Anyone who has served the mighty Demon Lord Morgard for as many years as Vez has, knows when to grovel, when to lavish with praise, and when to yes m’lord until the crackling embers cease their raining from the demon lord’s flame drenched eye sockets. Vez has seen first-hand what happens to those too stupid or stubborn to bend to Morgard’s whims.

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Vez is neither stupid nor stubborn. He values his life too highly to trade it away for sheer stupidity, or worse - the stubborn, relentless sort of stupidity which so many heroes wear like those crests on their useless shields.

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When Morgard approaches Vez, his favored seer, demanding a prophecy which will stem the endless stream of foolhardy heroes (little more than pests to one such as Morgard), Vez does what any sane minion would do. He lies through his teeth.

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“Yes,” Vez says, dipping delicate fingers into his wide basin. The water is icy and it sharpens his senses. “I see it,” he says - though in truth, the only thing he sees is his own reflection. Dark skin. Elegantly braided hair. Bright gold painting the rims of his clever eyes.

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“What do you see?” Morgard asks, hunching eagerly over the bowl. He is ten feet tall and monstrous in his great cloak. He wears a deer skull on his head, and whatever lies beneath is inky and immaterial - apart from those red, ember eyes.

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Vez stares down at his reflection and can’t help recall the last hero - a grim faced woman with a brave, steady gaze. She’d sworn to defeat Morgard so that she might save her enslaved, suffering people. By the end, Vez watched as Morgard bent over her, the chalk white skull shaking atop his head as he sucked the soul from her body. The day before had been a young man - burned to a crisp. And before that, twins - crushed beneath each of Morgard’s cruel feet.

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Vez thinks of the seemingly endless numbers of heroes willing to throw away their very lives for the barest hope of a better, demon-lordless world. It isn’t that Vez sympathizes with them. Gods no. He can’t afford that. He does tire of all the death though.

Besides, he has no real vision to offer Morgard. What is the harm in one more lie?

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“There is only one in all of the world who can defeat you, my lord,” Vez hums, artfully twisting his fingers through the water. Waves lap at the basin’s silver edges. “And what luck, my lord! The only one in the world who might defeat you is a coward at heart.”

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As the demon lord roars with laughter, Vez smiles into his basin.

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It really is a perfect trick, he thinks to himself. The brave heroes will no longer have reason to throw themselves at Morgard - for their willingness to die separates them from any coward. While a true coward would never willingly risk their life fighting Morgard to begin with.

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Word spreads of the prophecy. Whispers are delivered to the right ears and easily decoded messages placed in carefully selected hands. Soon enough, all surrounding lands know of the impossible prognostication.

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Of course, heroes try to find ways around the prophecy, but not nearly so many as before. Heroic deaths, which had once been a near daily occurrence, are now a mere monthly affair. It doesn’t make the screams necessarily easier to overhear, but Vez appreciates that he no longer needs to stuff his ears with cloth every other hour.

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Vez goes about his business of foretelling (which is sometimes genuine, but mostly telling the demon lord what he wants to hear), and doesn’t look at the heroes who still come to die, doesn’t listen to them, doesn’t think of them…until the children arrive.

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Vez is sprinkling a rich maroon powder into his basin for purely aesthetic purposes when he hears the doors to the main chambers open and close. The sound that follows is the metallic snap of guard’s boots - then, the telltale, high-pitched sobs of children.

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He stands before his purple basin, one hand reaching for the cloth to plug his ears, his other reaching blindly for the door. In the end, he tucks the cloth in his pockets and slinks silently into the grand hall.

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Morgard sits upon a throne of skulls, both human and beast alike. The children - a boy and a girl - have been forced to the ground before him. They can’t be more than ten, and Vez notices their little hands are tied.

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“A band of rebels got it in their heads that children are the key to the prophecy,” a guard says by way of explanation and knocks his boot against the boy’s back.

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Vez’s hands curl at his sides.

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If a hero were here, they would march to the center of the hall and face Morgard and the guards. But Vez is not a hero. There’s a reason he’s survived so long in the demon lord’s employment, after all.

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Morgard stands. “I’ll show them the error of their ways.” And the terrible fire in his eyes flares.

Vez steps back, away from the hall. He slips into his chambers without a sound. Moving with haste, he pries open the lid of his thick oak chest and pulls a vial from its depths. When he returns to the hall, the children, kneeling in Morgard’s shadow, have begun to shriek in fear.

