Gerald may have been just a magician, but he was also gifted with the second sight. This manifested itself in a showing of auras around people, which usually told him a whole lot of utterly useless information about them.  If he had been a more enterprising and less scrupulous sort of man, he could have become wealthy through blackmail, but he wasn't, and he considered his second sight to be a mildly unpleasant curse most of the time.

On this day though, all of his usually unpleasant gifts were made extremely useful when he saw Lorred D'Kay walk up the stairs into the castle entry hall. He had never seen an aura like Lorred's. It was blacker than the night sky with fire and lightning shooting out randomly here and there, and seemed to stretch back to eternity. On his head perched the image of a bloody crown made of human bone.

Thankfully Gerald's second sight also told him the meaning of his visions, which was good because it was generally an underrated and understudied magic, and if the possessors of it had had to guess at the meanings, they would have all gone insane. Lorred's aura didn't really need any explanation, because fire and darkness and an eternity of pain and suffering pretty much make themselves apparent to the beholder instantly.

Gerald used all of his abilities of being an extremely plain, and easily forgettable, man to press himself against the far wall and go unnoticed. It was a job well done, for what he didn't know is the Dark Lord was particularly keen on finding and shutting up those with second sight.  They were the only ones who could really see him, and he'd already dispatched three on his way to the castle.

One he turned to soup and ate for dinner.  One he turned into a bug and then stomped on just when the woman-turned-bug thought she might escape into the grass.  The last he killed by stabbing in a duel because it had been a long time since he'd dueled anyone and was keen on feeling his sword plunge into human flesh, and really enjoyed seeing the surprised look in his opponent's eyes who was sure the sword had been in his other hand.

It had been, but then he wasn't a Dark Lord for nothing.

Gerald might not have been so lucky if it weren't for the fact that the queen descended the marble staircase at the back of the hall just as Lorred ascended the front hall stairs. While there had been an initial hullabaloo surrounding what precisely the queen had done with her singing, the king quickly hushed everything up with a lot of gold and more than one sexual favor. Those who wanted the later really didn't care what the queen was doing and mostly wanted an excuse to play tummy sticks with the king.

The queen was looking radiant that morning, for everything she had done which caused the aforementioned hullabaloo was done with the express purpose of calling Lorred D'Kay to her, and she was aglow with success, and also a lot of glitter. She'd put on a very good front for those few days, but in reality years of marriage with no hope of intimacy, children, or any chance of divorce (this was only a thing in the land of New York City, as shown in the tales of Robin of "The Hood," where there seemed to be quite a lot of it going on), despondency finally got the better of her, and her sanity sagged a bit under the prospect of eternal virginity.

Her desperation for an out from her bejeweled prison opened her heart to The Book Of D'Lorde, which appeared to have been misplaced at some point by a librarian. It was in the cooking section rather than the religion section.  The later is where she first searched for an answer to her woes and, like so many before and after her, found only disappointing metaphors and promises of freedom after death.

The Book of D'Lorde (which is another name Lorred D'Kay was given over the millennia) was never actually incorrectly shelved. Like most religious miracles, The Book always appeared to the one who needed it at precisely the moment of their greatest vulnerability, wherever they were standing at that moment.

The queen was standing in the cooking section because she was trying to find a recipe for poisoning the king without causing her to be suspected. Unfortunately for her, the collection was curated with these thoughts in mind after the third queen of the kingdom did the same thing six centuries earlier, and all such cookbooks had been removed from the castle.*

Instead, she found something much better; a book promising both hope and a concrete solution to her woes which the other religious texts had not. The Book of D'Lorde told her what to do, and she followed it's instructions with gusto. She didn't mean to open her heart to darkness and invite destruction on the kingdom, but then no one ever really does. The road to hell is mostly paved with good intentions, though about a quarter of it is made up of really nasty and horrible intentions like racism, sexism, classism - really all the 'isms - and genocide.

When Gerald saw the queen, who was also the object of Lorred's attention, he knew he needed to get out of the castle quickly. Her aura was almost as dark as Lorred's and some alarming sparks were jumping between them. As soon as Lorred had passed, Gerald scurried out of the castle and raced as fast as he could on his plump little legs to the local Mage Society Headquarters. This was the right decision and is probably the only reason the earth is still in existence because as soon as Lorred and the queen touched an enchantment fell over the castle and anyone who entered was caught up in seeing Lorred as the answer to all of their prayers.

Over the next few months, Gerald worked with (as much as being told to get more coffee for the "real" mages, and being continuously undervalued, can be called working with) the other mages to come up with a plan to stop the return of The Dark Lord.

The king was decidedly not pleased about anything that was happening and swore that the queen and the child in her rapidly swelling belly (which he assumed was his), were under some sort of spell which he could sort out if he would only be let near the castle. He could be heard about the Mage Society Headquarters exclaiming things like,

"If I could but see her then she would come to her senses!"

