Eldren woke to his head throbbing once again. This time instead of a warm bed, he felt cold. Very cold. He was face down on what felt like concrete. He stirred, blinked, and tried to stretch. His legs ached too.

What happened?

His memories came back to him slowly through a fog, like trying to remember a late college night at the bars the morning after. He remembered Ardos biting his letting and telling him to run from the gray-cloaked soldiers.

He slid his hand down to his thigh. His robes were gone. He could feel the throbbing and now scabbed over turtle bit, though. How long had he been knocked out?

Trying to avoid unnecessary movement, Eldren tried to get his bearings. It was dark but it was the dim kind of darkness where you could still make out enough details to orient yourself. He was in a room. A jail cell. One wall was made of bars and the rest of the floor and walls loomed solid, probably stone or concrete. Following Ardos‘s plan hadn’t gotten him killed— it had gotten him locked up.

Super, he thought. Stop. Listening. To. The. Turtle. He tried to possess you!

Eldren turned his attention to his surroundings. He wondered if—and hoped— he was waking back in the real world. As his memories crystallized a bit more, he figured he was still probably in the fantasy. He remembered trying to sprint and hurdle over people in the council chambers and ducking beneath the arms of the soldiers. High Imperator Uther had stepped aside, letting his men apprehend Eldren. Two of them had grabbed him, kicking him in the shins to buckle his legs, while another clubbed him over the head with a sheathed sword. That must have been what had knocked him unconscious.

What had happened to Ardos? And the crystal ball? They had been in the pockets of the robes he had borrowed from Ardos. Ah. He remembered dropping the robes to the ground before he ran, thinking he might be more nimble without them tripping him up. He wondered if they had been seized and Ardos discovered. That could be his salvation. The tortoise-wizard could explain everything and why the man they knew as Eldren had been plucked out of his ordinary life as Cam and brought here.

“Are you awake?” A voice, raspy and weak, croaked from the darkness outside of the prison bars.

Eldren froze. Even though the darkness wasn’t complete, he couldn’t see far enough to notice anyone before

“H-hello?” His voice sounded tentative. Pull it together. Sound strong, he thought.

“They brought you in-caagh haargh.” The voice was interrupted by a nasty cough that became a wheeze. “They brought you in last night. Wondered if you were dead.”

“Not dead,” Eldren said. “Who are you?” As he spoke he pushed himself to his knees and began to slowly crawl his way toward the bars.

“Name’s Mickson. Harper Mickson.” More hacking and coughing. “Haven’t seen anyone down here in ages.”

“Except you,” Eldren said, half asking. He could now see, across a short hallway, another set of bars. Sitting against the wall in the corner of the cell across from his own was a tall man, knees bent toward his chest and head drooping. A shaggy mass of hair adorned his head and a long beard. Eldren couldn’t tell what color in the dim light that he now saw must be coming from a window somewhere quite far down the hallway, away from the cell block.

“Except me,” Harper Mickson agreed. His voice sounded forlorn to Eldren like a man resigned to his fate.

“Why did they lock you up?” It seemed like a natural question to ask another inmate.

“Same as you,” Mickson replied. “Unsanctioned magicks.” The man pronounced the word with a hard-‘ick' sound at the end, almost sounding like an exaggerated German accent. Eldren could also feel the contempt for the word ‘unsanctioned’ dripping from the man’s voice.

“I can’t do any magic,” Eldren admitted. He wasn’t sure why he was being so forward with the man in the gloom.

“You aren’t witch-kind?” Mickson asked.

Eldren considered the question. Cam, of course, would have continued to be forthright and would have assumed the best intentions of his prison companion. He forced himself to keep thinking like Eldren Pendergast. That’s how he would survive in this world. Not as Cam the teacher. Was the man trying to milk him for information?

He could be a witch, Eldren realized. He’s also locked up for unsanctioned magic.

Another thought entered Eldren’s head. Are witches bad? They aren’t the ones who knocked me upside the head with a blunted sword.

“Wizard,” Eldren said, carefully. “I was the temp mage for the court.”

“A wizard who can’t do any magic.” Mickson’s haggard voice cracked. “Did you do the pilgrimage to the spell shrines?”

Eldren was out of his depth. Despite the tortoise attempting to possess him, he found himself missing Ardos who could have explained what this man meant.

“I don’t get to ask any questions in return for answering yours?” Eldren said, thinking on his feet. Mickson grunted, which Eldren took as permission to ask one.

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“Are you a witch?”

“Witch-kind,” the man said. “And, yes.”

“Can I ask a follow-up?”

“You just did,” Mickson replied, coughing some more.

“I’m sorry. I just don’t know much about witches or wizards or any of this really,” Eldren said. It was a lame thing to say and he regretted it almost immediately.

“Any of this? Any of what?” Mickson’s voice for the first time sounded intrigued.

Eldren paused and considered his options. His heart was starting to race and he fought through his pounding head to try to think. Witches—or witch-kind—seemed to be the enemy. Everyone detested them. Lord Ravelo was at war with them and Espella had blamed them for creating the shadow monsters in the marshes that had almost killed him. The evidence stacked up pretty clearly that witches were not good and, from his history of playing Tristan’s tabletop campaigns, he knew that usually trusting a not-good-guy was a surefire way to make your problems worse.

