Untold Tales of the Lair Legion: Valeria’s Story     The sun blazed red, a fiery hemisphere vanishing behind the Mountains of Yearning, painting their snow-capped peaks before they took on the shades of evening. At the high tarn the Servants of the Secret Chalice lit torches to ward the boundaries and placed scented lamps inside the rich tapestry tents of their encampment. The warm haze of glorious day yet lingered, but they lit the ritual bonfire with proper ceremony, with the old songs and words, before darkness fell.     The Candidates still clustered together in nervous excitement. Tomorrow would be the day. They would be led, one by one, into the presence of the Chalice of Life, the Sacred Cup that was the treasure and the destiny of their people. After all the teaching and preparation, the dedication and sacrifice, one, perhaps two of them would be called to join the Order and become Initiates, Keepers of the Secret Fire.     Dame Leona came to the girls’ tent as dusk turned into full dark. “Come over to the campfire, novices,” she instructed them. “No, you don’t need to put your sacred robes on again. Keep them clean for tomorrow. Just casual as you are will do.”     They padded over to the blaze, not even noticing that Dame Leona didn’t follow them all the way. There was someone kneeling down beside the bonfire waiting for them.     “Hello,” the woman smiled. She wasn’t that much older than the Candidates, a pretty blonde with a kind smile and grey far-seeing eyes.     The novices went pale. “L-lady Valeria,” Adela stammered. “That is, My Lady of Carfax. I mean of Shandalor. Of Carfax and Shandalor and…”     “High Servant of the Secret Fire,” Marchelle prompted, swallowing hard.     They had all heard of Valeria, the Promised One. Valeria, returned from a time of legend at the hour of their need, bringer of the Champion. Valeria, who had offered her own life up to free all the people, not once but twice. Valeria who knew other worlds and times, and in whom the Chalice was personified and the secret fire danced.     “Valeria will do,” the Lady smiled. “Come and sit down where it’s warm and we’ll talk a while. I thought it might help pass the time and prepare you for tomorrow.”     The dozen girls shuffled uneasily to sit near the Lady; but not too near. “Is this another of the Rites?” one of them asked.     Valeria shook her head and laughed softly. “No more than all of life, Adela. No, this is just me wanting to meet you all before you undertake the Test. I thought you might be nervous.”     Not as much as we are now, nobody dared to say.     “I wanted to show you something,” Valeria told them. She opened a small felt bag and took out something made of fabric. “This is my most precious possession.”     She passed it round the wondering girls. It was cloth, but not of any kind they had ever felt. It was light and soft, but warm and comfortable too.     “What is it?” Adela dared ask. “What do these runes embroidered upon it mean?”     “In the alphabet of the mortal world of iron they say ‘Lair Legion’,” Valeria explained to them. “That’s where this garment comes from, and it was given to me at the moment I looked only for horrible death.”     The Candidates listened carefully. Everyone knew the story of Valeria of Carfax, but few had heard it spoken from her own lips. “Shall I say more?” she asked. Everyone pleaded yes.     “Well then,” the Lady said, smiling wistfully as the memories came to her, “let me see…”           “The Dreary Dimension was a prison, nothing more, created by the gods to confine the Dread Dormaggadon, demon of fire and darkness. A great chunk was carved from the Mythlands and set with wards and barriers so he could never again escape and wreak his destruction on the multiverse. Many creatures and people from that domain were trapped with Dormaggadon, and these he subjugated as his own.     But there are things that are hidden even from the gods, and one of them is the Chalice, the Grail of the Secret Fire that brings life and light and joy. It too passed into the Dreary Dimension, and with it went its guardian, an ancestor of my line. The Chalice was kept hidden from Dormaggadon and its secret descended from mother to daughter, as we now pass the secret from initiate to novice. So it was for years beyond count, even to my own day.     When I became a woman by lunar blood my mother took me, as she had been taken, into the presence of the Secret Fire, and there it claimed me as its own. I became its guardian and servant, and would have devoted my life to it. But becoming a woman also made me eligible as tribute to the Court of Dread Dormaggadon, and it was the turn of our district to offer up a sacrifice slave to the tyrant of the Dreary Dimension. Local politics and corruption, and my spurning the amorous advances of a cruel councilman led to my being elected as the one to be given into bondage.     It’s hard for you to understand how it was when this happened, a thousand years ago for you but less than a decade for me. If you were chosen, you had to go. To do otherwise would be to disgrace and to doom your family. To be anything other than utterly obedient to Dormaggadon once enslaved was to bring destruction on your whole village. My father raged and my mother wept but ultimately I had to go, to be delivered to torment and eventual death. Dormaggadon was not kind to his servitors.     I was one of many such tributes due that year. Those offerings that were flesh might find themselves used as target practice, or set to work in the mines, or translated into monstrous guard-beasts, or even carved up and served at table. But I was deemed pretty, and I caught the eye of Anseptilus, Grand Vizier to the Dread Lord. He decided that I would make a fitting bed-slave for Dormaggadon, and set me aside for special training that I might please his master.     Dormaggadon was a cruel being, and never more so than with his amorous partners. Few survived long. None had pleasant ends. But each of us had to strive our best to please him, if we still had any care for those we loved but could never see again. I suffered my training for three years, becoming accomplished in arts both erotic and courtly; except that all my carnal learning was theoretical, for Dormaggadon prized tearing the innocence from his sacrifices and would have none of them sullied before he could defile them. Vizier Anseptilus might watch and slaver as I screamed and writhed under the discipline lash but he could not then touch me.     Three years of penury were hard to survive, made tolerable only by the knowledge that the preparation would never be as bad as what came after. The day came when Anseptilus sent for me and told me I was ready to enter the service of the Dread Lord.     I knew what that meant. I had seen other girls and boys I had trained with go one by one as I went now. I had heard the fates of each of them, and seen what was left of a grisly few. Now it was my turn. My fading memories of the Secret Fire did little to help me, a woman-child of seventeen, about to become the toy of the most cruel demon in creation.     Then the news came to the pleasure-pits. Dormaggadon was fallen, destroyed, defeated in his final bid to escape the Dreary Dimension and bring destruction to the worlds beyond. He was gone forever, and the spells that created our prison-world had already settled upon the one who had defeated him. Surely this new Dread Lord, more terrible and powerful even than Dormaggadon, would come soon and wreak his will upon those whom Dormaggadon had commanded?     The Grand Vizier must have worried much. He had me dispatched through one of the vestigial portals left over from Dormaddon’s incursion into the Mythlands, and from there I was delivered to the stronghold of our new conqueror, that he might use me as Dormaggadon would have, or however he saw fit.     How can I describe the terror of that journey? As homesick as I had been for Carfax I was at least in my own world. Now, bound tight by spells that compelled my utter abject obedience to my master’s every whim, torn from everything I knew, I was sent to the harsh iron world of the mortals. I knew something of them, from my training of course. I had been told they were a cruel, brutal people, inventing horrors such as electricity that could wrack the sensitive areas of a fettered body, or diseases which ate the very flesh of their victims, or weapons of energy that could devastate whole cities and leave invisible rays that brought sickness and lingering death. Their greatest holy men were all killed by their own people.     But terrifying as the journey to the mortal world, to the city they call Paradopolis was, how much more to be left to await the coming of my new master, the new supreme ruler of the Dreary Dimension. What fate would he have for me? For perversion or torment would I face before I was finally allowed to die? I prayed that in my pain and misery I would not reveal the sacred secrets I had once been shown.     So I waited, trembling, in the Dread Lord’s island fortress, his slave.     And at last the Dread Derek came…”           “So basically Xander was saying you’re being rejected by the Parodyverse?” G-Eyed said sympathetically to his cousin. “That sucks.”     Exile thumbed the remote control which opened the shutters to his fortress headquarters. “That’s what I thought. But who do you complain to about being made lord of a prison dimension?”     “The Chronicler of Stories? The Parody-Master? Oldman? Mefrothto?” Goldeneyed offered helpfully. He was just enjoying the expression on his cousin’s face when the girl in the silver-mesh bikini ran out of the fortress and prostrated herself at Exile’s feet.     “Er…” Exile said.     G-Eyed raised one speculative eyebrow. “Something you want to tell me, cuz?”     “Er…”     The girl kept her face studiously downwards. “Master,” she told him, “I am here for your pleasure.”     Exile gulped. “You… you are?”     “This is way, way better than a Bulbasaur,” G-Eyed admitted.     Exile finally found the words. “Who are you?”     “I am your slave, the tribute of the people of the Northern Marches of the Dreary Dimension, sent to you in tribute for your great forbearance in not destroying them.” She glanced up briefly then remembered her instructions and quickly looked down again. “You… you won’t destroy them will you, master?”     That one glance had been enough to show Exile and Goldeneyed that the girl was utterly, absolutely terrified. Of them.     “I think I’d better get the coffee on,” Goldeneyed suggested.           “How then, do I describe the Dread Derek? He was… he was like nothing I expected. In his own world he was a hero, a Champion. He fought as one of the company of warriors who were the Earth’s defenders, they who had thwarted Dormaggadon’s plans: the Lair Legion.     And he was kind. I never thought he would be kind. My expectations were so low then, so twisted, that it seemed strange that he lifted me from my knees and did not hurt me, that he gave me raiment and did not ravish me, that he took me in and did not exploit me. I didn’t believe it. I expected it was all some cruel game to hurt me the more. I didn’t dare hope, or care, and yet he made me hope and care. More painful than a flogging, more cruel than rape, his kindness skewered me through the heart.     