"Well, I, for one am grateful that you have superhuman intelligence," Bloodstorm said. "I didn't pick up on the fact Radu would be stupid enough to keep his soul jar in his own throne room."

Bloodstorm walked to the doors of the tower and proceeded to close them. Outside, we could hear screaming even though there was no way we should be able to hear them through the storm and distance to the tower.

Like I said, reality was out to lunch in Castle Bloodmoon.

"What's going on outside?" I asked.

Bloodstorm lifted a large wooden beam and blocked the doors, meaning we were effectively trapped in the blood-soaked room. His face was heavily burned from Radu's magic but already starting to heal, which told me that his dhampyr blood was more than just cosmetic. I was glad since we were already running low on healing magic. Agata was casting CURE spells on Ania's arm while we were having this discussion and we'd all taken a beating.

"Radu is dead, dead," Bloodstorm said. "At least until Veles resurrects him. When a vampire noble dies, their offspring either revert into corpses or become vampire nobles themselves if they're strong enough. But because he was a lich, they were probably all just mind-controlled and held back from tearing each other apart by his will alone. That means this place is about to become am abattoir."

I wiped away the blood in my eyes.

"Well, more than it already is," Bloodstorm said. "That means it'll be even harder to escape this place than it was entering."

"Tell me something I don’t know," I said, looking for a towel and wondering if I should use the tapestries.

"How weird it is the Eastern Empire is actually West of Ledziania," Jon said. "I mean, it's called the Eastern Empire. Shouldn't it be in the East?"

"It stands in for the Holy Roman Empire," I pointed out. "Which is West of Poland. The Turqish Lands and Death Mountains are West, the Rus lands are North, and the South is the Coast."

"Yes, hence, the Eastern Empire is not East," Jon said. "I dunno why this is bugging me. I think falcons have in-built geography issues. I also want to dive bomb everyone's hair."

"The Empire goes underneath Ledziania and has a peninsula that is East of it. Sort of like a curved Italy or Florida," I said, thinking about details from The World of the Dark Undermaster Saga coffee table book my mother got me for Christmas. "But I presume the map makers were from Albion or the Carolingian Kingdoms and referring to the fact it's capital is East of New Rome."

"All of these places are just renamed countries from our world," Jon said, shaking his head. "Seriously, the Southern Kingdoms are just Medieval Europe and Asia all smooshed together with the Middle East between them. Weis should be ashamed. At least when Robert E. Howard stole from history, he used the Bronze Age."

"Europe and Asia are already smooshed together with the Middle East. It's why it's called the Middle East," I pointed out an obvious fact.

Jon covered his face with a wing.

"Don't we have something more important to worry about?" Ania asked, examining her arm before walking to the side of the tower and examining the walls.

"Hold on," I said, now into this. We should really get some maps on the interface. "Like Aegypta is at the bottom of the continent and not connected to an Africa equivalent. Also, the Southern Kingdoms is in the Southern Hemisphere. Which makes me wonder if the Africa equivalent was in the Northern Hemisphere before it disappeared, and this is world is just upside down. Or maybe the Northern Kingdoms were a wholly original fantasy land like Numenor or Atlantis and--"

"I've found a secret door," Ania said, interrupting. "I think it must lead to the Pope's prison cell, assuming she's alive."

She didn't sound confidant, and I didn't blame her.

"Really?" I asked. "I was just about to point out how Ledziania is much bigger than Poland and covers most of Eastern Europe's equivalent."

"Yes," Ania said. "But I absolutely would lie to get you to shut up about my world's geography."

"Afrika with a k exists," Bloodstorm said. "But it's on the other side of the globe and next to kingdoms of Indras as well as the Aztek nations in Hy-Brasil. You need to use a rainbow bridge or portals to travel there due to the sea monsters. Prestor John's Empire there worships that Middle Eastern deity that's so popular on your world."

"Okay, that just makes no historical or economic sense," I said, confused. "You just can't move cultures around like that and not totally change everything about them--"

"Please!" Agata said, turning around from where Ania was feeling for a secret door.

"Oh right," I said, walking up to the wall. "All I'm saying is that maybe Weis should hire Ed Greenwood to straighten out his worldbuilding."

"Do you ever get tired of treating us like we're fictional characters?" Agata asked, banging on the wall and listening for the sounds beyond.

I paused before answering. "I'm currently covered in the blood of your ex-husband after about ten hours of running through a murder house full of monsters. I don't think of you as fictional characters but I'm about ready to think of myself as one to stay sane."

Agata blinked then nodded. "Fair enough."

Agata cast a CLEAN spell on me and then herself. She proceeded to cast it on the rest of the group too. The room was probably beyond the power of sorcery, though. You'd need ten bottles of bleach to get the Radu off everything.

"You okay, Sparky?" I asked, wondering what he thought of everything. I had a bad feeling this was going to leave lasting scars on his impressionable little mind.