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Uncorking the vial with his teeth, Vez tosses it with a flick of his hand. Glass rings against stone as it clatters across the floor. Something pops, and then black smoke billows up and out, choking the room.

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Vez slips into darkness, like an owl into night, a miniature blade sliding from its hiding place in his sleeve. He finds the children by pure luck - nearly tripping over them in his hurry.

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A hero would have taken a child under each arm and run. Or perhaps they would have turned a blade on the dark lord while he was blinded. But Vez is no hero.

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With two flicks of the blade, he cuts the ropes binding their little hands. “Run for the door,” he hisses close by their ears, and shoves them in the right direction.

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While the dark lord is bellowing at the guards and the guards are stomping blindly through the smoke, Vez slips into his chambers.

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Without pause, he draws an elegantly beaded bag from a hook by the door. Propping open the wooden chest, he throws vials and notes and trinkets into the bag. When it is satisfactorily full, he closes the chest and yanks back the tapestry which hides the passageway to the tunnels beneath the castle. Though he’d hoped to never need to flee Morgard’s wrath, Vez has always been painfully aware of the demon lord’s record when it came to murdering servants - and so he’d been prepared.

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Whipping the tapestry fully aside, he steps into darkness - only to be yanked back by his collar. An icy hand grips him, and Vez looks up into a white skull and red, burning eyes.

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“You’ve betrayed me,” Morgard seethes, and those ember eyes are leaking fire.

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“My Lord,” Vez gasps, clutching at the armored hand which grasps him by the neck. “I would never!”

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“What was the trick with the smoke then? Why have I caught you fleeing like a thief in the night?”

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“All very good questions,” Vez chokes.

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He doesn’t have a satisfactory answer. He can’t even think of a good lie with Morgard’s fingers around his throat. The only thoughts in his head are wild, frantic, and repetitious.

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Oh gods of above and below, I don’t want to die. I really don’t want to die.

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The gods did not answer the heroes, and neither do they answer Vez. He realizes he is going to die.

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With a sudden, terrible jerk, the demon lord stumbles forward, and Vez, gasping, slips from his grasp. He glimpses the girl child, standing behind the hulking demon, her little hands raised. The boy is at her back, clinging to her shirt.

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Vez groans.

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He is not a hero, and so to the children he snaps, “Would you brats get out of here already?”

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Morgard, with a flick of his hand, sends them flying back. When he turns back, Vez knows that this will surely be when he dies. Vez draws the blade from his sleeve - not thinking to attack with it, but to draw it across his own throat and spare himself the torture Morgard surely desires to inflict upon him.

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Vez lifts the blade to his neck as Morgard reaches toward him - and from the corner of his eye, sees darting movement. It’s the girl again (stubborn, stupid child), and she throws herself against the back of the demon lord’s leg.

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The demon lord pitches forward, as Vez, shrieking in terror, lifts both hands to ward him away. The great skull crashes forward, and the blade grasped in Vez’s terrified hand plunges deep into a flaming eye socket.

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Fire explodes out, and Vez scrambles back as Morgard screams in agonized disbelief. And then, the room is completely, absolutely silent.

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Morgard, the Great Demon lord, is a pile of rags and bones on Vez’s chamber floor.

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“Woah,” the little girl says. The boy only sobs.

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He’s got the right idea, Vez thinks, and feels like sobbing too. But he thinks of the guards and Morgard’s other faithful servants and rises on trembling legs.

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“Well children,” Vez says, brushing the dirt of his knees. “Shall we go?”

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“Where?” The boy asks, red faced and despairing.

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“Literally anywhere but here.” Vez snatches up his bag.

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He jumps when a tiny hand wraps around his fingers. The little girl looks up at him and says in an almost conspiratorial whisper. “You killed the demon lord. That means you’re a-”

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“Shut up. Not a hero,” he snaps, and impatiently holds his other hand out for the boy. The boy reluctantly takes it - and gross, his fingers are sticky.

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“What are we gonna do?” The girl asks.

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“We, children, are about to practice the age old art of running away.” When they look at him with wide, unblinking eyes, Vez sighs and adjusts his grip on their hands. “Come on, then. Just try to keep up.”

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And so Vez, the only mostly fraudulent seer, escaped with the children through the bowels of the castle.

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When news spread of the demon lord’s defeat, it was whispered that the nameless champion had, in true coward’s fashion, fled into the night.