I was prepared for his sadism. I had no defence against his nobility.     And he cared for me, and gave me this raiment to cover my nakedness, and placed me in the care of his most wonderful, marvellous friend…”           “Hello? Are you to be being at home?” Yo called into the darkened bedroom.     Valeria braced herself and came from the shadows trying not to tremble. She knelt down and awaited instructions.     “What are you doing?” Yo asked in alarm. “Is not to be kneeling! Yo is to be not frighting anybody! Yo is to be here to be welcoming cute-Derek-friend and to be seeing that you are being alright.”     “Are you… the slave-keeper?” Valeria ventured.     “No! Nonono! Yo is to be being the slave-keeper smiter. Or at least the slave-keeper-teller-off-very-much. Yo is here to be your friend. Look! I bring to see you!”     Valeria looked up in confusion as a strange purple animal was bundled into her arms. It was about the size of a corpse-raider but it had purple fur and long floppy ears, one larger than the other. It’s nose twitched and it didn’t seem to have fangs.     “Is Rabito!” Yo explained. “Is pure thought bunny, like Yo is being pure thought being from Yo-planet. What are you to be being called?”     It took the slave-girl a few moments to translate her visitor’s questions. Even with the spell of comprehension Yo’s innocent babblings took a little effort to follow. “I’m… I’m Valeria, mistress,” she said. She tried to bow her head but the thought bunny on her lap just sniffed her nose. It tickled.     “And I am being Yo, not mistress. I here to show you what is like to be typical girl in Paradopolis. Yo knows many typical girls in Paradopolis, like cute-Lisa and cute-Cheryl and cute-Sersi and cute-Troia and cute-Cobra, and cute-Sorcy and cute-Pegasus and cute-Lisette…”     Valeria tried to comprehend this. “You’re here to… train me?”     Yo gave up, dropped to the floor beside the slave-girl, and caught her up in a huge, friendly hug, rabbit and all. “Yo is here to be your friend.”     Valeria hadn’t realised until then how badly she needed a hug. She hadn’t been embraced by anyone who cared about her for over three years, since that last parting with a mother she could never see again. She hadn’t ever expected to be embraced again by someone who just wanted to hold her close and make her feel better.     She burst into tears.     Yo held her very tight while she sobbed out her hurt and fear. Then after a while she stole Valeria a pair of Exile’s pyjamas and settled down to brush her hair.           “All the things they said about Exile’s world were true. But they weren’t anything near the whole truth. It is cruel and harsh and dangerous and horrible. But it is also kind and alive and surprising and exciting. That electricity that could do such torture can also light rooms and make moving pictures and bring stopped hearts back to life. They have art and stories and good things to eat – they have this food of the gods called ice-cream, and a drink with bubbles that go up your nose. They have evil men who will slaughter thousands without a care, and but they have tens of thousands of people more who will stand up and help those who are hurt and who will fight to protect the helpless from being hurt again.     The people there are good and bad, and mostly a mixture, just like everywhere. Rick’s cousin Bry, whose superhero name is Goldeneyed, he gets accused of the most terrible things in their newspapers, a daily information sheet distributed to all the people. But he still strives to do what’s right, and he never lets down those same people that accuse him. Laurie Leyton, who loves him more than she knows, pretends to be a mean tough person but when anybody is in trouble she is the very first to help them. And Yo… well Yo is special and unique on any planet or plane, and Rick never did me a better turn ever than when he asked Yo to come and look after me in my first hours as Exile’s slave.     But my fears had been cut into me with many cruel lashes, and even if Rick was not the tyrant I expected but something more terrible and wondrous, others still understood cruelty and its proper application…”          Exile was amazed that Valeria actually looked as good dressed in old stripy pyjama-bottoms and a Lair Legion sweatshirt as she had in silver mesh bondagewear, which was quite an achievement. Perhaps the fact that his slave was not trembling in terror, expecting a fate worse than death at his hands at any moment helped. She still got a bit spooked if he moved suddenly, but she was slowly getting used to the idea that the Lord of the Dreary Dimension to whom she’d been presented as a tithe was not actually an evil, cruel tyrant.     “Evening, Valeria,” Derek Foreman bade his houseguest.     She hadn’t seem him and his cousin Bry Katz come in. She jumped up guilty from where she had been watching TV with Ben the Bulbasaur’s head resting on her lap. “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you, master,” she gasped.     “So you decided to keep her?” Bry asked disbelievingly as Exile assured the slave-girl that there was no reason for her to apologise for watching TV.     “It’s not that simple, cuz,” Exile explained. “When Dormaggadon was Lord of the Dreary Dimension he ruled with an iron fist. Each of the colonies was expected to send him tribute, like slaves, gems, precious metals and stuff, and if they didn’t then he sent his Brainless Ones round to crush them. So there are all these customs which have sprung up over hundreds of years…”     “If my lord rejects me and returns me in shame to my village, then my family will have to be tortured to death,” Valeria amplified. “This law is to motivate slaves to please their master.”     “I see the problem,” Goldeneyed agreed. “So she’s going to have to camp here until we get this Lord of the Dreary Dimension stuff sorted out, yes?”     “Yep. Where else can she go? And it’s really useful having someone who can change the TV channel for me now my remote control doesn’t admit that I exist. But I didn’t leave her alone while I was fighting crime.”     And Valentia’s babysitter emerged from the kitchen with the popcorn. “It is to be true, cute heroes. Exile is being to call up Yo and say please to be helping cute Valeria to adjust to life in Paradopolis.”     “You got Yo to teach her about life on Earth?” Bry boggled. “Yo?”     “Lady Yo has taught me many things already,” Valeria explained. “I now know the grooming and care of bunny rabbits, the rules of the game of ten-pin bowling, and what to do if I meet the Uncute Scourge of the BZL. Only one thing still puzzles me.”     “What’s that?” Derek asked.     Valeria turned back to the television. “Why can’t Ross and Rachel see that they’re made for each other?”     There were three loud poundings on the metal door.     “Who the hell could that be?” Exile puzzled. Ben growled. “We’re on an island in the middle of the night?”     Goldeneyed more practically opened the door. A tall gaunt man in robes of purple and green stalked in from the darkness. He ignored Yo and G-Eyed and turned his gaze upon Exile. Then he made a small bow. “Master,” he acknowledged.     “Er…” the Lord of the Dreary Dimension answered uncertainly. “Who are you?”     “It… it’s your Grand Vizier,” Valeria warned him. The terror was back with the slave-girl now. She knew in her heart that this had all been a cruel game to give her hope before destroying her. She cursed herself for being foolish enough to actually fall for it, to actually even like the fiend who owned her body and soul. She braced herself for the pain and horror to come.     “Your chattel is correct,” the Grand Vizier indicated. “As I served Dread Dormaggadon now I serve you, Dread Derek. Your legions stand ready for conquest, a million people tremble as they await your first command. What shall I instruct them, my lord?”     “He is not wanting to be that sort of Dread Lord,” Yo interfered. “Cute-Exile is being a good man, and he is not to be conquering or dooming anybody. Exile is to be the Nice-Lord of Dreary Dimension, which might be called something more cheerful in the future like Hoppy Bunny Land or something.”     “I don’t think I want the job at all, actually,” Exile answered. “Thanks awfully and all that, but I think I’ll just stay here in Paradopolis.”     “Ah.” The Grand Visier ah-ed.     “Ah?” G-Eyed checked. “Ah, that’s not possible? Ah, I’ll arrange it immediately? Ah, I’ll go get the forms? What?”     “Ah, I have already taken the liberty of transporting your island and your personal slaves here into the Dreary Dimension, and although I have the ability to do such a thing this way you will recall that escape from the realm is not an option.”     “What?” Exile shouted.     “We’re trapped here?” G-Eyed gasped.     “Yo is unable to think Yo away,” the thought being reported.     “It seems that you will be able to continue as our… figurehead here in the Dark Tower for the foreseeable future,” the Vizier secretly smirked.     “Figurehead?” Derek Foreman frowned. “I thought I was in charge.”     “Of course you are, dread lord, of course you are,” the Grand Vizier assured him with a charming, insincere smile. “And I live only to serve.”           “Thus Anseptilus brought us back to the Dreary Dimension, that Rick might become his puppet ruler and he the power that ruled us all. And now the Vizier had learned that when a Lord of that realm died his authority and deep links with the plane were transferred to one near who that had conducted the proper rituals.”          “Such a simple duty, my sweet little slave,” the Grand Vizier told Valeria. When he leaned towards her she had nowhere else to shuffle away from him. She could smell the stale food on his breath. He pressed the glass stiletto wand between her breasts but did not piece her skin.     “What?” the slave girl managed to gasp. “What duty?”     Anseptilus smiled, but his eyes remained cold. As ever they played up and down Valeria’s body as he spoke, enjoying the trembling lushness beneath the flimsy nightgown. “This Talisman of Neutralisation has been wrought with fell magics long in the preparation,” he lectured. “Many souls have been destroyed to create it. It is a tool with but a single purpose. Can you guess what that is, my pretty poppet?”     “To – to kill someone.”     “To kill ‘Dread Derek’, our so-called Dark Lord. To cut through not only his flesh but the magics that bind him to this Dreary Dimension. Any other being would be cast out into the Vortex, but he will surely be destroyed. And his power and authority will be channelled to where it rightfully belongs.”     “To you,” Valeria surmised.     “To me,” the Vizier smirked. He flicked one strap of Valeria’s gown off her shoulder and stroked her skin with the sharp tip of the cold slimy wand. “Do I terrify you, slave?”     “Yes.”     “Soon I shall terrify all. Dormaggadon was powerful but foolish, little understanding the true applications of power. I shall be a Dread Lord worthy of the name, and empires will tremble before me.”     Valeria thought only of Exile’s courage and nobility, and of how kind he had proved. “I am not your slave,” she told the man who had spent three years tormenting her. “I am his.”     