The Dread Lord Gavrax has had better weeks…
We’re thrilled to share the cover and preview an excerpt from Dreadful, a high fantasy farce from author Caitlin Rozakis—forthcoming June 2024 from Titan Books.
It’s bad enough waking up in a half-destroyed evil wizard’s workshop with no eyebrows, no memories, and no idea how long you have before the Dread Lord Whomever shows up to murder you horribly and then turn your skull into a goblet or something.
It’s a lot worse when you realize that Dread Lord Whomever is… you.
Gav isn’t really sure how he ended up with a castle full of goblins, or why he has a princess locked in a cell. All he can do is play along with his own evil plan in hopes of getting his memories back before he gets himself killed.
But as he realizes that nothing—from the incredibly tasteless cloak adorned with flames to the aforementioned princess—is quite what it seems, Gav must face up to all the things the Dread Lord Gavrax has done. And he’ll have to answer the hardest question of all—who does he want to be?
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Dreadful
Caitlin Rozakis’s work has appeared in Cast of Wonders, Daily Science Fiction, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Weirdbook, Allegory, Liquid Imagination, Bards & Sages, Every Day Fiction, the anthologies Substitution Cipher, Clockwork Chaos, and Baker Street Irregulars II. She was nominated for a 2014 Pushcart Prize and won the 2018 LUMINA Speculative Fiction Contest. She is based in New Jersey, and Dreadful is her first novel.
He woke up with no eyebrows and no idea how he’d gotten into such a position.
It wasn’t just that he couldn’t remember why he was lying on his back, or why there were tiny fires smoldering throughout the room. He couldn’t remember the room.
It was not the kind of room to be forgettable. The floor was made of black marble, with concentric silver circles embedded in it. The remains of an elaborate pattern of magical runes and indeterminate squiggles chalked around the outermost circle had been scuffed into partial illegibility. A dagger whose death’s head pommel gave him the willies lay coated in caking blood. The wall had manacles embedded in the stone, which made him passingly grateful to have only been on his back on the floor. He didn’t know whether the large articulated bird skeleton was intended as an oft-used resource or just decoration. The human skull with a half-melted candle jutting out of it attempted to be both. As far as he was concerned, it succeeded at neither. Who had chosen this decorating scheme? He was tempted to give the owner a piece of his mind, if only he could remember who the owner was.
Or who he was.
The realization did not so much hit him as politely tap him on the shoulder, having waited patiently for him to stop being distracted by the mess. He lost his breath at the thought. How could you forget who you were? If you had forgotten, how could you fail to notice that simple fact?
But then, how often did you think about it? He couldn’t remember when he’d last informed himself of his own name. But then, he couldn’t remember much of anything. He would have to ask the next person he saw.
Someone knocked on the door.
He immediately abandoned any resolutions of asking anyone anything. He was the only person left in the ruined workshop of someone who kept human skulls as decor, and things were on fire. He did not want the sinister owner of this room to come back and blame it all on him.
If he stayed very still, maybe they would go away?
Very slowly, and with great deliberation, the bird skeleton collapsed.
He had enough time to see it start to fall, and feel his stomach plummet with it. He had nowhere near enough time to catch it, although he tried. The main mass, its mount weakened by whatever had removed his eyebrows and his memory, slammed into the floor before his outstretched hands. The resulting crash scraped his nerves and echoed through the workshop. Some of the bones bounced free, and these toppled down the bookshelf with musical little plinks. He scrambled after them as if somehow if he could just make the sounds stop happening, whoever was outside would overlook the first big crash. Bones skittered away from his shaking fingers, a cascading arpeggio. His elbow knocked into the bird skull, which rolled audibly across the floor, grinning all the while. He slammed a foot down on the skull, shutting its gaping beak, and unbalancing a teetering pile of books. He shoved books back before they could fall, which knocked the stone pestle behind it over. He sat down heavily, defeated. The bowl, only a little chipped, took its sweet time rolling in a spiral, the sound of stone on stone wobbling finally to a halt.