"...can't believe they think they know better than me, I, the king!"

"Does this mean I'm being cuckolded?"

"He's not even trying to help the people!"

"...I'm not going to let him have my Heir..." (though the mages tried to tell him multiple times the child was definitely not his)

"I'm sure I could beat him in a duel..."

"How could she stray?  Doesn't she love me? I did sleep with her, didn't I? What more could she want?"
(To be fair his mind was a little fuzzy on this since her song had the effect of a Rohypnol, and accusations of his inability to consent could technically be laid at her feet, but that would require a lawyer and this kingdom had none).

Thankfully the Mage Society prevailed and kept the king from the castle, but they could not convince him the queen was not carrying his child. They could have asked Gerald for confirmation, for he was continually manning the telescope used for non-magical spying and could clearly see the aura around the growing baby as the queen walked the gardens, but most of the time they forgot he was there.

If they had asked Gerald about the baby, they would have known at once that this child had been prophesied by one of their own members seven centuries prior. The prophecies of Geraldo the Foreshadower, who happened to be Gerald's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-uncle twice removed, and for whom pretty much every male in his family had been named for since were well known and continuously consulted by everyone. This is despite the fact that most fortune tellers or other purveyors of foretelling services are generally looked down on. Geraldo's book sold so well that when any printer needed a boost in funds, they would repackage his prophecies (which were in the public domain and they didn't have to pay any royalties) for whatever holiday was coming up to get back in the black.

The reasons Geraldo's prophecies were so highly regarded were twofold: First, he was slightly insane and retired at the age of twenty to live in a seaside tower alone, naked, eating only rats and pigeons, and completely renouncing the material world, which gave credence to his personal brand (he died at age 22, for this is a very unhealthy way to live, and it's a miracle he lasted two years).  Second, a full quarter of his prophesies (which were found written out on a large stack of poorly-tanned rat hides) had come to pass. This was a success rate 87.6% better than any other foreteller, and so his word was generally taken as gospel.

In the end, the mages didn't consult Gerald though, so they didn't find out about the prophecy (that will come later).  However, they did realize that if The Dark Lord were able to anchor his darkness in a human form, say a child of his own, which was tied to Earth, it would form a connection between him and the Earth and he could use it to break free of his universal imprisonment. This obviously could not be allowed to happen, since it would mean death and destruction for the whole Earth and possibly the rest of the universe, and the Mage Society couldn't have their own kingdom being blamed for something like that.

So a plan was devised which they thought would work tolerably well, and which consisted of them getting a hold of the baby immediately upon its birth, and transporting it to a future timeline, while they threw all their magic into sealing the crack in the Dark Lord's prison, which the queen created with her song.

They calculated that as long as the baby was transported to the future, at which time the crack would be inevitably sealed, the Dark Lord could not use it as an anchor to break free. Of course, all of this required a lot of things to work perfectly, timed to the millisecond, and their plan also required someone to be transported with the baby to the future to ensure it's safety, and nobody wanted to go.

Now, a more bloodthirsty and horrible person might wonder why they wouldn't just kill the baby. It seems the most logical thing to do for the greater good of the earth and the universe. Mages, contrary to current popular belief, are not murderers. They would have balked at the idea of killing an innocent (if possibly evil) baby - a princess to be precise.

The other reason, and the more logical one is that killing the child would have unleashed the darkness in the world in a different form, which would have been uncontrollable and would have found a way to provide The Dark Lord with an anchor regardless. At the very least they believed a child was a controllable element since none of them were parents (commence laughter from all parents everywhere).

We won't go into the details of how the plan worked, but suffice to say it was laid out expertly, executed flawlessly.  Though the castle and all the people and animals within a five-mile radius, including the majority of the Mage Society, the queen, the king, and all his entourage were killed in the resulting earthquake from the seconds the child was born into the world before she was whisked away to the future timeline, the plan was considered a complete success. Gerald, who initially hadn't been keen on being chosen to take the child, felt survival was a silver lining.

And so Gerald and our princess found themselves whisked several centuries into the future, into a bizarre and unrecognizable place, where their survival was miraculous and where the rest of the story is about to begin.

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Next time on The Dark Heir...
Onyx Rose sets a doghouse on fire.
Oren the door-to-door salesmen founds a cult.
The Book of D'Lorde surfaces again.
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*The decision of previous librarians to remove all books containing methods of secretly killing a member of the royal family (or anyone else) have been debated heavily. It should be noted that they thought they were doing the right thing at the time and had no idea it would lead to the complete and utter destruction of their future kingdom. Had the queen found a suitable murderous recipe that day, she would not have been in a position for The Book of D'Lorde to find her. However, it is likely that if the previously noted books were not removed, the whole kingdom would have collapsed much sooner due to a succession of successful poisonings, and the ensuing civil wars.