Author's Note: This is one of the darkest pieces of writing I have attempted so far. It centers on two characters in my Aladdin fic "Antiphony," which I encourage you to read first to understand this one-shot in context, since this is an add-on to flesh out Lord Destane as portrayed in that multi-chapter story. After all my exploration of Mozenrath, I thought it would be interesting to explore his former master as well. Lastly, a warning: while there is nothing explicit in this story, the dark themes and implied acts may be highly disturbing to some readers.

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

-William Blake, The Sick Rose

The Rose

It is a well known fact that no living thing may grow in my kingdom.

Nothing that lives in the traditional sense, that is. The undead, on the other hand, the possessed, the otherworldly, the cursed—my domain is where they thrive. The Land of the Black Sand. The name alone strikes fear into the hearts of kings, standing safely behind their shivering armies and well-worn masks of statecraft. High priests with their immaculate robes and polished scepters declare holy wars against these midnight grains, claiming I will be struck down by the might of some unseen god. Yet they too quake, in the chambered sanctum of their aging hearts.

My land is cursed, they say. Dry sands drenched in evil, imbued with the essence of the Betrayer. And I am cursed as well, as the vagabond harpists sing in their pathetic laments, an ageless, decrepit spawn of the devil plotting his time to blackwash the Seven Deserts in blighted sand.

That day will come, and I relish the thought of its arrival. The reality of a future where all lies under the sharpened blade of my will and the cold leather of my greatest weapon. The taste of victory is saccharine to all six of my senses.

The only thought comparable in sweetness is the day I first laid eyes on you.

That single second rooted itself within the entire span of my unnaturally lengthened life, a moment that dug its myriad little claws into the vast desert of my memory. And there, in the midst of its lifeless dunes, you made a rose bloom.

I had thought you had stolen the magic of my sands, the way that your raven hair glittered and enticed the air with its deviant aura. Every inch of your lovely face was painted in ageless runes of youth, beauty that no sorceress in history has been able to conjure or sustain through potions and enchantments. Your lips were the soft petals of a rose preserved in ice, the flush of your skin like the faint sheen of fresh blood spread thinly on vellum. And your eyes – those dark, measureless orbs that sparkled with nameless fear and wonder as they met mine for the first time…ah, the unearthly vision of you alone riveted me more than any spell. In rapidly escalating time I drank in the rest of you, curves like the slight dunes of a windblown desert, slender limbs you kept from trembling like sapling twigs by sheer force of will, the gem-adorned throat so beautifully exposed to my ravenous eyes.

A living rose, planted and cultivated perfectly in the native soil of Chyrilis, a kingdom renowned for its gardened streets of unmatched beauty. The most beautiful rose of them all, priceless, eternal. I knew then with utter clarity that if I plucked you from that lush garden, your beauty would not fade, your petals would not droop and wither, your leaves would not grow brittle with thirst. For you would indeed thirst, as all living things that enter my land do. But unlike them, you would not die.

You would live, pristine, perfect. And all mine.

I saw nothing of the human forms around you; they appeared as little more than crawling pestilences, unsightly worms of the soil beneath your radiance. Your mother and father blathered in quavering tones, hoping to placate my capricious anger that had, unbeknownst to them, already dissipated at the sight of you, the lovely daughter they had undeservingly borne and raised to fruition. A wave of my hand and the contract was sealed, the stark and simple terms tumbling to the back of my mind even while they hung like a plague over your parents’ heads. Sealed, the promise of one hundred slaves every month to serve my whims and fall into rank within my army. A small price to pay to preserve the most precious treasure of their kingdom.

You were silent, placid, unchanging as you moved from your mother’s side and shook off the soil of your birthplace, casting your eyes to the ground as you came to stand before me. Your invisible roots lay bare around your heart, waiting to be replanted in a new land, to be tested in a black desert where nothing grew. And I learned that beauty is all the purer when adorned by courage, as futile as it may be. I almost reached forward to touch you then, but stopped myself, the greatest act of restraint I had practiced in many years. I would save you, as the potter saves his most valuable clay for the most isolated, unbroken time of the night.

