which she stabbed at good men who had given her such meager amusement. Eventually her soul began to blacken. With the good men driven off, all that remained were the ones who were motivated by their own personal quest for power, not by love or honest attraction.
She grew bitter and enraged. Whenever she’d look down from her hill and saw people who were happy, she became furious. How dare they be so happy when she was in misery? So she stopped having the Grand Balls and Great Feasts altogether. Their purpose gone, the brilliantly detailed ice swans of Nordlingen simply melted away.
Every morning she’d wake in a foul humor. It was when she was in moods like this that she turned to the most trusted member of her staff, the commander of her secret police, Chief Constable Warwick Vane Bezel III. It was in Warwick that she found the closest thing to a kindred spirit.
The queen became rotten over time, but Warwick was born that way. In fact he came from a long line of scoundrels. When he was a very small child, he’d often fashioned clumps of ice into makeshift magnifying glasses and use the sun’s rays to burn insects and start fires. He thought it hilarious to dangle food in front of hungry puppies, only to pull it away and eat it himself.
If one were to look up the definition of the word “degenerate” in Dorian Hamster’s Old World Dictionary, there would be one of Warwick Vane Bezel III’s baby pictures alongside the word to serve as illustration.
One time, for a laugh, he’d replaced a sleeping old man’s wooden leg with a French baguette so that he could watch him fall flat on his face. Oh, how he laughed at that one. He was still laughing when he got out of the Reginald R. Grelnitz youth dungeon a month later.
But his most sinister prank as a child by far had to be the time he led a blind friend to a hornet’s nest, handed the boy a stick, and told him that if he hit it hard enough then candy would fall out. When asked later how he could do such a despicable thing, and to a “friend” no less, Warwick Vane Bezel III simply said he wanted to make sure the kid would “always remember his twelfth birthday.”
Everyone knew the kid was bad, some said irredeemable, and as he grew into his teens, his childish pranks took on a whole new level of meanness.
You could never say, though, that Warwick Vane Bezel III wasn’t motivated. In fact, he was probably the most determined man in the kingdom to be bad for badness sake. If there was a list of the world’s most horrible people, Warwick was going straight to the top, and he would crush whoever stood in his way.
He enrolled in the Harsizzle Hall of Higher Learning where he received an associate’s degree in criminal injustice with a minor in general disorder. His favorite class was in police brutality where the core curriculum consisted of learning how to use someone’s compassion and kindness against them on a daily basis. That, and of course, cracking people’s kneecaps with a billy club.
He finished at either the top or the bottom of his class, depending on one’s perspective. Warwick Vane Bezel III proved to be a fine student of inhuman nature. These were the qualities that later brought him to the queen’s attention. He was just the man she needed to be her enforcer. He was a good-looking brute, standing nearly six foot four. He had gray eyes that indicated more than a modest intelligence. His long, black hair draped over the back of his armor, and you could tell he had the makings of a fine soldier, if he wasn’t so bloody cruel. Druciah made him the head of her secret police, and through the years, he never disappointed her.
Soon he became a deterrent to anyone who might disobey the queen’s orders. Often she would send him on raids among the villages. Girls and women who were younger or prettier than the queen were systematically rounded up and deported from Druciah’s lands forever.
Around the holidays, Warwick Vane Bezel III would devise devious schemes to get rid of the homeless and other political undesirables. Once he rounded up seventeen of those he considered human flotsam by setting a trap for people who had been avoiding his vagrancy warrants. He sent out invitations, telling them that there would be a cooked goose, free bread pudding, and fresh cider at Ye Old Mission.
Once they arrived with their empty stomachs, he threw them all in the dungeon at Cathoon, every last one. Even the children were captured. After all, thought the constable, children without parents were a terrible nuisance. Might as well grab them now and prevent them from becoming beggars later on.
The queen’s taxes were the most obscene. There was a tax on just about everything, from flour to fowl. Of course, Warwick Vane Bezel III profited from this as well. Tax farming, he’d called it. For every collection he made, he skimmed a little off the top for himself. It was all approved by the queen, and thus all perfectly legal.
If those high taxes kept the townsfolk close to poverty, the nefarious police commander couldn’t care less. He would sometimes burst down the doors of people he suspected of “holding out” on him. He and his goons could enter wherever they wanted with impunity and take whatever he said was owed. For that reason alone, he was the man most of the queen’s subjects hated above all others, as the wellspring of their misery.
The queen delighted in the way her constable responded to her every command. He brought in the money she needed, and kept the people in an almost constant state of terror. What more could a queen want in a brute? It was as though she held a noose around the village’s neck with Warwick Vane Bezel III to tighten it whenever she gave the word. She had complete control over everything and everyone, and no one could do a thing about it.
As much joy as the constable brought the queen, her aging problem remained. She decided to take up magic to try to find a solution in the world of the arcane. She spent a small fortune in amassing the largest collection of magic books and items she could find.
Once she learned of the existence of a book of magic spells that was rumored to have been compiled by the greatest wizard who’d ever lived. She sent out dozens of her guards to procure it. Finally, it had been discovered in the backroom of one of the booksellers doing business in the village of Mauth. The merchant did not want to part with it for obvious reasons, but Druciah’s guards were quite insistent.
The book turned out to be of minor use. There wasn’t a single incantation that could slow her aging or restore her beauty. Most of the spells were little more than what Druciah considered parlor tricks, but there were a few she could make use of fairly regularly.
She took particular delight in one of them—a spell that could summon up a swarm of insects. Depending on the variation of a few simple words, Druciah could use it to send a horde of grasshoppers, beetles, or mosquitoes after one of her enemies. Unfortunately, like most spells, using it took up much of her energy, so she only used it on special occasions.
But even using the spell book once in a while had the desired effect of making her people fear her more. After all, it was bad enough to be ruled by an evil queen. It was much worse if that queen had magic at her disposal too.