The Dark Lord receives a prophecy that a young orphan from the nearby village will end his reign. Instead of killing her, he adopts her.
Agan of the Blade watched his new daughter playing with carved wooden blocks. Rishta was a scrawny little thing still, about three or four, with big brown eyes and dark hair. (They had needed to cut out the mats and trim it down to a soft velvet cap that was finally starting to grow back out.) She was wearing a little tunic and skirt with embroidered butterflies, and she was only wearing one little shoe. (The other lay by the toy chest.)
Her nursemaid hovered, looking between Agan and the child, clearly wondering if she should have little Rishta greet her father or not. The little girl was so absorbed in her blocks that she hadn’t noticed his presence at the nursery door. Agan shook his head, and mouthed, “let her play.” The nursemaid nodded and curtsied.
He goes to his office, reads through reports, and makes plans. The plans are split between “actual things he needs to do,” and “making his enemies look like idiots.” He thinks he’s made excellent headway on the latter with his adoption of little Rishta.
His little girl had been in a very bad situation. (She hadn’t been his little girl yet.) There had been no one willing or able to raise her, and the village had been too small for an orphanage. The poor baby had been eating out of trash bins, and was being beaten up by larger, older children. The mother, from what he’d learned had been a “half-wit” who had died after a second pregnancy, leaving Rishta without a caretaker.
Then there was suddenly a prophecy, and his little girl had been marked by it. There had been some kind of ridiculous quest and rebellion the overseer of that region had put down. The overseer mistakenly thought Agan would want to “dispose” of the Chosen One himself. This was absolutely not the case, which the overseer had found out with seconds of being beheaded.
The rebels hadn’t fared much better, though they lived through the experience of being shouted at for failing to bathe, feed, and protect a frightened baby. (To be fair, they hadn’t had much time in between running from his forces. Still, they could have made it more of a priority.) Then he summoned the biggest shadow he could, and exiled them to the nastiest, most monster haunted region he could think of, since they wanted to play hero so badly.
(He had been carrying Rishta on his hip the entire time. The poor child had been so tired, scared and dazed she had barely reacted to the beheading or the exile. Agan felt a little guilty about that, but he had seen worse things at the same age, so he couldn’t really gauge how bad it was, just that it was probably bad, so he should feel bad about it.)
So now Agan had a daughter, and many confused minions who apparently couldn’t wrap their minds around the idea of their lord as a father. Add to that a large number of enemies bent on “rescuing” his daughter from the clutches of the dark lord. “Maybe I should imply she’s bait,” Agan says to his sword. “There’ve been three kidnapping attempts this month.”
“Bad idea,” the sword says silently. “They won’t be careful enough with her.”
“That’s true,” Agan says with a sigh. “It’s not as if they don’t also have families ,” he complains. “Why would my adopting Rishta be so incomprehensible.”
“Well, there’s the part where she’s supposed to kill you.”
“End my reign,” Agan corrects, and gives the sword an amused, slanted smile. “Not kill. That would make her a heiress as much as an enemy. Or instead of one.”
“Her mother was a half-wit,” the sword points out.
Agan isn’t sure if this is supposed to be judgment of his daughter’s suitability as a heiress or an enemy. “Let me guess, her supposed purity and innocence was supposed to destroy me? Where innocence means child like whatever,” he says sarcastically.
“That’s not in the prophecy either,” the sword says.
“You know they would have thought that,” Agan says. “Anyway, I’m a half-wit. If I didn’t have you, nothing would ever get done.” He’d get distracted, or forget something that needed doing. He could delegate of course, that’s what retainers and courtiers were for, but he couldn’t exactly delegate “double check that you didn’t skip a step in a spell and you didn’t write your equation backward or upside down.” That’s what his familiar was for.
“That barely counts. Point for child-like whatever: she can’t talk.”
“Sometimes people can’t talk,” Agan says slowly. “Sometimes they can’t see or hear. Sometimes they are slow. She probably isn’t mute, at least not because of a physical reason; she squeaks and giggles. Doesn’t seem to have a hearing problem. Not sure about her vision yet. If she’s slow I’ve met royalty that she’d think circles around.”
“She didn’t hear you come into the nursery.”
“Pretty sure she did,” Agan says, amused. “The blocks were more of a priority, is all. Anyway it doesn’t matter how she was going to end my reign. I’ve decided she’s going to do it by inheritance.”
“Fine,” the sword grumbled. “If your heiress can’t pick up sorcery or alchemy or some other arcane branch don’t come crying to me.”
“We’ll see,” Agan says.
The arcane branch Rishta decides to study when she’s older is necromancy. She mostly uses it to study in turn the petrified remains of monsters and plants. The sword sulks, and Agan is smug.
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