The Executioner Prince
Prologue- The Serpent of Netherhelm
Three Years Ago
The absence of life in the aristocrat’s eyes sets a light burning in mine, cold and steady as a lantern in the snow. The thrill of taking a life, claiming it, and freeing the world of his wretched ways is medicinal for my jaded soul. One soul fades so others may thrive. This is but a gift.
“No! Please!” A blood-curdling scream echoes through the stone alleyway. But then, so does my mocking laughter. Really, it’s only two severed fingers. He could live.
“How many?” I demand and kick him in the face. He blacks out for a moment, his beard sticking in the mud beneath my boots.
“Piss off, snake,” he spits at me. I inhale sharply through my nose, baring my teeth at the worthless thing below me.
My irises narrow to match my serpent brethren as I deploy a hypnotic spell.
“How many girls are being held there?” I wrap my hand around his throat, this man that is old enough to be my father. Far too old for an interest in prepubescent girls.
“Sixteen,” he finally chokes out as the spell forces it from him. He tries to reach out for me, tries to fight back.
But it’s too late. My precious serpents are already slithering down my arm, slow and taunting. He screams as they crawl up his neck and over his face. They bite and writhe, pumping him full of venom as he thrashes.
I laugh hysterically at this brute of a man, reduced to nothing but a sniveling coward on the ground before me.
“Sssilno,” I whisper and call them back to me. Though this can be done in silence, the horrified look on my victims’ faces as my snakes return to me gives me a thrill.
This is impossible magic, this is forbidden magic.
He’s a twitching bloody mess by the time I send my loves back to the Venomwoods.
The aristocrat’s body makes for a powerful display outside of Lord Jensen’s home, a man of higher nobility who lives just outside the palace in Whitmire.
A businessman of importance who grew bored with wealth and decided running a trafficking ring was an acceptable way to use his free time.
It is because of this hobby that intestines decorate the windows and will greet him when he pulls his curtains open to the morning sun.
I wait in the shadows of his room for him to awaken, and his scream hardly leaves his throat before my sword punctures his spine and emerges up and out of his mouth.
I drag it out of him and dance backward as he collapses.
“A pleasure, sir,” I bow at him with a playful smirk and skip away towards the dungeon beneath his house.
I gracefully dance over his guards’ bodies whom I dispatched in silence on my way to Lord Jensen.
When the girls are free and the hands from every man who ever touched them is embedded in their throats, I rest.
Sitting upon the tallest structure in Netherhelm, I set my sights on the palace while I sharpen my blade to the tune of screaming in the streets. The bodies are everywhere, in pieces. Upon the cobblestones, hanging from lantern posts, impaled on fence spikes. I smirk.