Still, he felt like he needed information. With Ardos gone, he was on his own against whoever came through his cell door when his time would come. Mickson might have knowledge that would be helpful to him if he wanted to escape. Maybe even knowledge that would help him get out of this world.

He chose his words very carefully.

“I’m from a different world,” he said. “In my world, there are no wizards or witch-kind. No lords or monsters.” Am I revealing too much, he wondered.

Harper Mickson was silent for a long while. Just when Eldren was beginning to think the man had lost interest or didn’t believe him he spoke, quietly.

“How did you get here? To this world?” Cam had a lot of practice with lying teenagers, trying to pretend more nonchalant than they were. He could tell that the man was now extremely interested but was feigning a casual tone to their conversation.

Be careful how much you tell him.

At the same time, Eldren didn’t understand the rules of this place. Without the crystal ball, he still didn’t know if he had any stats or skills beyond hit points that might impact his ability to lie, especially to a witch-kind.

“I’m not entirely sure,” he said, half truthful but omitting the part about signing the old book. “Everything in my world went black and then I appeared here.”

“Where?”

“In the marshes,” Eldren said. For whatever reason his gut was telling him not to give too many details to Mickson.

“You made it through the marshes with no magic?” Mickson asked, sounding incredulous.

“Not quite,” Eldren replied. “We were attacked by shadow monsters.”

“We?” Mickson said, temporarily losing his fake indifference.

Shit. Eldren swore at himself for slipping up and revealing more than he had intended. Focus.

“I was escorted by a member of Lord Ravelo’s guard,” he said, trying to be purposefully vague.

“Ah,” Mickson said. “You are the replacement mage. Curious. Quite curious.” He sounded adrift in his thoughts. “Who would fetch a replacement mage from another plane that can’t do magic? And why?”

Eldren let the question sit in the darkness, worried about his ability to answer it without inadvertently revealing more. He could tell from the intensity with which Mickson pondered what little Eldren had said that the man was dangerously sharp.

“How do you know I was a replacement mage?” Eldren asked, his stomach suddenly churning with a thought.

“A very good question,” Mickson said. For the first time, he moved, shuffling closer to the bars. Eldren got a good look at his face for the first time. Scarred and pock-marked with a ragged beard, even in the darkness the man’s red eyes pierced Eldren’s gaze.

“Someone needed to replace your predecessor after I killed him,” Mickson said, his lips twisting in a wicked grin. “But why you, I wonder?”

Eldren’s mind reeled. Mickson was Ardos’ assassin? Well, would-be assassin anyway. The witch-kind didn’t know that Ardos had survived the poisoning. Did Ardos know he was here and had been captured? Every conversation brought new questions and Eldren was growing tired of not getting any answers.

Before he could continue his conversation with Mickson, Eldren heard the clink of iron as a lock and bar on a door and daylight flooded the hallway blinding him. He quietly cursed to himself. The conversation with the witch-kind had distracted him long enough that he hadn’t even begun to look for or consider a means to escape.

Escape? Cam’s thoughts surfaced. I’m a physics teacher not a member of the special forces.

“Wizard. On your feet.” A pair of gray-cloaked soldiers appeared at his cell door. Eldren slowly pulled himself to his feet. “Turn and face the wall, cross your hands behind your back. No movements or you die, plain and simple.” Not having anything else he could do, Eldren obeyed silently.

The men entered the cell and roughly grabbed his crossed arms and he felt the coolness of the metal cuffs as they clasped around his wrists.

“Diamond,” grunted one of the soldiers. “No magic tricks for you, witch-kind.” They forcefully turned him around and began to frog-march him from the cell. Eldren glanced over at Mickson’s cell and saw that the man had retreated to a corner and buried his face, avoiding the gray cloaks.

Eldren walked forward and soon the soldiers had guided him up and out of the dungeons. From the color of the stones in the walls, he surmised they were still in Nottengrad Keep, so he hadn’t been taken very far after the council chamber incident. The soldiers continued pushing him onward until they came to the base of a tower where four more of their comrades stood guard. Eldren strained to hear the hushed conversation between his captors and the guards but couldn’t make out anything intelligible.

After a few moments, the guard and the jailor gray cloaks saluted one another and their trek continued, climbing a spiraling staircase. They were inside one of the keep’s drum towers. As they neared the top, another pair of guards saluted and opened the wooden door. Eldren and his escorts marched inside, and the hallway guard closed the door behind them.

He found himself in a small, sparsely furnished room. It was almost meticulous in its lack of adornment as if someone had scrubbed the room of any excessive character or flourish. No curtains, no rugs, no shelves or fancy sconces. Just a small room with a narrow, plain bed, a nightstand and a simple basin of water, and a square table with two simple three-legged wooden stools that looked rather uncomfortable.

Seated on the stool, pouring over a stack of parchment with a candle burning in a holder was the High Imperator Uther. He glanced up as the gray cloak soldiers of the Iron Square led Eldren into the room.

“Ah. Master Pendergast,” the Imperator smiled. “I’m glad to see you awake and — refreshed.” His grin was off-putting. “Come, please sit. We have much to discuss and I have many questions for you.”