There was silence for a few moments, and then applause as the play ended.

As I left the theater, I could hear people talking and giving their opinions about the play.

I had my own questions - in the version of the story that I had heard before this, the Blood-Emperor hadn’t taken his own life, he had simply become so worried that he fell sick and refused treatment, allowing nature to take its course. Also, there was no ‘Spirit of Darkness’ who he made a pact with, in the versions I had heard he had been told a rumor about the demonic grimoire from one of his advisers.

Obviously, when you speak of any story, there would be different versions of it. However, this had really happened - though I guess even when it comes to historical events there would be conflicting accounts on what had happened. Even in plays or movies based on historical events, creative liberties were often taken and it wasn’t like the theater had sold it off as being a historical documentary, after all. So, I couldn’t really take this as entirely what historians thought had happened.

After all, I could tell that the writer of the play was slightly biased against the Blood-Emperor. Then again, most people were.

Even after all the horrible things the Ruler of the Astral Winds had done (even with my limited knowledge of this world I could name three things off the top of my head that he had done that would be classified as war crimes back on Earth) his name was still spoken with reverence all throughout the continent.

I personally would’ve thought that people would’ve seen the Blood-Emperor as the real hero of the story, a man who had stood against a seemingly unstoppable tyrant and tragically had to commit a heinous act to save most of his people. But on the contrary, his name was usually spoken with disdain - and I had heard that statues made in his likeness were often defaced by people.

Maybe people sympathized with the Ruler of the Astral Winds instead - he had been born a simple man without any powerful family backing him, and yet had risen to a height in Liberomancy which had never been seen since the time the Goddess Serragnin walked the Earth. There were likely those who wished that they too, could reach that level - he was a paragon of the phrase ‘lifting yourself up by your bootstraps’ when you thought about it.

Contrasted to him, the Blood-Emperor had been born into royalty and had had much of his path already set up for him.

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Along the same lines, I think that people thought that he ‘deserved’ to beat the Blood-Emperor and that the Blood-Emperor had simply cheated the Ruler of the Astral Winds out of his victory. It wasn’t just the fact that he had used a demonic grimoire, after all, but that he had slain the Ruler of the Astral Winds while they had been under a banner of truce. I could see people thinking that was not exactly playing fair - though on the other hand, was it fair for the Ruler of the Astral Winds to demand everyone submit to him? Maybe from a ‘might means right’ perspective, but I doubted that people wholly thought that that was a reasonable philosophy to live life by.

Or perhaps people wished he had conquered all of Libraria and united it under one banner. Many problems today between countries could be traced back to the demise of his empire, and I guess some people thought that if he had united the world there wouldn’t be any more wars. Which was true from a certain point of view.

Even back on Earth there were some people who wondered why it was that a strong dictator didn’t suddenly come along who could solve all their problems instantly, regardless of how unrealistic it was.

That said, the capital city of his empire, Hansini still stood and was a bastion of Liberomancy to this day even if it was only a shell of its former self when you considered its political power.

As I walked around the Book Fair and saw a family chatting together, it struck me that maybe the answer was far simpler. The Ruler of the Astral Winds, despite his cruel deeds had one thing that differentiated him from the Blood-Emperor - he had done them to his enemies.

You wouldn’t condone someone doing such horrible things, but if it was a time of war, I guess some people could write it off as ‘understandable’ to some extent. Not to mention that as this world lacked a lot of moral sensibilities back on Earth like the Geneva Convention, it was easier to overlook such actions.

It was far more palatable for a man to do horrible things to his enemies than to do them to his own people, like the Blood-Emperor had. He had slain the villagers that by every right, he was supposed to protect. As it was said, betrayal is the worst only becomes it comes from a friend.

I left such heavy-handed thoughts behind as I wandered the Book Fair for a while more. I wanted to kill some time before my round began, and I thought of wandering around places where there might be bards and the like to see if I could find a story or a poem, unlikely as it was, that might give me some insight into why I was in this world.

I didn’t find anything like that. The talk of the town currently was the dryad threat, and that was what nearly every story or tale swapped around was about.

When I though of dryads, I thought of beautiful women who were tree spirits from the Greek myths back on Earth.

Here though, they were different - actually, the translation system of the world probably just called them ‘dryads’ because that was the closest thing that I would understand.