Darken Rahl

Darken Rahl has a lean frame, delicate fingers and striking good looks. His blonde hair is straight and fine and hangs almost to his shoulders. His eyes are a painfully handsome shade of blue. His features set off his eyes perfectly. His voice is usually quiet, soft, and almost kind and had a clear, almost liquid quality to it. His skin is smooth and taut over his well-proportioned muscles, except on his upper left thigh, and across part of his hip and abdomen, which is covered in horrible, bumpy scars. He typically wears a white robe that goes down to within an inch of the floor, its only decoration being the gold embroidery in a narrow band around the neck and down the front. He wears no jewelry, other than a curved knife in a gold scabbard embossed with symbols warning the spirits to give way. The belt that holds it was woven of gold wire. His scars, inflicted by a ball of wizard's fire that had killed his father, Panis Rahl, are kept carefully hidden by his robes.

Darken Rahl was a very wicked man, a wizard, the son of Panis Rahl and the leader of D'Hara. Like his father, he ruled D'Hara from the People's Palace. He had more magical and political power than his father ever did and more than any wizard of his time. He always carried a curved knife at his belt which he took great pleasure in using to carry out his executions. He hated the taste of meat, and never ate anything but plants (unless required to in order to perform a certain incantation). Darken Rahl hated fire, and outlawed it in all lands under his rule (although he approved or ignored its use in certain cases, like in his father's tomb). The most widely accepted reason for this was because fire had killed his father and thus it was a sign of disrespect to the house of Rahl. Darken Rahl had the ability to travel the underworld and used it to cross the boundaries and recover the boxes of Orden and undo the boundaries. He even commanded some in it, and more with his every coming.

Darken Rahl was a practitioner of an ancient form of magic called anthropomancy, which he learned from his father. He divined the answers to questions by the inspection of living human entrails. It was of limited use, he could at most get a yes or no to a single question and sometimes, a name. Nonetheless, he favored its use. Darken Rahl used this technique on George Cypher to discover that Richard was the one who had the Book of Counted Shadows.

Darken Rahl craved power. He chanced destroying the world to get it. He savored bleeding the life from people. He hungered for their pain. His sense of wrong had no bounds and was twisted into an all-consuming lust to torture all opposition into submission. He considered any who didn't rush to bow before him as opposition. His conscience was clear when he performed his anthropomancy on a victim. He found pleasure in the doing because his distorted sense of right gave him license. In his eyes, he was not evil... Zedd was. Darken Rahl was much more powerful than any other person alive, including Zedd, especially with the magic of Orden protecting him. He was an extremely accomplished and studied wizard. The instructions for advanced magic (such as traveling the underworld) were burned into his memory, and he carried them out with precision, grace, and ease.

Darken Rahl had taken many women to his bed, which entertained him in ways they could not have foreseen, especially if they were repulsed when they saw his scars. Just like his father, he considered women merely vessels for the man's seed, the dirt it grew in, unworthy of higher recognition. Just like his father, he would have no wife.

While in D'Hara, Darken Rahl always traveled with his personal guards. They stood out with their sleeveless leather-and-mail uniforms that helped display their bulky forms and the sharp contours of their heavy muscles. They wore bands around their arms just above their elbows with raised projections that were sharpened to deadly edges, to be used in close combat to tear apart an adversary. They followed at a distance, watching everywhere, alert but silent: the Master's shadows. Although his guards were formidable, they were unnecessary, mere accoutrements of his position. He had powers enough to put down any threat. Demmin Nass was his right-hand, his second-in-command, and was a good friend of his since they were boys. Darken Rahl also commanded a red dragon named Scarlet, and used her to travel quickly throughout the New World.

Darken Rahl's mother had been nothing more than the first to sprout his father's seed, and then she had been discarded. Darken Rahl was the firstborn, the one born with the gift and the one to whom his father had passed the knowledge, and all glory fell to him. If he had siblings, he didn't know of it nor did he care. He considered any half-brothers or half-sisters mere weeds, to be expunged if discovered. While Darken Rahl's father, Panis Rahl, was still alive, he told him of the boxes of Orden and the Book of Counted Shadows, which he had been trying to recover himself, but was unable to. He taught Darken Rahl the value of the head over the sword, how by using your head, you could defeat any number of men. He had the best instructors tutor Darken Rahl.

When Darken Rahl was young, Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander put up the boundaries. As he was doing so, he threw a ball of wizard's fire, empowered by the underworld, which consumed Panis Rahl. The flames also licked a young Darken Rahl as he stood at his father's right hand, giving him the pain of the wizard's fire. The pain was unlike anything he had ever experienced, and he screamed until he lost his voice. The healers bound him by his wrists to prevent him from touching the burn, which he wished to do badly in order to stop the terror of the unrelenting pain and burning. He licked his fingers and instead of rubbing them on the burn, rubbed them on his lips as he shook, to try to stop his crying, and on his eyes to try to wipe away the vision of having seen his father burned alive. For months he cried and panted and begged to touch and soothe the burns, but the healers would not let him. Zeddicus Zu'l Zorander became his greatest hatred.

After his father's death, Darken Rahl studied harder, for many years, so that he might succeed where his father had failed, and return the house of Rahl to its rightful place as ruler of all the lands. In his studies, he found where the Book of Counted Shadows lay hidden, in the Wizard's Keep in Aydindril on the other side of the boundary, but he was unable yet to travel the underworld to go there and retrieve it. So he sent a guard beast from the underworld to watch over it for him, until the day when he could go himself and liberate it.

Before he could get the book, a man named George Cypher killed the underworld beast and stole the book, taking a tooth from the underworld beast with him.

Darken Rahl was killed when he was tricked by Richard, using the wizard's first rule, into opening the wrong box of Orden. Later, Richard unintentionally summoned him back to the living world (as a spectre). Darken Rahl's spectre attempted to tear the veil between the underworld and the living, releasing the Keeper of the underworld, but was stopped by Richard and sent back into the underworld where he continued to plot and scheme against Richard.