Anseptilus snorted. “It was I who commissioned the spells of obedience upon you. Do you not think that I would have ways of over-riding them? The injunction never to harm your master is void in this matter. You will wait for some moment of great vulnerability and then you will strike your blow with this weapon, aiming to kill. Dread Derek will be destroyed and I shall be your new master.” He leered down at the trembling woman. “And then we shall see.”     “I do not wish to harm my master,” Valeria told him. “He does not deserve it.” ;    The Vizier caught her by the neck and held it too tight. “Your wishes mean nothing. I am Grand Vizier here, and my will is paramount. I know you, Valeria, formerly of Carfax. I know of your father and mother, your brothers and sister. I know of your estate and its villages, of your childhood friends. And I know how easy it would be to snuff them all out.”     Valeria knew it was true. She closed her eyes but a betraying tear tricked down onto Anseptilus’ glove.     “And I will. I promise that. And the Unthinking Ones will be the last of the torments I visit upon them, only after every other horror I can command.” He released the slave with a cruel jerk. “So you will do as I demand, Valeria, because I hold not only your life but everyone you love at my mercy. And I have no mercy.”     “Yes,” agreed the slave girl.     Anseptilus ran the cold glass wand over the smooth curves of Valeria’s face. “I shall enjoy this victory,.” He promised her. “Kill Derek. You have no other choice.” ;    He left Valeria to her weeping then. But he would be back.          “Not relevant!” Exile screamed. “I'm boss of a dimension where people are getting executed in my name for not bowing properly, and you think it's not relevant to tell me?”     The Grand Vizier bowed. “Your predecessor preferred to leave the minutiae of daily rulership to others, dread lord. People who understood the nuances.”     “You mean you,” Goldeneyed suggested, leaning on one of the black pillars that ringed the great throne room and frowning. “We'd never even of got to hear what was going on if it wasn't for Yo.”     The thought being nodded. People talked to Yo. Yo thought to chat to folks nobody else bothered with, the serfs and drabs and drudges of the lower courts. And people trusted Yo with things they'd never dare tell the new Lord of the Dreary Dimension or his brother. “Yo is not being impressed, uncute Vizier-nasty! Yo does not like the guards with whips, and the too big tithes, and the elven cleansing, and the bullying bullies who can do whatever they are wanting to people because they are working for you…”     “I can see that your… simple friend has failed to understand our complex socio-economic environment here,” the Vizier smiled coldly. “We can hardly expect people to adjust to a change of leadership style in a few days after millennia of tyranny under Dread Dormaggadon, now can we? They wouldn't understand. But I am, of course, fully seized of Dread Derek's innovative and fascinating agenda, and am bending every effort towards delivering it in a feasible timescale.”     “Bend more,” Exile scowled. “No more executions. No more bribes. No more torture. Plain enough, Vizier?”     “As day, Dread Lord,” the devious administrator acknowledged. “Then I suppose there is another matter that I should draw to my liege lord's attention. A security issue, really, and one which I had not thought would interest you until now.”     “Go on,” Exile allowed.     “An intruder in the Dreary Dimension,” the Grand Vizier reported. “From your own world. He is terrorising the outlands, destroying farms, crushing villagers, that kind of thing. I believe he calls himself the Yurt.”     G-Eyed and Exile exchanged worried glances. “The Yurt?” Goldeneyed worried. “So this is where he got to.” The inconceivable Yurt was a gamma-radiation spawned cross between a man and a Russian peasant hut. He had been defeated once, and that had taken the entire Lair Legion and a clever device which syphoned gamma-rays. Exile, G-Eyed, and Yo had not been present.     “The Yurt is threatening my people?” Exile breathed. He stifled a bad word.     “You need not worry, Dread Lord,” the Grand Vizier smirked. “Have no fear. I have arranged an ambush of war machines, arcane cannons, and Brainless Ones to destroy him once he reaches this pass here on the map. You need never face this terrible creature.”     “What about this village here, though?” G-Eyed pointed out. “Surely if the Yurt's heading that way he'll get to that little place before he walks into your ambush?”     “I believe he will,” the Vizier admitted. “Unfortunately there is no ambush site before that settlement. And it is only one village. The Dread Lord has thousands more.”     “That doesn't mean I'm going to let those people die!” Exile declared. “Bry, Yo, I know we need to work on a way to get out of here, but right now we're needed to save some lives. Are you with me?”     “Yo is happy to be helping with people who are to be in trouble.”     “You got it, cuz. Let's go kick some radioactive hut!” G-Eyed checked the co-ordinates so he could teleport them there.     “I… I'm coming too,” Valeria decided. She was hurriedly piling bandages into a carrier.     “You can't come,” Exile objected. “This is the Yurt. It's too dangerous.”     Valeria looked at him with desperate eyes. “Please?” she begged.     “I think she'd be useful on the team, Derek,” Goldeneyed suggested, spotting the slave-girl's terrified glance over at the Grand Vizier. “She might be safer with us after all.”     “Yes,” Yo agreed. “Cute Valeria should be being with us.” Yo had seen far more than Exile or Goldeneyed, and knew that there was far more than self-preservation at play here in the slave-girl's decision. People underestimated Yo because Yo talked strangely and had a childlike simplicity. But Yo loved to watch people, and Yo was far from being stupid; and Yo had shared long talks with Valeria on the subject of being Exile's slave.     The Grand Vizier beckoned Valeria over to him to provide her with more medical equipment and supplies that the adventurers would need. That gave him the opportunity to hand over a six-inch glass wand which tapered to a cruel spike. “Here is the Talisman of Neutralisation of which I spoke, wench. Tell me what you are to do with it.”     Valeria lowered her eyes. “I am to wait until the Dread Lord is distracted in combat and then plunge it into him. The magics upon it will cast him from the Dimension of Exile, destroying him since he is now integral to it, and allowing another to become Dread Lord in his stead.”     “Very good,” the Vizier told her, knowing full well which senior administrator was lined up to be next supreme ruler. “And then?”     “A-and then I will return to you and report for service, Grand Vizier.”     “Keep the Earth clothes on. They're delightfully kinky,” the Grand Vizier advised. “But bring your manacles.”     “Let's go, Valeria,” Exile called from across the room. The girl concealed the Talisman of Neutralisation in the waistband of her pyjama trousers.     “Remember,” the Vizier hissed at her, “I know where your family lives!”     The heroes departed in a flash of golden light to battle the unstoppable Yurt.           “Think of this as a test of your ability to displace kinetic energy,” Exile told himself as the Yurt hit him. It was nice to know the exact limits of his energy-shifting powers he told himself as he was slammed with bone-splintering force back into the jagged cliff-face and slumped into a small bloody pile.     But the set-up had worked, because now Exile’s cousin Goldeneyed had been able to creep up on the radioactive Russian peasant hut that walked like a man and get close enough to grab it and teleport. Goldeneyed had once managed, with the extreme motivation of imminent death to plane-shift an entire shuttlecraft. All he had to do here was teleport a significant enough bit of the Yurt to hurt him. Of course, the Yurt was composed of super-dense gamma-irradiated cosmic materiel.     “Aaaaaaagggghhhh!” Bry Katz commented as he felt himself losing control of the dimension-shifting. He worked very hard to keep most of his major organs appearing in the same place and roughly the right order. It wasn’t easy.     The Yurt appeared not to notice that twenty-five percent of its mass had been separated. It merely picked up a boulder the size of a house and hurled it at G-Eyed.     Yo intervened, impossibly skewering the boulder on his/her rapier and deftly tossing it aside. “Ah, ah, naughty Yurt monster!” the thought being admonished. “Yo is to be making sure that you are not menacing innocent villaging villagers down below.”     “Yurt smash puny sword boy. Girl. Boy.” The Yurt promised Yo uncertainly. Unfortunately the dumber the Yurt got the stronger he got. As a thought being Yo could be whatever he believed himself to be, but it was becoming increasingly hard to convince him/herself that those mountain-shattering blows from the Yurt weren’t able to hurt him/her.     “Yo is wondering if we cannot be to be talking all of this over with cappuccino and biscuits?” the genderless thought being suggested. The Yurt was unreceptive to this alternative, preferring to stick with the tried and tested smashing option he did so well.     Exile painfully dragged himself out from under the heap of rubble the Yurt had buried him in. Gentle hands helped him free and wrapped bandages round the worst of his abrasions. “Valeria?” he remembered. The slave girl had been a tribute offering from one of the outlying vassal states and had insisted on coming along in case she was needed. Right now, given Exile’s mangled state, she was clearly needed.     “Yo is holding her own for a few moments, dread lord,” Valeria assured him. “Now hold still while I try and get this suture attached.”     “Bryan?”     “Your cousin is a little way down the mountain catching his breath and trying to teleport his digestive tract back to its proper place. He’ll be alright eventually, but he’s taken as a bad a beating as you have.”     Exile winced as he tried to stand up. “You’ve got to get out of here, Valeria. Things are turning nasty.”     “Are you going to run away, dread lord?”     Derek Foreman ran a hand through his blood-matted hair. “No, I can’t. Somebody’s got to hold the Yurt off long enough for the villagers to run away, and since I appear to be in charge round here that makes it my responsibility.”     Valeria smiled sadly. “Well then, if our dread lord is willing to fight for us, surely we should stand by him.” As she saw Exile about to protest she added, “Master… Derek… we have never, in ten thousand years, had a ruler who would lift a finger for us. Do you really think we’re going to turn our backs on one who will risk his life for people who have always been told they’re worth nothing? And me… you know what I am, what you could demand of me, yet you’ve been… you’ve been so very kind. Did you expect me to leave you to die alone?”     There were tears in the slave girls eyes as she spoke, because even as she told the truth with her lips she was slipping the Talisman of Neutralisation from her pyjama-trouser waistband as the Grand Vizier had commanded her, ready to plunge the wand into Exile, hurling him from the Dreary Dimension, destroying him since he was one with it. The Grand Vizier knew where Valeria’s family lived, and he had been very specific in all his instructions to her.     