An Evil Overlord’s Vision is absolutely vital. But is not sufficient in and of itself to secure Utter Domination, of course. Visions are as common as crotch rot is to sailors. A Vision, all by itself, has another name: a wish. And like father Viker used to say, wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which one fills up faster.

So you’ve got a vision for the future - you on a throne of bones atop a mountain of severed heads, say. Bully for you. You can’t hear it, but know that I am clapping for you… slowly.

How are you going to get there? Are you just going to start chopping heads off until you can pile them up high enough to make you feel important? Because that rarely works out over the long run, let me tell you.

No. After you’ve thought (hopefully) long and hard about your Vision, what you need is a Mission. Your Vision is for the future. Your Mission is what you’re going to do today to turn that dark, blood-soaked image of years-to-come into reality.

What I’m saying is, Utter Domination isn’t for slackers or the thought-challenged. If you are unburdened by a conscience or morality but want someone else to do all the heavy mental lifting for you, consider a career as a minion. Or a tax collector.

~ ~ ~

Over the next few months, the Scriptorium lost many of its more precious manuscripts, as I graduated from street-side vice to ever-more established and prestigious gambling and comfort houses. It was, without exaggeration, the best time of my life.

I learned many, many things about how the world truly works, from men with names like Three Fingers and Snake and the Count (so named for his facility with counting cards). From women, I learned skills of a more… intimate nature, as well as vastly practical things like how to pick a pocket and to stitch up a rip - in cloth or in flesh. But mostly the women of my acquaintance taught me how to not be at a complete loss in the bedroom.

They did not, sadly, teach me how to woo, or have an intimate relationship that was anything more than transactional, though I suppose I did learn how to be generally friendly with people of the female persuasion. For most men that would likely be a lesson that didn’t need to be learned, I suspect. But then most men don’t grow up in a monastery. I can’t overstate just how disadvantaged I was when it came to socializing with people who possessed breasts, especially with Viker’s dire lessons still rattling around deep down in my brain.

Women aside, I soaked up a stellar education in vice and crime, simply by keeping my mouth shut and my ears open as I sat at one gaming table or another, or in one of the many wine shops and public houses the city had to offer. And once the riffraff customers of such places had become accustomed to my presence, they were more than happy to answer any questions I did find the courage to ask. I became something of a mascot in the underbelly of the Capital, and it didn’t hurt that I lost vast sums of money to its denizens. My education did not come without a price, you see, and the more I learned, the more costly those lessons became.

Gambling debts. I’m talking about gambling debts. Great horking mounds of them.

I finally found myself in such a desperate need of money that I took to breaking into, and raiding, the Forbidden Collection.

That sounds more difficult and daring than it actually was. Brother Krum 'guarded' the Collection. He was ninety-three, stone deaf, senile, and slept at least twenty hours a day. And he kept the key to the Collection in an outer pocket of his cassock.

I don’t know why the Scriptorium housed such vile tomes. Certainly we never copied any of them. I suspect that, over the centuries, the Church stumbled upon and confiscated them here and there. Then, in true unthinking bureaucratic fashion, the Church just dumped them on the Scriptorium because they were books, and we did stuff with books, and Bob’s your uncle.

There were perhaps three hundred books in the Forbidden Collection, which was in fact housed in a broom closet. There weren't even any shelves. The books were just stacked on the floor in half a dozen tottering, messy piles amongst the cleaning supplies. (Two things I learned from the brothers – the power of pettiness, and the vastly underrated skill of not giving a damn. Both these seemingly opposed life lessons were to color my future, both for good and ill.)

I just started taking books from the pile nearest the door, one or two at a time, and I sold them to this or that alchemist, hedge wizard, antiquarian or used book dealer. I couldn’t tell you all the dangerous or downright evil stuff I let back into the world to keep my fingers from being broken over my debts. Honestly, I rarely did more than glance at the cover or flip through the first couple of pages. I know I sold a copy of the Necronomicon to a fellow from Arkenwold. I think he became emperor there before went mad and killed himself and everyone else in the palace. I sold The King in Yellow to some grimy alchemist, who blew himself and half of Gruin up a few weeks later. I sold the Grimoire of Hacht Blau to that woman who caused so much trouble down in Fevre. Pity, that; she was very pretty before the changes took hold. But really, anyone who bases their hopes for Utter Domination on books written by madmen or demon-spawn should know what to expect.

The funny thing is, books filled with Knowledge Not Meant for Man didn't fetch nearly the price of the various pornographic tomes I filched, which should tell you something about what people are really in the market for.

In any case, I eventually pilfered a book that contained an imprisoned demon. Trust me, there will be much more on that subject a little later. But before I get into all that, I need to tell you about Chortle.

You’ll find two kinds of Evil Overlord in this world. The first kind are those who are made, much like myself. We are not destined for Utter Domination; instead, we build our dark futures one blood-soaked brick at a time, as it were.

The second kind, I swear to you, seem to be born for a dark and glorious future, as if the universe looked down on our shit world and said ‘Let’s make it worse.’

That was Chortle.

* * *

Even the younger me had sense enough not to wear my monk’s garb into the various dens of iniquity I frequented. That would have drawn absolutely unwanted attention, and sparked questions I did not want to answer. That there was a monk going round dropping coin on cards and dice and drink and harlots might eventually have gotten back to someone in the church in a position to investigate and do something about it.

The Church of the Light might be the biggest scam imaginable, but they were very big on the concept of outward piety. If I’d been found out as a brother hip-deep in vice, they’d have stripped me of my status as a brother, likely after having publicly stoned me.