There was a long silence.
Someone knocked again.
“My lord?” The voice was scratchy, accented as if the words didn’t quite fit right in the owner’s mouth. “Need firefighting team?”
Oh. He probably should try to put out all those little fires before something bigger caught. But letting in the team would reveal their lord was not here, and then they would want to know who he was, and then a great number of very uncomfortable questions he did not have answers to would result.
What would this lord of theirs sound like? Evil, clearly. He tried to make his voice sound deeper. Keep it short. “Everything’s fine.”
He looked around frantically. Not much in the way of firefighting equipment in the room. A black table hosted glassware, or at least, it used to. He hoped it wasn’t a problem that half of the potion flasks had shattered, and that a blue liquid was oozing out of a cracked alembic. The way the worktable sizzled suggested it might be. But none of the remaining bottles seemed likely to contain water. Fortunately, most of the fires were on the tiny side.
“Need help, my lord?”
Very persistent! Very commendable! Possibly suicidal! The owner of the voice clearly put duty ahead of self-preservation. He grabbed a thick sheaf of papers and set to beating the little flames to death.
“No!” He knocked over a broken bottle, which crashed onto the floor in a spectacular spray of glass shards. A whiff of purple smoke escaped as the contents rapidly dried into a powdery residue.
“My lord?” The handle of the door jiggled.
His voice rose to a crack: “Stay out!” There was no way they would fail to notice he wasn’t their master, but it was too late to come up with a better plan. “You’ll… uh… disrupt the spell!”
The jiggling immediately stopped. “Sorry, my lord!” The voice had its own note of panic now.
“Leave me alone!” There, another fire out. The hem of his robe had been eaten away to a lacy texture by that splash.
“Yes, my lord!”
He would have savored the sound of retreating footsteps, but he was too busy putting out the owl wing that had caught alight.
Not until he’d extinguished the last of the fires did it occur to him that the sheaf of papers might have been valuable in and of itself, and perhaps reducing the bottom several pages to charred ruins had been unwise.
He collapsed in the massive wooden chair in the corner to catch his breath. It was a monster of a thing, a dark wood nightmare that had to weigh a ton. Sultry carved women peered through hair that barely hid their nakedness. One licked an apple in her hand with a long, forked tongue. He stared at it, fascinated and vaguely disgusted and all too distracted from the real issues he needed to be considering.
So, this was shock. It seemed terribly inconvenient that the brain’s reaction to being placed in mortal jeopardy was to become much stupider.
Focus. Who was he? He was dressed in black velvet, which fell all the way to the floor except for the new holes. Expensive. Soft shoes, nothing meant for tromping around outside. A belt, made of small silver panels linked together, which felt rather like it had been made several years’ worth of beer and cakes earlier. The sleeves were a lost cause, shredded and singed, the remnants trailing impractically. It all gave him a rather sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.
An enormous mirror, as wide as his outstretched arms and half his height, loomed from an ornate stand bolted to the floor a couple inches away from the wall. A sheer piece of black fabric hung over the top, completely covering the glass so he could see dim outlines. He forced himself to his feet. Taking a deep breath, he pulled the cloth free.
No shock of recognition.
The middle-aged face that looked back at him was not remotely familiar. Pale white skin, dark hair, a rather sinister goatee. Although the look was ruined by the bit of jowl that started to appear around his chin. And the soot. And the lack of eyebrows.
The falling sensation in his falling stomach finally hit the bottom. This menacing room, with its mixture of the weird and the ridiculous? It was his. The voice outside the door obeyed his commands because they were familiar. There was only one kind of person who would have such a room, who would dress in such a way.
He was a Dark Wizard.
He half-expected some kind of acknowledgement of the realization. A roll of thunder, the croak of a crow. But there was nothing. He stared at his reflection, feeling increasingly ridiculous. He turned up his palms, willed them to crackle with electricity or fill with fire or, well, something. Nothing.
Excerpted from Dreadful, copyright © 2023 by Caitlin Rozakis