Sparky had reverted to corgi form and had jumped into Radu's throne where he was curled up in a ball. "That was awesome! Can we do it again?"

"No," I said, sighing before turning back to the wall. "Maybe there's a secret panel or candlestick to pull down?"

"Speak elvish for friend," Jon said. "Open sesame, bitches! No? Okay then. I really thought the bitches would make the difference."

"Try a counterspell," Bloodstorm said, showing off his higher WIS than me. "Wizards never use mundane masonry when they can use something conjured by magic, no matter how impractical."

Agata stared at the wall and nodded.

Counterspells didn't work entirely like they did in Dungeons and Dragons. The Mark of the Champion functioned on fantasy RPG rules, but they were extrapolations of how actual magic work and provided a few shortcuts to make them more like the games I'd played before coming here to Ledziania. Like, for instance, the fact we only had to shout the names of spells to work them versus the complicated magical gestures as well as words needed for "normal" magicians. Agata had commented on the fact she had to study a single spell for weeks to learn it and then practice for months thereafter before receiving her Mark of the Champion. Now? Now, she was like me, and the new magic just popped in her head.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Counterspells were more like anti-magic than anything else. Once you learned how to do them, you could undo any sorcery if you were strong enough. They could stop spells being flung at you and undo curses. However, tampering with magic was also dangerous. In the tabletop game, if you rolled a 1 on a D20, the spells you undid could literally blow up in your face. It was the reason I couldn't help her with it despite the fact I, technically, knew how to do it myself. Unfortunately, as Zorya had proven, downloaded knowledge was inferior to practiced application.

Agata didn't need my help anyway since she finished her counterspell after only a few seconds and the wall behind the throne disappeared, revealing a jail cell. There were three figures inside with two women, one being on the short side, and a man. The man was as short as the smaller of the two women. They had their hands bound in iron barbed wire and rune-covered bags on their heads. I recognized the runes from my "magic kung fu downloads" as silence spells. The dungeon cell had chamber pots, manacles, and old dried blood on the wall.

"I really hate Radu," I said, swinging my blade against the door lock.

It didn't break.

"Damn, that would have been cinematic," Jon said.

Ania pulled out a set of skeleton keys and proceeded to open the door. "Watch the prisoners. One of them or more could be a plant."

"Trust me, I'm not trusting anything after the Mimic privy," I said.

"I said I was sorry!" Bloodstorm shouted back from the doors. He was moving just about everything in front of them, which told me he was more worried about what was going on outside than he was letting on.

I went to the smaller woman first, guessing she was the adolescent Pontiff despite the fact that wasn't necessarily true. Teenage girls tended to shoot up like bean poles after all. Removing the bag over her head, I saw she'd also been bound with more wire in her mouth. Iron was the worst metal to have on you when you were a wizard and steel wasn't great. You needed to specially treat both in order to use sorcery according to the Dark Undermaster universe's rules. That, at least, was the excuse for why wizards only wore leather armor and robes.

The fourteen-year-old girl was, thankfully, not a sexualized doll like Jon had speculated. She had puffy cheeks, a chipmunk pair of teeth prominent in her mouth, and a pair of pigtails that were a brilliant white. Indeed, she was excessively adorable and immediately conjured feelings of brotherhood as well as a strange desire to give her a noogie. It clicked with me a second later, she looked exactly like my sister, Arwen AKA "Wendy", did at her age. Well, aside from the Pope here having mystical white hair. My sister hadn't looked like a Targaryen cosplay. Joan was dressed in a dirty white tunic with a Sun emblem rather than the gold Imperial bull on white with pants underneath.

Jon settled down on my shoulder and looked down at her. "See? What did I tell you? Loli pope."

"Jon, I will fry you," I said, simply.

"Just saying, in four or five years, the fanboys are--" Jon started to say before I knocked him off my pauldron with a smack.

"Okay, I deserved that," Jon said on the ground.

"Hold still," I said, cutting the wire away from the Pope with arcane fire in my forefinger tip

"Radu is dead and we're here to help," Agata explained to the other two prisoners but not moving to release them yet.

The two prisoners with bags over their heads reacted but only in a slight way, which made sense since they were still bound and gagged.

I finished my work with the Pontiff of Middle School.

She looked up at me and said, "Wow, you look a lot like my dad."

Well, that was awkward but at least it confirmed she knew who Garland was. Surprisingly, she wasn't confusing me for him, though. "Yes, those Perun genes are pretty potent. You look a lot like my sister when she was your age."

"There is no god but Ahura Mazda and Mythras is his son," Joan said. "But yes, with that out of the way, Perun's genes are impressive."

"You know that he's not Garland?" Agata asked, looking down at the girl.

"Yeah," Joan said. "I met my father a few times before he died. One time, he wanted to rescue me from the Holy See but I told him I could do more for the world inside the Mythraeum than I could outside it."

"So he knew about you," Agata muttered, sounding once more disappointed by her husband's decisions--which was becoming a running theme. "He didn't mention you."