All it took was the courage to make one stab.     Just as Yo was pounded into the bedrock Goldeneyed limped back into the fray. “Hold it there, rocky,” he demanded. “That teleport trick’s got to have weakened you a little bit. See how you like this.” And G-Eyed gated in molten bedrock from the mountain’s searing heart.     The air was black with gaseous rock, and from the centre of the fumes came the scream of the Yurt; but it was hard to tell if it was from pain or rage. Then a slate-edged wall loomed fast out of the fog, slamming into G-Eyed with cruel force. Bry felt the ribs on his left side snapping as he toppled backwards onto the churned-up mountainside. The Yurt shambled forwards and raised a foot the size of an outhouse to squash to fallen hero.     Exile intervened with a power blast which shattered the earth under the Yurt’s other foot The monster roared with rage as it toppled backwards down the cliff, only to rise again more furious and powerful than ever.     “You okay?” Exile asked G-Eyed.     “Sure, cuz,” Bry gasped. “Only hurts when I breathe.”     Then the Yurt was back upon them.     Valeria watched the battle wide-eyed, still clutching the Talisman of Neutralisation she hadn’t had the courage to use yet. She knew she had to. She knew her family were lost to her anyway, since the day the council of elders of her village had elected her as their due tithe to the Dark Tower; she could never return, because to do so would be to doom them. She knew that the Grand Vizier would hurt them in ways she couldn’t even imagine if she didn’t fulfil his every whim, as his assassin and later as his bed-toy. She knew she had no choice. So why was it so hard to decide?     “Yo is thinking that cute-Valeria has to be worrying about something,” Yo suggested, appearing unexpectedly at the slave-girl’s shoulder.     “Yo!” Valeria gasped. “Shouldn’t you be down there helping the dread lord and Bryan?”     “Yo thinks Yo is,” the thought being replied, pointing to where a black-silk clad Zorro impersonator was dancing around the hut-monster distracting it from the stricken G-Eyed. “But Yo also thinks this is where it is important for Yo to be.”     Valeria looked frightened now. “What do you mean?” she trembled.     “Yo is to be thinking that cute-Valeria has to be making of hard choices, and is be needing a friend to be helping with the thinking out, yes?”     “I don’t know what… I don’t have a choice,” Valeria despaired.     “Is not true,” Yo told the weeping girl. “Is always important to be deciding what is right to do, and always important to be doing it.”     “I love my family, Yo. I don’t want any harm to come to them, even though I can’t ever see them again.”     “Yo thinks that cute-Valeria doesn’t want any harm to come to anybody cute-Valeria loves, yes?” Yo asked perceptively. Then s/he added, “Yo wonders who should to be trusted most with seeing cute-Valeria’s family is safe, Exile or the Grand Vizier.”     “It’s not that simple, Yo,” Valeria argued. “It’s all about greed, and envy, and betrayal, and shameful things done for mean and evil reasons.”     Yo cupped her chin with his/her hand and smiled. “No,” s/he told the maiden. “It is all about love.”     Then advisor-Yo vanished at the same time as combatant-Yo caught a particularly nasty cornice from the Yurt.     That left Exile in lone combat with the creature. Almost all the villagers had fled to safety now. Only one old woman, unable to run, cowered in the hut-monster’s path, futilely cradling a screaming baby from the wrath of the Yurt. Exile had always wondered when and how he was going to die, and now he knew it was to defend two helpless people that didn’t seem such a bad way to go. At least he would stop hurting.     “Back off, Yurt, they’re not for you,” he warned, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth as he spoke.     “Yurt smash!” The Hut that Walks Like a Man drew back one mighty wing to smear the hero into oblivion.     “Nooo!” screamed Valeria, and stabbed with the sharpened crystal spike which was the Talisman of Neutralisation. But she didn’t stab Exile. The wand somehow slid through the granite carapace of the monstrous Yurt.     The Grand Vizier’s magics burst into action, spewing the victim out of the Dreary Dimension in a rainbow flash. The Yurt was gone.     Exile discovered that he was still alive.     “I had to do it I had to do it I had to do it,” Valeria babbled. “I couldn’t kill you while you were fighting for us.” She clasped herself to Exile’s battered body and sobbed, but somehow the fact it hurt like hell to be squeezed didn’t bother Derek Foreman at all.     “Well, that’s settled then,” Xander the Improbable commented, emerging from behind a pile of rubble with the Manga Shoggoth. “Now we can get down to business.”           “The sorcerer supreme of the Parodyverse is a denizen of Earth called Xander the Improbable. Though he is a wizard he is a good man, although he seeks hard to hide this from the unwise. Many do not understand the choices he must make nor the stratagems he must employ, and think him cruel or avaricious. Others believe that he has no powers for they see him do no magics, never considering how great a sorcerer must be to operate in that way.         It was Xander who exploited the downfall of the Dread Dormaggedon, after orchestrating it with an archvillain called the Hooded Hood. It was Xander who had crafted the magics to bind Rick to the Dreary Dimension. So of course it was Xander who appeared now at the vital moment, seemingly doing nothing for our aid.     And me? I knew that I had utterly failed everyone and everything I had ever loved, and my choice had doomed them all. And still I did not regret that one tiny moment of courage in my lifetime’s cowardice, for it seemed to shine brighter in my heart than all the long years of my submission. And Rick was alive.”           “Well now,” the Grand Vizier to the Lord of the Dreary Dimension said with a sigh, “This is an unexpected complication.” He looked down the rocky incline to where Exile, Goldeneyed and Yo had just survived their battle with the inconceivable Yurt. “I can see that little Valeria is going to have to learn her lessons the hard way.”     Valeria the slave girl shuddered as the gaunt manipulator turned his narrowed eyes upon her, but didn't regret the choice she had made in defying his orders.     Exile, nominally Lord of the Dread Dimension (the post which the Grand Vizier was in fact applying for in the traditional way that Grand Viziers apply for it), was still on his feet, but only because the lithe slave in the borrowed pyjamas was supporting his arm round her neck. “I thought you said you couldn't get heavy weaponry to this spot so we had to go in and battle the Yurt physically?”     “I found a way,” shrugged the Vizier. “I would appreciate knowing exactly how you did manage to defeat the creature.” And why you're still here, not destroyed by that wand of extraplanar exiling that Valeria was supposed to stab you with, he didn't add.     Goldeneyed tried to get up but the stabbing pains in his chest warned him that it wouldn't be a good idea. On the other hand the thousand or so of the Vizier's private guards and the heavy arcane cannon ordinance they were dragging with them suggested staying put might not be such a smart move either.     “Do not be moving, brave G-Eyed being,” Yo suggested. “Yo is being proficient in medicine and can be helping you to be not dying and things like that. Did Yo ever tell you about human identity Pilar's thesis?”     “We've got to do something,” Goldeneyed gasped. “That Vizier wants Derek dead, and he's got the people and the kit to do it.”     “Perhaps I can be of some assistance?” Xander the Improbable suggested, drawing attention to his presence for the first time. “I believe I can make the proper explanations.”     The Grand Vizier drew closer to the mage in the faded red robes. He was starting to worry that this might be the chap who had previously hammered on the doors of the Dark Tower to announce the forthcoming demise of the previous Lord of the Dreary Dimension. “Who are you?” he demanded.     “Wrong question,” Xander shot back. “Why am I is a far better one. I'm present at the moment, for example, to help my young friends here to prepare this dimension as a refuge for their worlds' heroes, a staging point for one final battle with the Hooded Hood who has just managed to annex reality. That's why I arranged for Exile to become Lord of this place first off.”     “You arranged it?” Bry, Derek, Yo, and the Vizier all replied more or less together. The Vizier took a few more steps forward, as if ready to wring the improbable mage's neck. He squelched through the thick transparent goo which covered the battlefield where the Yurt had been vanquished, but forced himself to wait for the rest of the irritating magic-worker's explanation.     “As for the rest, Valeria here decided that you were a grade-A nasty and that it was better to use your dimensional exiling magics to send the Yurt away from the Dreary Dimension rather than to destroy young Derek here. She's screwed up all her courage to do the right thing because she's seen that Exile and his friends do the same, and now she's praying that somehow they will be able to stop you from massacring them all, claiming the mantle of Dimensional Lord, and perpetrating the horror on her family that you threatened her with.”     “You slime,” spat Exile. He hoped he could prolong the conversation for enough time to build up another energy blast inside him. He had an uncomfortable feeling that the Vizier knew exactly how long that would be.     “You don't have the right qualities to rule this place 'Dread Derek',” the Grand Vizier told him. “I'm doing you a favour annihilating you.” He raised his rune-carved staff.     “Excusing me?” Yo interrupted. “Wasn't uncute-Vizier listening to mysterious-Xander? Is this place to be needed as where heroes gather to be stopping Hoodily Hooded Hood, so is not to be for you to take over!”     “And who's going to stop me?” the Grand Vizier sneered. “You? Your crippled friends? That cowering concubine? A powerless mage?”     “My guess would be the Manga Shoggoth I brought,” shrugged Xander the Improbable.     The translucent ooze around their feet suddenly reared up into a vast, glutinous, growing mass. Before the Vizier could even scream it had oozed up inside his clothing and was finding its way into his various orifices.     Then the Manga Shoggoth resumed his usual mass.     There was a sound something like a peanut bag popping.     “Now, to plan this campaign against the Hood…” Xander continued.           Derek Foreman stood under an alien sky and watched black orchids bloom in the light of an alien moon. It had surprised him to find beauty amongst the brutal cruelty of the Dreary Dimension ruled for so long by the tyrant he had accidentally replaced, but there was a savage splendour about the realm of exile at the very edge of the Parodyverse which was beginning to creep into the young man’s soul.     “There you are,” Bry Katz declared, passing out onto the floral balcony of the Dark Tower which loomed over the vastnesses of the Dreamy Dimension. “I thought you’d probably slipped off somewhere to think through the things we need to sort out.”     “I’m just a bit overwhelmed, that’s all,” Exile admitted. “Who’d have thought that my TV remote control ignoring me would have led to all of this?”     Goldeneyed shrugged, then wished he hadn’t as the plaster holding his ribs in place registered its objections. The palace healers had done quite a good job of accelerating the repair of wounds that the two heroes had sustained defending the realm, but they couldn’t replace the benefits of time. “So what’s the verdict, cuz? What are you going to do?”     “What can I do?” Derek despaired. “She can’t go back to her people because of some stupid cultural taboo, and I can hardly keep her as a slave can I? Besides, half the court wants her dead because she saved us from the late Grand Vizier’s plot!”     “I was thinking about the Hooded Hood having taken over the time/space continuum, and how we’re supposed to be the last, best hope for stopping him; but we can talk about Valeria as well,” G-Eyed acknowledged wryly.     “Oh, well, I was thinking about that stuff as well,” Exile agreed hurriedly, “I was just making sure none of the detailed little stuff got forgotten, you know?” Actually there was a very searing image in his mind of the girl who had been sent to him as his first due tribute as Dread Lord of the Dimension of Exile, as she had been at the moment when the danger had passed, when she had chosen to use the instrument of assassination given her by the treacherous Vizier to save rather than slay Derek. As the Magna Shoggoth gently digested the villain and Xander had fussed around bluffing troops into surrender, Valeria had haltingly confessed her part in the plot to Exile, G-Eyed, and Yo. Then she had cast her eyes down to the ground and braced herself, and with a sick realisation Derek had understood that she fully expected him to hurt her now, to punish her or even kill her for what she had contemplated. He hadn’t, of course. What he wanted to do just then was to tell her how much he admired her courage and appreciated her faith, because she had literally risked everything to save him and his companions. Instead he had blushed and limped off to help Xander with the armies.     “Details are important,” G-Eyed agreed neutrally, bringing his cousin out of his reminiscence.     Exile eyed Bryan suspiciously. “It’s not what you think, you know,” he told the black-clad adventurer. “It’s not like I lo… have feelings for her. I just want to make sure she’s going to be okay when we have to move out with Xander and the Shoggoth.”     “Uh huh,” Goldeneyed replied. “Look, I’ll see you inside, okay?” he had to get out of Derek’s sight before the big grin he was stifling broke free. Once inside the tower again he allowed himself a sly chuckle. “Poor ol’ Derek’s got it bad this time,” he observed.     “Or got it good,” Xander the Improbable interrupted. “It depends on your perspective.”     “I didn’t know you were there,” G-Eyed jumped, turning to see the red-robed Master of the Mystic Crafts and his current companion the ameboid Manga Shoggoth descending the staircase.     “Take your visit to my shop, for example,” the mage went on. “I told your cousin to go home to resolve his problems. He interpreted that as meaning that island where he lives. I was warning him that he would need to come to this realm where he’s now bound as Master to get to grips with the situation.”     “You arranged for him to become the dimensional lord, though,” the Manga Shoggoth bubbled. “It’s not like you gave the human much choice.”     “Oh, don’t worry,” Xander smiled wickedly, “He gets a choice in the end.”     “At least he gets the girl,” grumped Goldeneyed. “How come I never get the sexy slavegirls in distress to rescue?”     “Because the most significant woman in your life will be far more trouble,” Xander shot back. “Anyway, if you can possibly reign in your loins for a moment it’s time for you to get on with something heroic.”     “Me?”     “Well, I can hardly go undercover to rendezvous with the Lair Legion in the Hooded Hood’s trap, can I?” challenged the Manga Shoggoth.     “It’s suicidally dangerous and devastatingly difficult,” Xander told the dimension-hopping hero. “So I naturally thought of you.”          Valeria relaxed when the knocking on her door turned out to be Yo with a massive stack of file-boxes. “Oh, I thought you might be an execution squad,” she admitted. “Or Derek,” she added, as if that might actually be worse.     “No. Yo is being Yo. And cute-Valeria is not to be worrying about hero-Exile being angry with Valeria. Valeria was being to be very brave and was saving of all of our lives against the uncute Yurt. Cute Derek is admiring your courage and appreciating your faith, but does not be able to say it because he is man all the time while Yo is only man some of the time like when Yo needs to reach high shelf or wants to write name in the snow.” The thought being manoeuvred the files onto a table in the temporary quarters assigned to the Dread Lord’s (theoretical) concubine.     Valeria hugged tight the Lair Legion sweatshirt that Exile had given her and sighed. “I really don’t understand all of this. I keep waiting for him to revert to what I know he’s got to be. And he keeps… keeps making me like him.”     Yo beamed. “That is to be being expected, sexy-Valeria. You were being given to Exile as slave, but Yo is thinking that soon it will be Exile who is slave to you.” At least if Yo gets Yo’s way, the romantic thought being didn’t add out loud. “In the meantime, Yo is needing Valeria’s help.”     “What do you need?” the baffled slave girl asked. She wasn’t sure why she felt so safe and happy with the simple Yo-creature. After all, s/he was devastatingly powerful and bizarrely alien; but somehow Yo radiated an aura of happiness that made Valeria feel as though somehow things would turn out alright, against all odds. Yo believed they would.     “Yo is now new Grand Temporary Vizier,” Yo explained, “and while Yo has the job, Yo has to some plans to make this Dreary Dimension more into a Happy Place. But Yo is needing someone who knows how things work here to be helping out with the details.”     Yo unrolled the scrolls from the boxes, and suddenly Valeria understood that Yo was simple, not stupid. A stupid creature would not be laying plans to reorganise the entire social, economic, and political structure of a dimension, from the methods of farming and distribution of food to the criminal justice systems and methods of communication. But a simple one might actually expect to be able to pull it off.     Valeria rolled up the sleeves of her overlarge pyjama jacket. “Let’s get to work,” she suggested.           “Before I was chosen by lot as tribute I would have been Lady of Shalandalor and Carfax. My mother and father had taken time to train me in the duties of stewardship and land management, that I might hold a realm for my husband. And I had not realised how much knowledge I had absorbed at three years in Dormaggadon’s court. Thus it was that Yo and I were able to change things, really change them, and turn the course of our society in but a few days.         Just as the legends tell, at the end Dread Derek surrendered his power and authority over the Dreary Dimension and a new Dread Lord was appointed, the last, Dread Avatar. Avatar had been one of the company of the Lair Legion, although once he had been a minion of the terrible Parody Master before gaining his free will. And Avatar became the last and longest of the Dread Lords, completing over many generations the work Yo and I began on that single night.         But Exile had been well named, and as he had once been excluded from his own plane now he was cast from mine. I was still slave-bound to him by the spells of the Grand Vizier even though Anseptilus was gone, and so I had to go with him back to Earth; although that might also have been the choice of my heart. I became his housekeeper, serving him as best I could and being beside him daily. And I was content.         It surprised me to be content. I had been so proud and full of high dreams before I was taken for Dormaggadon, so certain of a high destiny. I would be the Servant of the Chalice who was destined to bring its joys to all the people, ending the days of sorrow. I would marry some highborn noble who would sweep me off my feet to his wide dominions. I would become a mother who could teach her own children and watch them grow. Yet here I was a warrior’s slave, exiled no less than him in a strange land. And my days had never been happier.”          Bry (Goldeneyed) Katz took his morning coffee break early and slipped out from Lisa’s law firm down to the Bean and Donut Coffee Bar off Paradopolis Plaza to meet Exile and Valeria. He was surprised when Lisette, the slightly punk legal assistant erstwhile sidekick of Lisa, followed him into the diner. “Wow! What a coincidence finding you guys here in my regular,” she faked.     “I’ve been coming here since I moved to Paradopolis and got a job at Lisa’s and I’ve never seen you in here before,” G-Eyed pointed out.     “Yeah, whatever,” the dark-haired babe shrugged. She looked across at the girl in the Lair Legion sweatshirt and stripy cotton trousers. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Laurie Layton, but mostly these days folks call me Lisette. I work at what Lisa laughingly calls her law practise. Hi!”     “Hello,” Exile’s companion replied, raising her hand to duplicate the peace symbol the other woman had made. “I’m Valeria of Carfax, except I can never return to Carfax again of course on pain of execution by torture. I’m Derek’s absolute slave for life.”     Exile sprayed his coffee over Goldeneyed.     “Oh, that scene, huh.” Lisette nodded knowingly. “Are you into that as well, Bry?”     “It’s not like that,” Derek Foreman tried to explain. “See, she was sent as tribute back when I was dimensional emperor of this Dreary Dimension and…”     “She just lives with Derek and looks after his needs,” Bry explained wickedly.     “Well, whatever rings your bells,” Lisette agreed tolerantly. “What are you doing for St Val’s Night, Bryan?”     “I, uh, I haven’t decided between all the options quite yet,” Goldeneyed prevaricated.     “He’s coming over to our place for our old video watch-a-thon,” Exile said ruthlessly. He owed Bry this. “You know, Casablanca and popcorn.”     “Uh huh,” understood Laurie Layton. “So I figure there’s no point dragging you along to this big party I’m going to then. Bry? Rock stars, media figures, actors and actresses saving the rainforest, that kind of gig?”     “Me? Well, erm, I don’t want to let Derek and Valeria down…” G-Eyed prevaricated some more.     “We’ll manage,” Exile grinned. “You should go.”     “Yes, go,” agreed Valeria. “After all, the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”          Valeria looked at the upturned faces in the circle of firelight and smiled. “What? You expected some great high romance or terrible horror story? You expected Rick to be ten feet tall with a blazing sword?”     The candidates looked a little abashed and self-conscious. Nothing in their diligent training had prepared them for a Great Lady who was also a person.     “Everyone knows he is a great hero,” Marchelle whispered, looking nervously as if the great Exile might appear in a crash of thunder.     “Of course he is. But he’s also sweet and silly, like all men,” Valeria confided. “He can defeat monsters and tyrants but he has problems matching his socks.”     The candidates tried to absorb this new and secret lore. “But you are the Maiden of the Chalice?” Adela asked worriedly. “The promised one?”     “For now,” Valeria agreed. “Until a new personification is appointed. Maybe one of you.”     “What… what’s it like?” ventured Erien, the quietest of the candidates, crouched timidly at the very back of the group. “The Chalice?”     “Terrifying,” the priestess told her. “More terrifying than even Dame Leona’s descriptions. But you won’t be terrified, because you will be swept away by its beauty. And then the beauty will mean nothing to you because you will feel its love.”     “Dame Leona says it’s a metaphor for womanhood,” Adela reported. “Or creation. Or sovereignty.”     “I suppose it can be if it wants to be,” conceded Valeria. “Listen…”           “It's… it's beautiful,” gasped Valeria of Carfax. “Oh…”     The same rainbow lights that rippled across the walls of the cave played over her face and golden hair too. It was like being inside a kaleidoscope.     Dame Sontergard suppressed an affectionate smile at the girl's wonder as she remembered her own reaction to first seeing the Secret Chalice all those years ago when she too had been brought here after her first womans' bleeding. She forced herself to maintain a stern face though. This was a serious matter, and must be conducted properly. The fate of worlds might depend upon this.     “What do you see, daughter?” she asked Valeria.     The child scrambled forward in wonder to look at the golden cup and the sparkling contents within it. “Some sort of cup or goblet… a wonderful thing,” Valeria reported. “Floating in a hidden cave. It's… its glowing. And singing. I don't know what is in it. Wine… or water… or blood… or… or life!”     “Why is it here?”     Valeria wanted to reach out and touch the lovely thing but she knew right in her core that it was not for her to touch. “It's waiting. To be found.”     “By whom?”     “By a champion. Someone who is worthy of it. Someone who will do what has to be done and… and champion life.”     “Why is it hidden?”     Valeria looked around the rainbow-washed cave. “It's been here a long time,” she realised, without ever wondering how the answers came into her head. “A very long time. It was here when the gods first took this realm and cast it off to be a Dreary Dimension, prison for the Dread Lord. It was hidden even then. Not even they knew it was here.”     “But why is it hidden, even from the gods?” persisted Sontergard.     Valeria puzzled with this. “Because… because sometime men can do what gods can not,” she understood. “And all of us have been blessed with a touch of the divine. Because some battles are for men to win.”     “Just men?” Sontergard prompted.     And now Valeria understood. “Not just men. Women too. And our duty is to guard what is important, and to nurture what is good, and to… to bring life.”     “Listen, Valeria, and listen well, for you are to become an initiate of the Secret of the Hidden Chalice,” Dame Sontergard warned. “As I am, and my mother was, and hers before her past the rememberings of mortals. We are a select order, sworn never to speak of our trust to any outsider, bounden by magics which even Dormaggadon cannot break, and we have a sacred duty. The day will come when this cup will be needed to heal the world, which is why it was granted by grace higher than we can know. Many will seek the grail, but only one will achieve it. Whoever is the guardian of the Chalice at that time will become the instrument of destiny. As she is won by the grail-hero so too will the Chalice be won. And as her life's blood is spent upon the ground so shall the waters of the Chalice be released upon the land.”     “The guardian has to die?” Valeria gasped.     “Oh my child, everyone has to die,” her mother told her. “And every woman has to spend her life bit by bit, sharing some of it with those she loves and labouring for their wellbeing. With the Chalice the sacrifice is more obvious, that is all. One day this must come to pass, and it may be your daughter or your daughter' daughter or your line a thousand years from now upon whom the burden will fall to be the Quest Maiden.”     “I see,” Valeria said, her face grave for so small a girl. “If it is me, then I have to be courted by the best knight in the world, and be his bride? That doesn't sound so bad.”     “More joyous and terrible than you could imagine, my daughter,” promised Dame Sontergard, of Felwell and the Low Marshes. “But you must elect to take up the destiny. You must choose to bear the Secret and to bear the duty that goes with it. Will you accept this doom?”     Valeria looked at the shining Chalice and her own face shone back at it. “I accept it,” she vowed.          .The rapt girls looked at Valeria’s shining eyes and their own courage burned from the spark they caught in her. They had been drilled and tutored since their calling had been discerned and they had been taught all there was to know about the Secret Chalice and its priesthood of guardians. And they had learned nothing until now.     “When did you know you were going to be the Quest Maiden?” Marchelle ventured. “Did you always know?”     Valeria laughed. “I’m afraid it came as a complete surprise,” she admitted. “Prophesy can be very deceptive, you know.           The stranger came to the Dark Tower of the Dreary Dimension in the third cycle of the reign of the Dread Avatar.     “Not bad, Avatar. I like what you've done with the place,” the stranger admired.     “Silence! You will show respect before the ruler of the Dread Dimension!” screeched a guard.     “Hold it!” Avatar interrupted with a sigh. “Are we going to have this conversation again? People are allowed to speak freely in my presence, without fear of me cutting their heads off, remember?”     The Guard Captain paled and bowed. “Yes, Dread Liege. A thousand apologies.” He turned back to the visitor. “You will speak freely before the Dread Lord or you will die!” he proclaimed.     “Just can't get good help these days, huh?” the Paradox Stranger shrugged. “Anyway, I was just passing through and I thought I'd drop by and say hello.”     “I have learned a good deal about command, both the good and the bad of it, from my own former ruler the Parody Master,” the blue-skinned humanoid on the throne explained. “It will take more than three cycles to change a culture which has stratified and ossified through ten thousand years of absolute tyranny. Am I supposed to react to your casual announcement of your wandering through the supposedly-closed Dreary Dimension by the way?”     “It would have been nice,” shrugged the Stranger. “It would have made me feel affirmed. Ah well.”     “I am still learning human reactions,” Avatar explained. “From my perspective it is less than four years since I became self-aware enough to express freedom of choice and part company from my creator the Parody Master. After a sojourn with the Lair Legion of Earth I elected to take on the rulership of this dimension of exile and have directed my energies towards implementing an economic and cultural reform outlined by the pure thought being Yo. So you will see that my studies about how to act baffled are somewhat tardy.”     “Quite so,” agreed the Paradox Stranger. “Never argue with a guy with an Avasword, that's my motto. And like I said, I think the old place is looking up. Sun shining again, once-barren wastes irrigated and blooming. It's got the makings of a golden age.”     “I hope so.”     “And like all Golden Ages, it won't last forever. That's what I've come about.”     “You are an enemy?” Avatar asked, and his molecule-thick blade was suddenly in his hand.     “Only a Stranger. Listen, all I'm doing is telling you it like it is. You're going to have a good long run here, hundred of years. Hundreds. And you'll turn this place into something to be really proud of. Well done. But the price of having that self-awareness is mortality, and you won't last forever. There'll be a time when you will no longer be around to rule the Dreary Dimension.”     “This is true,” considered the synthetic warrior. “I shall ensure that a coterie of suitable administrators and rulers are trained for such a contingency.”     “And they'll do okay too, after that,” the Paradox Stranger predicted. “But one day somebody outside your little prison-plane is going to figure out that the whole reason for this place existing - that is to keep the dimensional conqueror Dread Dormaggadon in check - doesn't matter any more. And then someone's going to figure out just how much divine energy the old pantheons have locked up in this place, going to waste. And from that point its only a matter of time before someone wants to strip the Dreary Dimension for parts.”     “The people here will defend themselves. I shall prepare them…”     “It won't work. There's only one chance, and I'm here to tell you about it.” The Paradox Stranger glanced up to the Scribes gallery. “Get this down, because it's important. If you could tidy up the grammar, maybe put it all in iambic pentameter that would be even better, okay?”     “What chance do you speak of, Stranger?” Avatar asked impatiently.     “There's a Secret hidden in your realm, Al. May I call you Al? There's a Secret that was old when the Mythlands from which this place was carved were birthed. When the time of trouble comes, look for the Secret, and the maiden that guards the secret. When she comes to marry your ruler and die to save the Dreary Dimension then you'll understand what I'm talking about. Well, you won't, but the readers of the prophesy will, natch.” He glanced up at the Scribes again. “Fill in the details yourselves, guys. Rains of blood, mountains heaving, blackness across the land, Great Enemy, yadda yadda, you know the stuff. Well, I must be off.”     “Wait,” Avatar challenged. “Can you not tell us more. How do you know these things?”     “Nah, I've gotta go,” the Stranger said. “I'm just delivering a message for somebody, and in exchange he's setting me up with a hot date with the Shaper of Worlds. So I've gotta shower and put on my good trenchcoat. See you later.”     And thus was the Prophesy made.           “That’s… different to how we learned it in temple,” Adele admitted. “The version we recite is more…”         “Flowery?” Valeria suggested. “Yes, I had that too. If I’d known what really happened I’d have had a much better chance of knowing what was happening to me. But then I suppose I wouldn’t have acted the same, and neither would Rick, so the whole thing might not have happened at all.” She shrugged. “That’s prophesy for you.”         The candidates blinked in surprise. They would have expected the Most Holy Valeria to be more diligent in defence of doctrine.     “But you are the High Servant of the Secret Fire,” Adela stammered. “Everyone knows you are… sacred.”     “I don’t think the Slimy Slaver Lovetoad thought that,” smiled the golden-haired woman impishly. “Or De Brown Streak when he kidnapped Lisette and I as hostages to seek the release of his hero the Magnetic Techbird.”     The girls looked at one another in confusion. “I don’t think those are in the scriptures,” Marchelle admitted.     “I shared a few adventures with Exile and his Lair Legion,” Valeria explained. “One of the last one before my return to the Dreary Dimension involved being captured by this rather earnest young man who called himself De Brown Streak. He didn’t hurt us, but he was seeking to free his mentor from captivity. It ended sadly. But it was during that misadventure that I received the call to come home and face my doom....”           “It’s going badly, isn’t it?” Valeria of Carfax asked Laurie Leyton as they watched the Magnetic Techbird trial coverage in their hotel room. “Your mistress, Lisa, does not look happy.”     “Lisa’s my boss,” Lisette replied, “Mistress has a different connotation outside the Dreary Dimension you come from, ‘kay.”     “But the trial is not going well? I have not seen a trial before, since such things were not done in a realm where Dread Dormaggadon’s word was final.”     “Well I still can’t work out whether the guy is guilty or innocent,” Laurie admitted. “I mean, sire, he did that stuff they’re saying. It’s a question of whether he was right to do it, y;’know?”     “I understand,” replied Valeria. “I was once commanded to slay Rick and broke the law by disobeying, but I have now come to believe that I did the right thing.”     Lisette looked at the reserved slave-girl from another dimension. “Look, I know you’re magically bound to serve Derek Foreman,” she ventured, “but what do you really feel about it? Do you actually love him? I mean really heart-stopping-do-anything-world-be-damned love him?”     Valeria blushed. “Love would be inappropriate. Whatever Exile might say he is my master and I his chattel.”     “What kind of future do you see for yourself?” Laurie wondered. “I mean, do you see yourself settled with him, growing old together? Kids?”     “I don’t see any future at all,” the slave replied, looking downwards. “Certainly not a happy ending. There are some things you and Derek don’t know.” Valeria deliberately changed the subject. “What about you? How serious are you with Bryan? Do you see yourself bearing his heirs?”     “Well that’s something I’ve been wanting to talk with somebody about…” Lisette began.     The door smashed open and a blur of speed blitzed into the room.     “Sorry about this, ladies,” De Brown Streak told them as he subdued them at supersonic speeds. “But you must consider yourselves my hostages.”           “What are you doing?” Valeria asked the struggling Lisette.     “Trying to get out of these cuffs,” she replied. “It’s not as if I haven’t enough experience of being in them.”     “Where do you think we are?”     “Some kind of abandoned warehouse,” Laurie replied. “It’s pretty standard stuff.”     “You have faced this kind of danger before?”     “Sure. Lots of times. Sometimes even when it wasn’t a date.”     “I think things are about to get a little less typical,” Valeria suggested, looking over her companion’s shoulder.     “Good evening,” intoned the Hooded Hood.           “Let us go, villain,” Valeria warned the cowled crime czar. “It is only a matter of time before Rick finds us and he will make you pay for any harm that comes to me.”     “Is that any way to thank me for the trouble I am going to on your behalf, Keeper of the Secret?” he asked her. “After all, I only came to deliver you a message from home.”     Valeria looked at the proffered parchment as if it was a snake. “I don’t want it,” she told him.     “Really?” the Hood asked. “I thought you were a young lady who took her duty very seriously. Or does the fate of your people mean nothing to you now you have… other interests.”     “Damn you,” the slave-girl snarled, snatching the scroll from the cowled crime czar. “How much of this have you set up?”     “As much as I had to,” smirked the archvillain.     “I don’t understand,” Lisette frowned as Valeria took the letter off to a corner of the warehouse to read it. “What’s going on?”     “The Lady of Shalandalor had hoped for longer before her fate came upon her,” the Hood replied.     But no more time was to be granted to Valeria of Carfax.          Full night had fallen, and above the campsite the stars wheeled in crystal heavens and reflected in the tarn below. Valeria pulled her cloak around her and leaned towards the candidates.         “Time runs differently in the mortal world than it does here,” she explained. “While a few months had passed for me many generations had been and gone in my homeland. Dormaggadon was just an evil legend, a bogeyman to scare children. Exile and I were myths. Even Avatar was only a memory from the history scrolls. A new line of kings had arisen, some good, some bad, and the Chalice was once again known and sought, though few glimpsed of it.         Yet people still remembered the prophesy, that in the hour of our land’s last, darkest need, a Quest Maiden of the Chalice would be claimed by a king and offer her life’s blood to save our world. I did not know if that would be me. I hardly expected to have escaped my adventures still a maiden. But when the Hooded Hood handed me the summons written in due form from the overclerics of the Dreary Dimension I knew that my days were at an end. I had a duty to perform.     It was time to bid Rick, my master and my friend, goodbye.”          Derek Foreman woke up in the middle of the night to find a girl’s soft shape curled up against him in his bed. From the fragrant scent and flowing blonde hair he knew who it was at once. “Valeria?”     The slave-girl’s eyes opened wide in horror and she scrabbled away and fell out of the bed. “I’m sorry, master!” she gabbled quickly. “Oh I’m so sorry, Really. Please don’t be angry!”     The half-awake Exile looked at the pyjama-clad girl from the Dreary Dimension with incomprehension. “Sorry for what? Why should I be angry? I almost never get angry at the idea of beautiful girls in my bed. You were probably… cold or something.”     By the spell of enslavement that bound Valeria of Carfax to Derek Foreman she was unable to lie to him. “I just wanted to see what it would be like to lie in your arms,” she was forced to confess. “Just once. I’m sorry.”     “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with a cuddle, Val,” Exile assured her. “You’re really upset. What’s wrong?”     Now a second set of enchantments came into play and Valeria evaded the question. “I guess I was just feeling a little homesick and lonely,” she confessed. “You have been a perfect master since I was sent in tribute to you and my life here has been exciting and interesting, but sometimes…”     “We all think about home,” Derek understood. He wrapped Valeria in a blanket and sat her down on the bed. “So what were you remembering?”     Valeria looked out of the keyhole-shaped window at the starry Indian night. “I was thinking about my family,” she admitted. “They’re probably all dead now. Time runs differently in the Dread Dimension and hundreds of years have probably gone by there while I’ve just been here a few months. I was wondering what happened to them, what my brothers and sisters grew up like. I was remembering my mother singing to me.”     “Oh Val,” Derek sympathised, pulling her close and holding her tight. “I’ve got to find a way of breaking this curse on you.”     Exile didn’t see the wild expression that crossed Valeria’s face at that. “You… you don’t want to keep me, Rick?”     “Not as a slave,” the young man answered. “If you weren’t bound to me by those cruel magics then I’d probably have to wade my way through guys a lot better than me to get you to give me the time of day. But hey, I’d love to call you up sometime and say, ‘hi, wanna go dancing or to catch a movie?’, and to take you out and romance you like two people who like each other should. And then we’d take it from there.”     Valeria was very close and very feminine there in Derek’s bed, under the Indian stars. “You could have me, you know that Rick. I wouldn’t mind now. I’d do anything if you want me to. You only have to command it.”     “It was going great up to the ‘command’ bit,” Exile sighed. “But I want you to be free, not under any compulsion, when you decide you wanna be with me. I want to set you free.”     “Oh Rick,” Valeria gulped Valeria. “if only… Never mind.”     “No, what?”     Valeria shook her golden locks. “It doesn’t matter. Can I ask something of you, Rick? A favour.”     “You know you can, Val. Anything.”     Valeria blinked back tears. “Can I… can I sing to you? There are some old songs, songs my mother taught me when I was very small, songs of my people. I’m probably the last person who even remembers them now. Once I’d thought that I would teach them to my own… to other people, but that isn’t going to happen now. So can I sing them to you, Rick? So somebody remembers? Please.”     “I would be honoured,” Exile promised her. “Sing for me.”     Alone together in the night Derek and Valeria held each other and Valeria sang him the songs of her people.           Valeria was not asleep. She lay beside Derek Foreman and watched his breathing, watched his face trying to remember every detail of the man she now slept with – just slept with, no euphemism there, Rick was a perfect gentleman even though it was clear he had to use iron self-restraint and she wouldn’t have minded if that self restraint failed. She wanted to keep the picture of Rick in her mind.     Too soon the sickly green light of the dimensional portal opened, washing the room with an eerie glow.     Half a dozen robed priests stepped through the gateway, followed by a half dozen knights, and finally a warrior in bright golden armour. This tall, handsome man lifted off his helmet to show a perfect face with long curly blonde locks. “My lady,” he bowed. “I am Prince Maggador. We have journeyed far to rescue you.”     “Of course,” Valeria swallowed. “I received the summons. I am ready to go.”     “This shame will be forgotten in your new life,” Prince Maggador promised.     Valeria realised that she was in a somewhat compromising situation. “Exile has been a kind and good master,” she answered. “I remain a candidate of destiny, and a Keeper of the Hidden Chalice.”     “Really?” the Prince asked slightly sceptically, glancing at the priests. “Well, that can be determined later. If you are then we have a better hope than we thought, for we need not wait a generation for your daughter to come of age. Indeed, we may not have a generation’s time to wait.”     “Really,” Valeria replied. “I declare that I, Valeria, Lady of Shalandalor, First Daughter of Regis Trantor of Carfax and Shalandalor and Dame Sontergard of Fellwall and the Low Marshes, am initiate and Keeper of the Secret of the Hidden Chalice, and remain a maiden suitable for the sacrifice of destiny. You know I could not make such a vow if it was not true.”     “It is so,” agreed one of the clergy. “As the prophecies say. She has been gone nigh a thousand years but she is as it is told in the writings of the Wise One.”     “A thousand years,” the slave-girl gasped. “So long?”     “Then come, my lady,” Prince Maggador urged, taking Valeria by the hand and leading her from Exile’s bed towards the dimensional portal. “All of the Dreary Dimension awaits your return, and dread peril threatens our existence. It is the time of prophesy. You are needed.” He turned to the priests. “Convey my bride safely,” he commanded them as they led Valeria through the doorway to what had once been her home.     