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fortune to have his examination and blood work rushed. But here he waited yet again. The doctor had skittered off to tend other patients and left him alone to rot. In Farrenheil, Dr. Korensteen’s family would cower for their lives until he successfully healed a member of the archduke’s family. Dorn toyed with the idea of converting the doctor into a minion instead of paying the promised exorbitant fee.
    Not to waste a period of clarity, the bored lord of Farrenheil retrieved his iPad and opened a file with the scanned parchments of forbidden magicks that he’d stolen during the invasion. These sorceries had been sealed and guarded for centuries in a vault on the border of Aandor and Nurvenheim. All requests to study the scrolls had been turned down—but war favored the opportunist. Chaos made an excellent cover, circumventing powers that might have been brought to bear protecting the scrolls. Many sorcerers had died defending their citadel. Dorn did not see wizardry as a brotherhood— the fewer, the better. True magic users were rare; one in ten thousand had any sensitivity to magical energies. Of them, maybe one in a thousand could willfully wield the energy.
    One scroll contained a spell that could suck an entire city into a singularity no larger than a grape seed. A black snake on a scarlet, hexagon-shaped field was stamped in the corner of that parchment; all the scrolls had this mark—the symbol for forbidden knowledge. Like most of these spells, it required a radioactive element. Destructive weapons existed in this reality through scientific means, but in Aandor, where men still fought wars by hacking at each other with swords and spears, such a spell would be interpreted as an act of the gods.
    You are a god, said the voice. He ignored it. Talking only encouraged madness.
    Dorn read over the singularity spell and wondered what the point of war was if there were no spoils. Sword fighting was messier and less efficient, but one could not rape or enslave cinders or plunder a singularity. One could not farm a field burned to ashes.
    You would be the farmer of death … your crop a bountiful row of corpses.
    The other spells were just as impressive. A few could be utilized to hunt down the prince. They would not be necessary, though. His indentured detective, Colby Dretch, was hot on the lad’s trail. Using forbidden spells at this point was like swatting a fly with a trebuchet. These spells would have to wait until they returned to Aandor. Perhaps he would wipe out that postage-stamp kingdom of Jura—always cowering behind Aandor’s skirt. A miscreant breed of ass kissers if he’d ever met any.
    He opened the locket with the image of Lara. She was only a few years older than him, and could have chosen any lover in the Twelve Kingdoms. Their affair was the worst kept secret, made scandalous only by the fact that she was his mother’s half-sister. But her reputation as a vengeful witch kept their detractors’ tongues in check. Dorn suspected she had enchanted him, heightening his passions for her. It was ironic that those best able to utilize sorcery were also most susceptible to it. Resistance to magic was the sole commonality among the rulers of the Twelve Kingdoms. It was why Dorn could never rule.
    He wondered about the love spell that Lara may or may not have cast on him. These spells were complex, dangerous enchantments and difficult to remove. The enchanted has no desire to remove the spell even when he or she is aware they’d been afflicted. It was like a drug. Intense longing came over the subject when parted from the object of the spell. Dorn had not been prepared to be away from Lara for so long when he crossed over into this universe. He wondered if this was the root of the migraines, the dementia that had grown increasingly worse since arriving on this dimensional plane. “I’ll be home soon,” he told his aunt’s portrait.
    The doctor walked in without announcing himself. It irritated Dorn to