"He mentioned you," Joan said. "You are the Rose sisters, I assume."

"Yes," Ania said. "This is Aaron, our, uh--"

"Associate," Agata added.

Ouch.

"Thank you," Joan said. "I am Holy Father Joan the First. I used to go by Asma, but I'd prefer you only use that if we're trying to hide from the Emperor's assassins. I'm familiar with the Wise Man's champions. My father told me about them in a dream. He was, after all, dead by the time they started to appear."

Agata and Ania exchanged a look.

"How old were you then?" Ania asked.

"Almost a woman grown," Joan said. "Thirteen."

Ania stared. "I hate the Empire."

Joan nodded. "There's definitely room for improvement. The Emperor has overstretched the lines of its legions and alienated most of its allies. Its overreliance over slavery has also crippled the economy and lead to vast discontent among the non-landowning classes. Plus, he's alienated Mythras and let the evil god Veles, the Celestial Bull and embodiment of evil we know as Ahriman, into his court. That's a bad thing, generally."

“Ha!” Jon said,

“What?” I asked.

“Remember that Veles said Ahriman was the only God of Evil he respected,” Jon said. “He was complementing himself.”

“The bull, the wyrm, and the trickster is a master of many such examples of wordplay,” Joan said, proving she could understand Jon unlike most people in the Southern Kingdoms. “He can lie a thousand times without ever telling a single falsehood.”

Well, she was a smart little cookie, wasn't she? "I'm not sure there's an acceptable level of slavery to rely on."

"Agreed," Joan said. "However, even the mild reforms I introduced that would protect women and slaves under Mythras that I tried to introduce to the Senate resulted in the Emperor's supporters panicking. His position is incredibly tenuous and only the distractions he's created by attempting to annex as much of the surrounding countryside as possible have kept him being overthrown. Ironically, I suspect his evil chancellor is the only one still capable of managing the cluster...err, issues, created by the corruption as well as mismanagement."

Jon looked up. "Wow, how bad of a leader do you have to be that the frigging Devil is a better ruler than you?"

"I dunno, I've can think of several politicians the Devil would be a better leader than," I replied. "I suspect Hell, unlike Washington DC, has competency requirements."

"Mythras blessings upon you, Ser Raven," Joan said, waving to Jon.

"Nice to meet you, Sailor Rome," Jon said, extending a wing to her. "Can you do a baton twirl with your holy wand?"

Joan tried not to look confused but failed.

Ania went to start untying the other prisoners. "We don't believe in Mythras, Your Holiness. Our goal is to stop Veles by any means necessary and you can keep your preaching to yourself."

"Yes, you know Mythras as Dazhbog," Joan said. "They're the same solar deity, except when they're not. In any case, he's not happy with Veles. His uncle and father are the enemy of all life as well as corrupted by the Twisted Gods. Veles is just able to resist it much better than the other Old Gods. That's what Mythras tells me at least. He provides me all my instructions on fighting the war against the Dark One via dreams. Sometimes he brings me tutors. That's how I met Garland."

Agata stared, clearly processing what was a cataclysmic shift in her worldview.

As fascinating as I found that revelation about the universe's cosmology, I found my attention drawn to the gasps and surprise of my companions. Ania and Agata had gone for their weapons as they'd seen just who the other two prisoners were.

The first of these was the five-foot-nothing form of a white-haired man with delicate features that could best be described as pretty despite an ugly scar on his right cheek as well as a badly healed broken nose. One shoulder of his was slightly higher than the other but his uniform-like clothing was specially designed to compensate. I recognized him from countless fan art and a decent resemblance to his actor in the TV show: Ivan Crookback aka Prince Ivan von Piast-Jagiellon.

Less Tyrion Lannister and more polymath shoto boy version of Richard III, Ivan had been disregarded for the kingship for a variety of reasons that mostly amounted to being born too late to make a claim in place of his sisters. He was often the sole voice of reason in the Royal Capital chapters and keeping ahead of the Empire's plotting. Sadly, his story seemed to be headed to a black end when he'd been framed for the attempted murder of the Mad Queen by Prince Cesare. His marriage to Agata had been dissolved and he'd been sent off to the Dark Undermasters with secret orders to executed along the way. Since he was alive, it occurred to me he could be a powerful ally. He also had a mark of the champion on his wrist.

Damn.

My concerns about Ania slitting his throat then and there took a backseat to her reaction to the next prisoner. Ania had recoiled from her as if she was a venomous snake. The woman was an elf with pale skin, a half-shaved head, and leather clothes that were extremely tight but flexible. One of her ears had several piercings as did the side of her lip. She had a kind of fantasy punk look (dungeon punk?) that seemed at odds with the Medieval aesthetic we had around us. She was quite lovely in the, "I will kick your ass if we don't go down to the tattoo parlor tonight" sort of way. Don't ask me how I know that.

Ania spoke her name with shock. "Thistle."

Oh, her dead lover from the books.