The Dark Lady's Guide to Villainy [Book 1 Complete] [Dark Lord, School, Romance]

Five years had passed since Grimz fled Blackthorn Keep, though some days the memory of his escape felt as fresh as yesterday. The barking of the hounds, the shouts of the guards, the cold weight of certainty that capture meant a fate worse than death—these recollections still occasionally woke him in the night, heart pounding and hands instinctively reaching for the silver nightshade pin he kept hidden in a secret pocket.

But those five years had also brought changes he could never have imagined during his days as a servant. The frightened goblin who had stumbled through the western forest, clutching a child's alphabet block and moving only at night, had grown into someone almost unrecognizable to his former self.

Grimz now made his home in what locals called the Border Settlements—a collection of ramshackle towns that did not exist on any cartographer's map, but in the liminal spaces where magical realms brushed too close to the other astral planes. Here, where reality itself grew thin and malleable, enforcement of any single territory's regulations became nearly impossible, and questions about one's past were considered impolite at best, dangerous at worst. It was a place of smugglers, minor outlaws, and beings who had reason to avoid the direct governance of the powerful magical houses—all drawn to these edges where multiple worlds met, but none held complete authority.

The town of Crossroads in particular had become his base of operations, a place built quite literally from the discards of the surrounding realms. Buildings constructed from salvaged timber and stone stood alongside structures that defied conventional architecture—homes partly grown from living trees, shops suspended between dimensions, and establishments that seemed to exist in multiple places simultaneously.

At twenty-two, Grimz had finally grown into his oversized ears, his frame filling out from the scrawny servant he'd once been. What had once been nervous energy now carried the quiet confidence that comes from surviving against impossible odds. The hunched posture of servitude had been replaced by watchful alertness, his movements economical but rarely fearful.

His home was a cramped room above Vermillion's Oddities and Ends, a junk shop specializing in magical castoffs deemed too trivial for the great houses to bother reclaiming. In exchange for sorting the constant influx of discarded items, identifying the truly dangerous ones—a skill honed during his years handling cursed artifacts in Blackthorn Keep's repositories—and occasionally manning the counter when the proprietor was indisposed, usually due to sampling her own inventory of questionable spirits, Grimz received lodging and a modest wage.

More importantly, he had first access to the written materials that sometimes appeared among the junk: damaged books, partial scrolls, discarded correspondence, and occasionally entire crates of papers deemed worthless by their original owners.

It was these treasures that occupied him now, in the pre-dawn hours when the town still slept and he could work uninterrupted. His small room was barely large enough for a cot and a rickety table, but he had transformed every available surface into storage for his growing collection. Wooden crates stacked against the walls held sorted papers, while strings stretched across the ceiling supported pages hung to dry after careful cleaning.

A single cracked lamp provided just enough light to read by without risking magical fire to his precious library. Hunched over the table, Grimz carefully separated the layers of a water-damaged text, using a thin bone tool he had crafted specifically for this purpose.

The book had arrived yesterday, at the bottom of a barrel of miscellaneous items purchased from a merchant who specialized in clearing abandoned properties. Most of the contents had been unremarkable—chipped crockery, tarnished candlesticks, clothing too worn to salvage—but the book, despite its sodden condition, had immediately caught Grimz's attention.

"Of the Advanced Theories of Contractual Bindings, Soul-Debt Enforcement, and Their Most Efficacious Applications in the Governance of Modern Demonic Territories and Lesser Subjects Therein," he read aloud, having to restart twice when the elaborate phrasing tangled in his mind. The formal language required intense concentration even after years of self-education, though he had developed techniques for parsing such dense prose. He had read references to theorists like Veridian the Contemplative in other political works, scholars who had dared to analyze the mechanisms of power itself, but their complete texts remained frustratingly elusive. But Veridian's works were banned, and it was absolutely impossible to get anything larger than a partial page.

The irony wasn't lost on him. Five years ago, he couldn't read at all; now he was painstakingly salvaging legal texts to better understand the system that had oppressed his kind for generations. The young Lady Morgana… Mo, he corrected himself sharply, though the formal address still came first to his tongue despite all his efforts to unlearn years of Blackthorn Keep conditioning. She would probably have found this both funny and fitting.

Grimz sometimes wondered what had become of her. She would be around eight now, still young but likely already deep into the formal education befitting a Nightshade heir. Had her brief friendship with a goblin servant affected her worldview, or had her father succeeded in erasing that uncomfortable episode from her development?

He hoped she remembered, and that some small part of her still questioned the traditions she was being raised to enforce. But he had no illusions about the power of Nightshade conditioning. Even the kindest children could be shaped into rulers who saw beings like him as little more than animated tools.

A soft knock at his door interrupted these musings. Grimz carefully set aside the fragile page and moved to answer, already knowing who he would find.

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"You're up early," he greeted the hunched figure in the hallway.

Moggs, a goblin nearly thrice Grimz's age, with skin the color of old moss and eyes perpetually widened in mild surprise, shuffled into the room carrying a small basket.

"Couldn't sleep," Moggs replied, setting the basket on the only clear corner of the table. "The wife's cousins arrived last night. Seven of them, all talking at once." He shook his head in fond exasperation. "Brought you some breakfast. Seskra made too much, as usual."