So every morning I would depart the Scriptorium, basket of pilfered books in hand, and walk across the Plaza to the Boulevard of Golden Rays, then walk three and a half blocks to a nameless alley where I kept my non-ecclesiastical garb stashed in an upturned rain barrel. I’d do a quick change, store my basket and robe in the barrel and then continue on with my daily rounds of being a wastrel, returning in the late afternoon to change once more and actually do the marketing.

It worked perfectly well for me for months, until the day it didn’t. That was the day I met Chortle. Or rather, it was the day Chortle decided to drop her metaphorical axe on my neck.

I’d just stripped off my robe and was standing in the alley in my small clothes when I heard a throat-clearing behind me. I glanced over my shoulder, prepared to be embarrassed, improbable explanations for what I was doing already bubbling up in my brain.

The throat-clearer was a girl, no more than eight, and she was obviously what would be called in polite company a street urchin. In other words, she was nobody to worry about. Or so I thought.

“You change out of those god-botherer clothes here every day,” she said. “I been watching you.”

“Well that’s more than a little creepy,” I replied, hopping around the alley, pulling on a pair of trousers.

“I thought you was a fake, at first. But I followed you back to the monk house once. The one for priests who’re too big of assholes to be let out in public.”

“It’s called the Scriptorium, and we have the very important job of setting the holy word of the Light onto paper so that Its message may spread, and what do you care anyway?” By then I’d got my tunic on over my head. I slipped my sandals on.

“I don’t.”

“That’s grand, then. You’re blocking my way, runt.” She was, not that it would have been much trouble to move her out of the mouth of the alley and be about my business.

“I don’t care if you’re a priest or a monk or a fake, or an asshole for that matter. I do care that you’re a scribbler. I got a use for you, see.”

“Well I happen to be otherwise engaged, you weird little stalker. Move now, or I’ll be forced to move you.”

Chortle did two things, then. First she pulled out a knife and held it like she knew how to use it, which meant that, lack or education or not, she knew at least one thing that I didn’t. Second, she put two fingers of her free hand to her lips and let out a piercing whistle. About a second later, three hard men materialized at her back. The kind of men you absolutely did not want to see in a dimly lit alley. The kind of men that my riffraff friends occasionally warned me about.

“I said I got a use for you, scribbler. Didn’t ask if you was available.” She smiled, revealing dimpled cheeks.

To this day I associate dimples with absolute evil.

"Come along quiet now," she told me, and I did. What choice did I have?

So anyway, that’s how I became the resident scribe and forger for the Dead Dogs gang, a position I was reluctantly forced to keep for months – until the Great Fire set me free by destroying most of the Capital, and all the Dead Dogs along with it.

There’s always a silver lining, if you look hard enough for it.

Also, my personal take is to never name your organization after corpses of any sort. It’s just tempting fate if you ask me.

* * *

It wasn’t just the threat of bodily harm that Chortle held over me, though she certainly did that. She was smart enough to make me fear losing my freedom, you see, which was worth far more to me than a beating, or even more permanent injury. In the grand scheme of things, I was living a fairly satisfying life. I had a roof over my head and food to eat. I had coin enough to sate my desires on a daily basis just by carting a book or three out the door every morning. And I didn’t have to do any actual work to enjoy my life.

Really, the only worry I had before I met Chortle was brother Maugrim’s health, because once he kicked it, marketing duties would go to brother Farendt, who never failed to give me the evil eye. Every morning at the breakfast table he’d stare daggers at me, and when he thought no-one was looking he’d draw a finger across his wattly neck, and mouth the word ‘soon.’ But he was eighty if he was a day and my cell door had a deadbolt, so I managed to contain my anxiety.

“I don’t aim to get you tossed from the church, scribbler,” Chortle told me over a glass of awful wine in what to my eye looked like an abandoned house. An abandoned house with an absolute shit-ton of valuables just lying about, though. The Dead Dogs had more coin and jewels and precious portables than they knew what to do with, it appeared.

“You can keep doing what you’re doing,” Chortle continued, “so long as you do what I want you to do, when I tell you.”

“And what exactly is it that you want me to do?” Her henchmen were arrayed around the room, sharpening their knives and generally looking like they wanted to carve me up.

“Oh, simple things. The occasional ransom note. A forged letter of exchange or letter of patent here and there. Whatever comes up, really.”

“So… all you want me to do is write?” That I could do. Despite brother Maugrim’s opinion of my copyist skills, I was in truth a fair hand. And it wouldn’t be my first time forging documents.

“Mostly. There might be situations when we need someone like you to, uh, play a part, as it were.”

I was in no way an actor. Also I wanted to stay far, far away from the actual commission of any crimes, which would considerably increase the chance of me being apprehended for said crimes.

“What kind of part?” I asked with more than a little trepidation.

“Well I can’t walk into a bank and get service, for example, and none of the other Dead Dogs clean up worth a shit. And even if they did, as soon as they opened their mouths, they’d raise suspicions, if you get my meaning.”

I wasn’t actually sure if she meant the way they spoke, or the way they were missing some fairly important teeth, but I nodded just the same.

“Or maybe we need a lookout one day, someone who’s obvoiusly utterly harmless and unimportant.” She shrugged and put back the rest of her wine in one gulp. I realized after a second that she’d just insulted me.

“The possibilities are many, scribbler,” she continued. “The point is, you do what I say, and when I don’t need you, you get to keep going on with all your goings-on. The ones that the Light would disapprove mightily of, if someone were to tell. Get it?”

I did. I didn’t like it, but I did.

“Any questions?”

“Why are you so evil?”

“My Mama didn’t love me. If you see a red rag in your rain barrel, get your ass here. Now fuck off.”