The prince had been having a bad week.

David found that his life got much less tolerable when he started to have to look over his shoulder for constant assassination attempts. He had his best man on the job of protecting him, but still, it was tough to live his life with a constant sense of paranoia.

He couldn’t prove it, but he was certain that his sister had developed a new spell in her grimoire as well.

Back when David and his half-sister Dahlia had actually gotten along, she had told him about her gift. He had been going through the throes of depression at the time dealing with his own “gift-situation” and hearing about her luck had brought him to a dark place emotionally.

Her gift had been from the god Magic, and it was a grimoire that contained a variety of mystical spells. She had started with almost nothing in the pages of the book, but as time went on, more and more things appeared in her book giving her access to more and more abilities and powers.

If she combined unique reagents and ridiculous long winded chants, she could make thunderclouds appear. He remembered one particularly eventful afternoon when her grimoire suddenly had a new page that allowed her spy through the eyes of flies. No one had enjoyed her being a little snooper after that.

But he was sure that she had developed a new ability in her grimoire because unfortunate things just kept happening to him.

Earlier that day he had been walking down the stairs, when an errant cleaning boy tossed a banana peel through the window nearby him, which promptly fell underneath his foot, which caused prince David to fall down the stairs in a spectacular fashion.

No one had laughed audibly, but he knew that everyone was chuckling about it.

The day before, he had been riding one of his favorite horses through a wonderfully well-kept garden, led by one of his staunchest supporters. The Cor family had a magnificent honey business and they had been showing him their bees. The bees had randomly decided to all come out and mob the prince at once.

Only his quick riding and Ian’s slice cutting a good half of the buggers in half had saved him from certain demise. He had a slight allergy to bees and maybe enough stings would have truly been enough to end him.

Finally, he had even been swimming in his luxurious private pool when a stone had dislodged itself from the roof above him and nearly caved his head in. The only thing that had saved him was the timely intervention of one of his father’s retainers, a boy named Jeremy, who had come to visit.

Jeremy had been chatting with Rose, David’s closest confidant and hair stylist while David had swum in the pool. The clumsy boy had slipped and fallen right into the path of the falling stone, merely resulting in a broken arm.

The various attempts on his life were what had brought him here to the main palace. David carefully inched his way up the stairs, looking out for any errant banana peels on the ground. A sense of revulsion and awe welled up in David as looked out at the palace, the place he had grown up and then was shunned out of.

David did not enjoy feeling like his life was on the line every time he walked into a room, so he decided to confront the problem head on. It was about time he and his sister had a little meeting.

David had sent a letter to his sister, and she had been amenable to the idea of setting the rules of the confrontation. The two of them decided to meet with their father in attendance, where each of them could bring one helper to cement themselves.

David walked into the throne room and looked at the set up. There was a small table where his sister was already sitting, playing with the pages of her grimoire. The table was directly in the center of the room, and the throne was beyond it. David’s father’s royal rear was sitting there up high on his dais. Staring down at his two children, waiting.

David had decided to show up with Sam, their insight into the world was astounding and their presence would help calm him down. Dahlia had shown up with Julia, Theo’s sister. He hoped to someday leverage their familial bond against his sister, but it did feel a tad cruel.

Julia idled somewhere behind Dahlia, looking one part menacing and one part bored. Sam sidled up next to her and started making some idle chatter as they waited for David to stop sizing up the room.

Even his father had brought one of his advisors, it was a woman named Crunk and she had a square face, a square jaw, and a square outlook on life. If the king said to do something, she did it.

The reason that Crunk was there was because she had a gift that was beyond rare. The users of these gifts usually ended up as the heroes of their age, but Crunk was content with a life of service. Her gift was from Denial, and it allowed her to revoke any godlike powers in an area around her. Everything from gifts to artifacts stopped working in her presence and so no one was foolish enough to try anything in the royal chambers that day.

David finally stopped observing the room around him and walked to his chair. He could’ve sworn that his chair seemed to be a few hairs shorter than his sister’s, but Rose had been telling him to work on his paranoia.

The chair slid across the floor, making a horrific racket. He assumed it was another trick by his scheming family to make him feel uncomfortable, but he suppressed the urge to start yelling and simply sat down.

David had a plan for this succession war, but for that plan to work he needed to not have to worry about being strangled by his own clothes while he slept. He needed this odd curse to be lifted from him.

He hoped he could resolve this without resorting to his more drastic measures. So, he asked bluntly, “remove the curse from me Dahlia.”

“Remove your spies from my cohorts.” Her tone was sharp, like something bitter was stuck on her tongue.

“Remove your grimoire from your soul.”

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“Remove your vanity.”

“Remove your head.”

“Remove your… your face.”

At this point, their father stepped in, “children. Kings, Queens, and Rulers do not call each other names when faced with conflict. And you both wish to rule, show a ruler’s poise.” He sounded almost bored if a little playful. Both had seen their father acting in court, and he did not always act with grace and poise. He loved a good laugh and would play pranks on his closest advisors if he got too bored. It felt like good advice from the wrong person.

Dahlia took a deep breath, and David did likewise. This was how it always was, a familiar rhythm between the two of them. The rage at each other burned hot and fast before calming into a slow ember that receded into the night, hidden beneath plots and plans.

David decided to make the opening move, “Do your spells that attack a person in particular still need a connected component to them?”

Dahlia tactically decided to not answer the far too blunt question, but her eyes gave away a tiny piece of shock.

A few years ago, they both had actually enjoyed the others’ company, and they had been nearly inseparable. He had helped her try to understand her gift as she eased into her powers and had remembered quite a few things from his time as her confidante.

