Disclaimer: If I owned even 1% of this show my life would be a lot better than it is right now. Tragically the world doesn't work that way.
Author's Note: I have no idea what possessed me to do this. Except Craig Parker's ability to look evil. (Bloody blond elves)
***
Darken Rahl had inherited many things from his father. None of them could have been consider good. But it was the inherited glare that made grown men cower in their boots and pray to be anywhere else that had earned the current Master Rahl his reputation.
No one crossed him. No one stood up to him. No one even dared voice a question that could possibly, potentially be construed as opposition. Anyone who did met with one singular fate.
Rahl had also inherited his penchant for death from his father. And truthfully from even further back than that. The first rulers of the House of Rahl had never once been consider kind and benevolent, and over the centuries that had evolved into mayhem and destruction and a complete inability to care how many people died. It was what made them good rulers. It was this very thing that had allowed Darken's father Panis to, with no small amount of agony, form D'Hara into an empire to be feared.
Darken Rahl had simply learned from his father's tactics. But the hard work was done. The empire was there, and all he had to do was be strong enough, ruthless enough to hold on to it. And he was that. It left time for other things. Panis had never held much interest in magic, though it ran in his blood. But his son has spent every waking hour he could engrossed in hundreds of books, memorizing every word, in the belief that to know all meant to control all. He had been patient, a skill his father had lacked. With that patience the Midlands had fallen under his fist, and then Westland too and there was no one in the entire New World that could argue that Master Rahl of D'Hara now controlled it all.
But even the world was not enough to satisfy some men.