The basket contained several meat-filled pastries still warm from the oven, their rich aroma making Grimz's stomach rumble in sudden awareness of hunger. He accepted one gratefully, only now realizing he had been working for hours without a break.

"She's going to fatten me up until I can't fit through doorways," Grimz said around a mouthful of flaky crust and savory filling.

"Thinks you're too skinny," Moggs agreed, helping himself to a pastry. "Says it's not natural for a goblin your age to spend so much time with papers instead of proper food, booze, and company."

This was a familiar refrain. Moggs and his wife Seskra had taken Grimz under their protection when he first arrived in Crossroads, a half-starved fugitive barely able to keep himself alive. They had asked few questions about his past, understanding all too well why a goblin might flee the territories of the great house. Instead, they had offered practical help—food, temporary shelter, introductions to potential employers who wouldn't ask for documentation or references. Not that many employers asked for those things over here.

In return, Grimz had gradually shared his unusual skill with them. At first, they had been skeptical, even alarmed—a literate goblin was unheard of, dangerous even in the relatively lawless Border Settlements. But over time, as they witnessed the practical applications of his reading and writing, their fear had turned to cautious appreciation.

Moggs now sat on the edge of the cot, eyeing the water-damaged book with curiosity. "Another one for your collection? What's this one about?"

"Contracts," Grimz explained, returning to the table. "Legal agreements between rulers and subjects. The foundations of governance."

"Sounds thrilling," Moggs said dryly, though his expression remained interested. Like most goblins raised in service to the magical houses, he had an instinctive wariness of written language but a growing recognition of its potential value.

"It might help with the dockworkers' dispute," Grimz said, carefully turning another sodden page. "The book may be a bit dated. But there are precedents here for negotiated labor agreements that don't rely on traditional demonic hierarchies and bloodlines."

Moggs made a noncommittal sound. The situation at the docks had been simmering for months—goblin laborers refusing to unload certain shipments without better pay, merchants threatening to bring in trolls as replacements, local authorities, if you could call them that, reluctant to intervene in what they saw as a private business matter. It was exactly the kind of conflict that Grimz had become increasingly involved in, using his rare literacy to help his fellow goblins understand their options beyond simple submission or hopeless rebellion.

"You're playing a dangerous game," Moggs said, not for the first time. "Reading for yourself is one thing. Using it to challenge established practices is another."

"I'm not challenging anything," Grimz replied with practiced innocence. "Just helping people understand the rules better."

Moggs snorted. "Understanding rules is the first step to changing them. Don't think I don't see what you're doing, building your little library, collecting laws and histories like they're precious gems."

There was no heat in his words, only concern. In the five years since arriving in Crossroads, Grimz had made a point of collecting every scrap of written material he could acquire, carefully hiding his most valuable political texts among stacks of mundane correspondence and useless rubbish. He presented his growing collection as merely an eccentric hobby, a personal curiosity rather than the foundation for something more ambitious. But Moggs knew him too well to be completely fooled.

The conversation was interrupted by another soft knock, this one carrying the distinctive rhythm that identified the visitor as Vermillion herself. Grimz quickly secured the water-damaged text in a protective wrapping before opening the door.

The shop owner was a tall, willowy figure whose species remained deliberately ambiguous—possibly demonic, possibly something else entirely. Today her skin held a faint blue tinge, and her hair moved independently of any breeze, suggesting one of her periodic transformations. She changed her appearance as casually as others changed clothes, a trait that served her well in the diverse community of Crossroads.

"My favorite sorter of treasures," she greeted him cheerfully. "Just received three barrels from an estate clearance in Vexaria. Looks promising—much of it appears to be from a defunct alchemist's workshop."

Grimz suppressed a groan. Alchemical equipment was notoriously difficult to evaluate without risking toxic exposure or magical backfire. It was precisely the sort of sorting that Vermillion preferred to delegate while maintaining a safe distance herself.

"Any obvious hazards?" he asked, already tying on the protective apron they used for such occasions.

"Nothing overtly carnivorous or dimension-altering, at least on preliminary inspection," she replied, which was less reassuring than she probably intended. "I've put them in the secondary storeroom. The usual precautions should suffice."

As Vermillion departed and Moggs gathered the breakfast dishes, Grimz prepared for what promised to be a challenging day of sorting. But beneath his professional caution lay a familiar excitement. Each new acquisition brought the possibility of discovering knowledge that had been discarded by those who failed to recognize its true value.

After all, one person's trash was often another's treasure—and in the right hands, even the most overlooked scrap of written knowledge could become a tool for transformation. The question was not whether valuable texts lay hidden among the alchemist's abandoned possessions, but what dangerous truths they might contain, and how those truths might serve the growing number of goblins who had learned to read the world for themselves.

Grimz descended toward the storeroom, carrying with him the quiet confidence of someone who had spent five years turning discarded knowledge into instruments of liberation. Today, like every day since his escape from Blackthorn Keep, held the potential to uncover another piece of the puzzle—another fragment of understanding that might help his people break free from the invisible chains that bound them.