Dreadful

by Caitlin Rozakis

So, this was shock. It seemed terribly inconvenient that the brain’s reaction to being placed in mortal jeopardy was to become much stupider.

“All right. Would you like to starve with me, wearing actual clothes, while I eat dinner?”

He walked up the stairs to his workshop numbly, trying to figure out how to hide his missing memories from someone who apparently scared him all the way through the amnesia.

He wondered which had come first, the conviction that women would treat him with disdain or his apparent determination to treat them like they would before they could get that far.

Surely he had some on topics other than magic or decorating with the skulls of his enemies.

If he could not even trust the face in the mirror, how was he supposed to ever figure out who he really was?

It occurred to him that a spell to make one’s enemies into idiots via the power of breasts might be immensely helpful. Then again, it might not be a spell. It might have only been the breasts.

“Guh.” Ah, monosyllables, his old friend. They would always be there, even when all the other concepts of fundamental linguistics deserted him.

A toddler with a lightning wand would inspire fear and indulgence, without respect. Uncomfortable thought, that.

Did you wake up one day and say to yourself, ‘I think I’ll become someone’s nightmare’?

Was this early-middle-age pain? Or was this “time to start slaughtering virgins for the annual literal blood-bath before the seven hundred years of life caught up with him” pain?

Get out my way before you get us both killed!”

“If you were trying to poison me, you would have had more of the pie,” the princess said slowly.

“Siege weapons are more interesting.” She delivered this incontrovertible fact as she rose from the table. “But we don’t choose what life we get, we just do our best to make the most of it.”

“You spend enough time running and screaming and starving and weeping, growing some claws and eating a few adventurers starts to look like it’s not so bad.”

“You need to understand—if a woman gets even a hint of power, the first thing everyone assumes is that she’s slept her way to it.”

“Women don’t have to do anything to be branded a whore in the first place,” she said flatly. “All you have to do is displease someone.

“Who’s the real anyone? When does who you’re pretending to be stop being a pretense and turns into who you really are?”

a border of moat squid cheerfully squeezing the life out of tiny villagers was a nice touch.

“Well, I suppose the two heads were too much of a strain for its heart after all,” Xaxus called down cheerfully. “But what do you think of the overall design?”

featured blackbirds, baked in a pie, which flew out as soon as the crust was cut,

“I hate you,” he said. “Only just now?”

Zarconar turned the force of his gaze on him, which made his bowels attempt to melt,

“I know, it’s a bit gauche to steal body parts from a rival,” Xaxus was saying. “I mean, I never understood why, but people get very upset. Still,

“My dear man, whatever would make you think I would want to be anyone other than who I am?”