Page 24 of Sincerely, Secretary of Doom

Doom tilted his head back and forth like he was weighing that. “Probably not.”

“Didn’t you see what he did to the other victims? You were following that story, too! I saw your article in the last Fairy Post. You know how he left the people he attacked!” Violet’s voice had grown uncharacteristically high.

“Yes. Andmostof them he left alive,” Doom said.

Violet’s jaw dropped. “Mostof them?!” She slapped a hand to her forehead, feeling a sudden lack of necessary iron supplements. Her knees were weak.

He shrugged. “I mean, the odds are in your favour, if you want to be picky about it.”

“Picky? You’re talking about my life!” Violet snapped. Then she whispered, “What have you gotten me into?”

The Master of Doom uncrossed his arms and sauntered over. “I got you into nothing, Human. You came here all on your own and broke into my house and rang my bell.”

“Is thatallthat happened?” Her glower fired up to him. “Because for a while I was missing part of the memory of when we first met.”

His jaw slid to the side. “Fine. Yes, I tried to steal your memory of coming here on that first day.” Violet slid away from him, nearly stumbling over a broken chair. Her eyes were wide, she was sure she’d heard wrong. “But your faeborn-cursed flesh burned my fingers and I only got fragments,” he added. “And besides, I gave the memories back to you once I thought better of it. You should have realized by now they’ve returned.”

Violet wasn’t breathing anymore. If she was, she didn’t feel it.

It should have been obvious the moment he’d teleported her in here that he was magical enough to do other things too, like wipe memories. But she hadn’t known the cold, definite truth until this moment. Even if the serial-attacker and Doom were two different beings, they both stole memories from people. She thought of the crushing pain she would go through again if she lost her precious memories with Zorah, and everything else she’d experienced the last ten years. The only memories she had left. She shook her head in denial. She didn’t want to lose a single one of them ever again. Not even a minute.

“Who are you?” she asked for the hundredth time, only this time, it came out cracked, and worn, and a necessary amount of afraid.

He seemed to notice. Seemed to consider the waver in her words. “My unhidden name is Mor,” he finally said.

Mor.

Just, Mor.

She wouldn’t call him that. That was a clean name meant for someone harmless and normal. He was not normal. He was an animal. A bringer of destruction; a stealer of life. He was…

He was Doom.

Doom right before her eyes.

11

Mor Trisencor and How it All Began in the Shadows, Part 1

Mor was no longer a childling when the Shadow Army reached Windswiple, the northernmost fairy city on the cusp of the Dark Corner, where sunlight filtered in and chased the ever-clouds away. The army always washed in like a black flood, taking over homes for beds when they grew tired, robbing the villagers of their milk beasts when they were thirsty, and at times, stealing the villagers’ hard-earned coin.

No one seemed to wonder what it was, exactly, that the Shadow Army was protecting. It certainly wasn’t the citizen fairies of the Dark Corner.

But Mor never asked questions. He never said much of anything, to his army comrades’ discontent. When he turned thirteen years of age, he stayed silent for over a full faeborn year. At first, his fellow Shadow Fairies tried to get him to speak by means of prodding, poking, and trickery. But they grew silent when Mor volunteered for combat training that year and brutally and violently defeated them in the training rings. No one seemed bothered by Mor’s silence after that.

The day he broke his silence was the same day the Shadow Army entered Windswiple. Mor was exactly fourteen and twenty-three days old.

The trees were different in Windswiple. They were greener, livelier, lush. They bore giant fruits unheard of in the rest of the Dark Corner due to the great toiling cloud—a cloud the Queene of North Corner had cursed to remain over the land of the Shadow Fairies for their insubordination. Harvests were difficult in the shadows. But the toiling cloud didn’t reach the vibrant city of Windswiple on the outskirts of the Corner.

The Shadow Army came for supplies in waves. Mor’s division came in the second wave, so the humble city streets should have been mostly empty. But when Mor entered on the back of a crossbeast that morning, followed by the army folk his own commander had entrusted him with, he saw a fairy childling squirming in the tight grip of a ruby-haired war fae. It wasn’t the first time Mor had witnessed such scenes. He often looked away, swallowed his words, and let the memory slip from his mind into another place afterward.

But perhaps… perhaps that day, while seeing the sunlight for the first time in several years, Mor felt he’d had enough.

Mor slowed his crossbeast to a stop, bringing the lesser fairies under his command to a halt. His glistening, iridescent, black pearl armour clapped together at his shoulders as he slid off his beast. Truly, Mor never even knew there were rainbows in his armour until he saw it in the light for the first time that day.

“State your real name, Fairy. So that I might return to you the torment you’ve given this childling. Unless you’re a faeborn coward.”

His first words. In over a year.

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