He was sure that she had not expected him to remember such a unique detail and that had caused her a moment’s shock. This all allowed him to know that she still needed something from whoever she was casting the spell on.

David had won the first exchange between them, and he relished that victory.

Dahlia changed the scene of the battle, hoping to move to a more advantageous field.

“What’s your plan with the knight tournament? You had three contenders make it through the qualifiers, but none of them were Ian. So, you leave your most powerful card in your hand, while taking a chance on three knuckleheads? They almost got their contender coins taken away by three of my worst hired henchmen the night of.”

David tried to keep his face straight and failed miserably. Those three fools would get a stern talking to once he was done with this. None of them had even informed him that they had made it through the qualifiers, or that three of his sister’s men had attacked them.

The three of them somehow always vexed David, they were some of the only people not in the room with him currently that could do that.

“My dear sister, I plan to win the knight tournament and use the publicity to crush your image.” Dahlia’s face soured at that.

The king decided, as all fathers do, to give some unrequited opinions and advice to his children as they sat there, “it is a truly powerful idea. I had a gift that was useless for killing my opponents in my succession war. Instead, I leveraged my ability to make everyone love me, allowing me to discredit my brothers and sisters, which made their retainers lose trust in them, which soon led to a knife in the back. You should watch out Dahlia, your brother is a cunning one.”

David knew that his father had an odd gift that he had struggled with since childhood. King Renoir’s gift made him loveable to anyone and everyone, he was everyone’s best friend, even if they didn’t know it yet.

It was hard to find faults in a father that was made so lovable by some god that imperfections and blemishes slid off him like oil on water.

David purposefully moved his gaze towards his father. The king was supposed to be impartial to the succession war, and his father was anything but. He had fawned over Dahlia since the day that David had been dubbed a disappointment by the gods. So, David was understandably annoyed.

Dahlia shook her head at her father, “that’s what bothers me. It is too cut and dry, David is wily. His every intention is hidden behind layers of deceit. So, it bothers me that this whole thing seems too simple, and that he gave up his plan so readily.”

David calmly slipped his right hand into his sleeve and grasped the tiny stick that was hidden in it. He needed to divert this conversation; his father’s gift made it liable that he would forget the need for secrecy in his plans, so he needed to pivot into a last-ditch plan now.

The stick was an artifact from the Second Age of immense and unrivaled power.

It was a stick that had a sympathetic bond with another stick. If one of them broke, the other broke.

Okay, maybe it was a nifty trick instead of something that fundamentally altered the power scheme of the world, but it was useful here.

Without breaking eye contact with his sister, David snapped the little stick. It barely made a sound, and no one thought twice about the noise.

In a separate dimension, one made of shadows, dark figures sat around a table playing cards. None of them had been having spectacular luck, but there was one man who had, at the very least, won more than he had lost.

Everyone at the table eyed him suspiciously since no one liked to lose. But the man twiddled with his bowler hat, and no one bothered him more than with their gazes. Benny was their only ticket out of this shadowy realm, and they were not going to make him angry.

Benny quite liked the sense of superiority he was feeling towards these men, the respect they showed him and had just vowed to take more people into the shadow realm when the stick that lay in the center of the table snapped in two.

Benny looked at the men and women that were at the table with bewilderment. Their group was supposed to be the last resort, and no one was excited to attack the king’s personal chambers.

Every one of the figures other than Benny were staunch antiroyalists and were part of some community called The Democracy. Benny hadn’t really cared that much about their political claims, but he knew that their more fervent supporters had jumped at a chance to attack the royal palace.

Benny knew that he had a job, and that it wasn’t a very nice job, but he readjusted his hat on his head before committing himself to doing something horrible.

The shadows exploded out of the ground and several men and women appeared in the royal hall. One of them had a distinctive hat, and he shivered as he appeared. But he quickly disappeared, going back into the realm of shadows before anyone could react to their sudden arrival.

Crunk knew of one thing to do whenever there was a threat to the king, she made it so that they became mere mortals again and David had been counting on that fact.

Once Benny had disappeared the entire room was cut off from their sources of power; everyone other than David’s father. The king had made it so that he himself was exempted from his underling’s gift.

The assorted men and women of The Democracy shouted battle cries and charged the throne, none of the occupants of the room moved.

The king heard their screams for glory and freedom and was unimpressed, he readjusted the crown on his head, and one of the jewels encrusted in the top began to glow.

The glow enveloped the room, and an unbearable weight pushed every single one of the intruders into the ground. The all kneeled in the presence of the undeniable king.

It was the aura of a ruler, the ethereal weight of the belief that was placed in King Renoir, and it pushed down on these intruders like a mountain upon their shoulders.

One by one they started to weep as the finality of their lives seemed to strike them under the pressure of the king. They each knew that this was the end, they had dedicated their lives to a cause, and that cause now led their lives to be snuffed out like candles in the breeze.

The bodies hit the floor and the weight left the room. David noticed that not even one of the bodies had a scratch or mark on them. It was like their minds had decided to die.

David finally took a deep breath. He didn’t remember when he started holding it, but the sudden rush of clarity was euphoric. No one had called him out on his risky play, and so he was going to escape having taken a massive victory over his sister.

His father and sister fretted and worried about how intruders had gotten into the chamber, but David was already gone in his mind. He had successfully purged himself of the curse, but he would have to be more careful about where he bled and where his hair went. He had been too lackadaisical about it recently and needed to bolster his defenses against his siter odd type of magic.

As David finally left the palace, a wide grin spread across his face. He wasn’t so worried about slipping and falling to his death anymore, now he just had to worry about normal assassins, and they were much easier to deal with.