Hastened by my impatience, our journey progressed through two other captive lands, and I hardly paid any mind to the young prince and princess who came to walk beside you in solemn fear, flanked on all sides by my undead guards. And then I thought I heard a slight sob from your lips when we crossed over the light sands of the familiar Deserts and into the midnight dunes of my kingdom. I turned and watched you, intent on discovering if those invisible roots would dry up and snap to pieces, rapidly rendering you useless, or if they would sustain, and your silent heart would persevere into the realm of eternal night. I smiled in secret delight as the answer gradually revealed itself.

My mind, brilliantly efficient as it is, slid easily into its most common mode of operation. Parting into two, the mundane and necessary functions of breathing, eating, speaking, introducing my sullen-eyed apprentice to you and the two others, and the eager imagination and anticipation of what was soon to come, the taste I had been longing to savor since the scent of you first enticed me.

Unfortunately, wine has the tendency to blur the clean-cut line between the two modes of my mind, and I lost my naturally excellent grip on myself as I reached forward with a steady, intent hand to brush your face.

You did not move, no, you did not react at all, my lovely rose, unbowed by storms and whispers alike. My smile widened at the thought of your resilience, how you were as the crystallized hearts encased in my private study, suspended timelessly for my scrutiny and admiration. Your calm composure and demure gaze reaffirmed that you would not break, that I could test you and stretch you and twist you, and you would not bend.

So began the first test, as the hammerings of my own heart intrigued me, this reflex I had long forgotten, when I leaned close to you and tasted your skin, crisp and smooth as spring petals, my hand entangled in your raven hair, feeling the silky magic in its strands. And I drew back slightly in surprise when I tasted the salty dew of tears, a forgotten trait of midnight roses. But my smile returned as I realized you were weeping for me, in anticipation of what you could offer me, your resplendent beauty thus far enfolded, now straining to open in full bloom. For me. The pleasure and pain of your first bloom, all for me.

Gratitude, a feeling so alien to a man such as myself, suddenly unveiled itself in my mind, and I knew only an unearthly wonder such as yourself could lead me to allow such an intrusion.

We were alone at last, the pestilences departed under my orders, and with one simple spell we lay in darkness, my favorite shade of being. But I saw you still, beauty sinking effortlessly into invisibility, leaving my sixth sense to drink you in and feel for the edges of your awareness, your every emotion, each fluttering of your eyelashes and trembling of your lips. You spoke, you whispered, you sang through the folds of your petals, writhing in helpless reaction to the worship of hands that had crushed thousands, the submissive touch of lips that had brought down kingdoms with mere words. I trembled at the startling knowledge of my own weakness, the thorn that had embedded itself in my side, loosed from your unbroken stem. The one weakness of the most powerful man in the world, the man who would see the Seven Deserts break and bend to his will, who now bowed helplessly before a small, slender rose.

I lay silently in the wake of my release and your surrender, stroking your hair but no longer brushing the invisible realm of your mind, willfully separating us so as to regain the precious self-control I had let slip from my seasoned grasp. I watched you critically then, as a novice wizard would examine a rare, unstudied specimen before deciding on the nature and frequency of the experiments that could be performed upon it. But unlike an inexperienced apprentice, I would not make mistakes; I could not afford to, with pristine beauty such as yours. How to test an impossibility? A rose that could grow in dead sands, a rose that would not snap at the stem like all others I have plucked from their gardens.

I smiled in the darkness, breathing in the faint scent of your petals, slowly closing for dreamless sleep, and decided to wait. There was no need to rush to know your limits, the depth of your beauty and the outer edges of your perfection. Time was abundant.

Because you were mine. My little Rose of the Black Sand.