Valeria did not look back.     When only Prince Maggadon remained in the green-tinted bedroom he glared down at Exile with a cold contempt and placed a power-restrainer on Derek Foreman’s forehead. “Wake up!” he demanded, with a kick.     Derek was roused from his sleep as he tumbled out of bed. “Wha?” he mumbled.     “Get up, pissant,” Prince Maggadon commanded. “I bring vengeance for your enslavement and shaming of the Lady of Shandalor. I have long dreamed of the day when I would avenge her dishonour upon thee, recreant caitiff.”     “Val? Where is she? What have you done with her?”     Exile discovered too late that his energy-manipulating powers were suppressed. Maggadon illustrated this by pounding a mail-clad fist into Exile’s midriff, then another into his chin.     “I shall beat you to within an inch of your life,” the Prince promised. “But I am a merciful man and will allow you to escape death, albeit barely. Reap now the reward for your evil.”     Exile got in a couple of good punches but he was up against a superbly-trained combatant in golden plate armour. He didn’t stand a chance.     Prince Magaddon kept on hitting him even after Exile had lost consciousness.           “I knew nothing of that, of course. I was conveyed back to a land that had once been my home, to cities I did not recognise and a people who had grown strange and distant. They cheered me through the streets, showering me with petals and calling me their Blessed Saviour and their Queen. And I was dazed, stunned to be once more in the Dreary Dimension, dazzled by the noise and the crowds and the pageantry.         But I had been with the Lair Legion for too long to not also notice the signs of war. The great city was battered and blackened with fire in some quarters, and all too many of the people carried on them wounds or wore clothes of mourning. Something was amiss in the realm; or why else had I been summoned back to save it with my death?         They took me to the palace and replaced my simple Earth night garb with costly gowns of silk and lace, but I wouldn’t let them take away my old things for they were the last souvenir I had of my happy captivity. The wizards and priests did what they could to vitiate the bindings that cleaved me to Rick but all they could do was suspend them long enough for me to do my duties. Perhaps I did not want that last bond of slavery broken, for then Rick and I would be truly separated forever. I was cleaned and coiffured until I resembled the princess they had imagined, and then I was taken to see my husband to be.”           “Valeria,” said Prince Mageddon, smiling down on her from his high golden throne. “My beloved.”         He inspected the Quest Maiden. She was fair enough of form, with shining blonde hair and a small, sweet face. She would look well on his arm.         “Lord Mageddon,” the Quest Maiden answered with a small courtesy.         “They tell me that you are indeed a Keeper of the Secret Chalice,” the Prince acknowledged. “A virgin fit for the prophesies.”         “I told you that before,” Valeria answered. “My master was a kind man who would not take advantage of a helpless slave.”         “Perhaps he preferred the company of boys,” reasoned Mageddon. “Or maybe he was saving you for some sinister purpose of which you knew nothing.”         “Rick was a good man. A hero.”         The Prince shook his head gently. “Many captives fall thus under the spell of their captor, Valeria. Dependent upon their enslaver for everything from food to survival they build in their minds some nobler picture of their jailer than truly is. Your own state is even worse, for you have magics compelling you to feel thus about your former master. You cannot trust your feelings about this.”         “I trust Rick. I know him.”         “Sweet child,” marvelled Prince Mageddon, “You are fortunate indeed that I have rescued you in time. Now you need never fear that your enemy the tyrant Dread Derek will ever trouble you again.”           Derek Foreman struggled back to consciousness in a comfortable room in Sydney St Sylvain’s ancestral Tokyo mansion. Even through the painkillers he hurt a lot. He found he couldn’t move his arms or legs because of the casts, and the rest of him was covered in plaster and bandages as well. “What… what happened?” he asked blearily.     “We were hoping you could tell us, pal,” ManMan suggested.     Exile recognised the blurry people gathered round his bed: Visionary, Cheryl, Dancer, ManMan, Meggan Foxxx and Miss Framlicker. “I don’t… wait a minute! Valeria!” He tried to sit up and his whole body was wracked with scorching pain.     “Don’t even try to move,” Miss Framlicker warned him. “You have a hundred and ninety-one major and minor broken bones and fractures, an injured kidney, a ruptured spleen, and ninety percent flesh contusions. The medics reinflated your collapsed lung, but on the whole it might be better to rest for a day or two.”     “There was a man in armour… golden armour,” Exile remembered. “He was in my room. Valeria was gone. He was there and… he hit me.”     “He used some kind of power-suppressing device,” Dancer explained. “We’ve sent it to Enty for analysis.”     “Whoever it was beat you up very professionally,” ManMan commented.     “Oh good. I’d hate to get pounded on by an amateur,” Exile spat.     “What Joe means is that he knew just what he was doing,” Cheryl explained gently. “He knew how to hurt you without killing you. But Derek, you should know that your pelvis is shattered and your spine is damaged. Even with years of operations and therapy there’s only a thirty percent chance you’ll ever be able to walk again.”     Derek closed his eyes. “Val,” he moaned. “Where is she?”     “As far as I can tell the dimensional gateway that opened in your room came from the Dreary Dimension,” Miss Framlicker explained. “There’s a good chance she’s gone back home.”     “I… I talked to Xander, Derek,” Dancer added. “He told me a few things about Valeria. Apparently she had to go home. It was part of her destiny. She went of her own free will.”     “No. She wouldn’t…”     “Hon, I know this is real tough on you,” Meggan told the energy-manipulating adventurer. “But you’ve gotta face facts. She left you. She chose. I’m sorry.”     “I’ve got to go after her.”     “How?” Miss Framlicker challenged. “Assuming you were ambulatory, which isn’t likely this decade, I’ve scanned for the Dreary Dimension but it’s completely closed off, possibly not even there at all. ITC couldn’t get you there, Exile.”     “We are really, really sorry, Exy. Really,” Visionary summarised awkwardly. “We’ll, um, we’ll let you get some rest.”     “Do you want me to stay for a while?” Dancer asked, but Exile gestured her away with his two working fingers.     “Valeria,” Derek Forman moaned when he was alone at last. Alone. Crippled. Useless. “Somehow I’ll find you… get to you… Whatever it takes.”     “Whatever?” asked the grey-cowled figure in the corner. He came forward and his eyes glowed greenly in the darkness. “Then we have much to discuss, Derek Foreman…”           .“There are a few things you don’t know about Valeria of Carfax,” the Hooded Hood told Derek Foreman. The hero known as Exile lay strapped to his hospital bed, victim of injuries so severe that he would probably be crippled for life. “And what you don’t know can hurt you.”     “Is she in trouble?” Exile worried. “Does she need my help?”     “I don’t think it is for me to reveal secrets her family have maintained for countless generations,” the cowled crime-czar answered. “However, it may help you to decide upon my offer if you know that she has been rescued from her… exile here to become Queen of the Dreary Dimension.”     “That prince guy who beat me up like this is going to marry her? Why would she do that?”     “Destiny,” the Hooded Hood answered. “Ancient prophesy about how the Dreary Dimension would be saved in its final days by the sacrifice of the Keeper of the Secret Chalice, the beloved of the ruler of the realm.”     “Sacrifice? What do you mean, sacrifice?”     “Oh, the usual. Horrible death to save millions of lives. Do you doubt for a moment that Valeria would not surrender herself to preserve her people?”     If Exile could move he would have shuddered. “No,” he admitted. “She always knew it would come to this, didn’t she? That one day she would have to go back?”     “She had two possible futures,” the Hood explained. “If she had been despoiled and ruined by the one who enslaved her, then it would have to be her daughter who became the Queen of Destiny. If she remained a maiden then she would face the role herself.”     Exile remembered a few nights ago, and how Valeria had come to him to sing the songs of her people and ask him to remember her. “I’ve got to get to her. To save her.”     “At the cost of dooming all her race?” the Hood asked sceptically. “And they call me a villain.”     “There’s got to be another way,” Derek insisted. “I’ll find it.”     “From your life support unit?” the cowled crime-czar observed. He turned to leave and then paused. “Or are you asking me to intervene in this matter?”     Exile caught his breath. “I… I’m asking you, damn it. What do you want?”     The Hood allowed himself a little smile. Since he had brought the warrant of summoning to Valeria, had directed Prince Maggador to claim her, had even arranged for her to be sent to Exile in the first place, he felt his plans were panning out nicely. “I thought you would never ask,” he replied.           “Wait,” objected Adela. “This was in the Account of the Last Days of the Dreary Dimension, by the Archpriest of Harmony Everil Neverwend! But it didn’t go quite like this!”         “I’m sure it didn’t,” said Valeria, and she was no longer smiling. “Mageddon was right to hide from me the harm he had done Rick. If I had known I would have torn that base villain’s heart out and ground it into the earth. He sought to win the Chalice by cunning and deception, to become Lord of the Land by winning the Quest Maiden falsely!”         Erien stirred again. “But Dread Derek didn’t give up, did he?” she challenged. “Even at the cost of making a pact with that Hooded Hood creature?”         “Rick would never give up on me,” Valeria assured her. “The Hooded Hood needed to borrow Exile’s power for some convoluted plot of manipulation and conquest back on Earth, and so he did, but he was thwarted in the end by the Lair Legion and their friends. He always is. But I will always be thankful that he arranged for Rick to be healed and sent with some of his friends after me to the Dreary Dimension.”         “That’s what Everil Neverwend wrote,” Adela recalled. “Kind of.”           Thus it came to pass that villains from the mud-plane of Earth traversed the Void betwixt their damned place and the green lands of the Dreary Dimension, empowered by the destroyer of Dormaggadon, the Hooded Hood. These villains were five in number, and they were clept Visionary, Yo, Nats, Miss Framlicker, and the great tyrant Dread Derek, also known as Exile.     They arrived in secret in one of the old forgotten places to plot the downfall of our realm and the destruction of the fair Lady of Carfax and Shandalar, Valeria, destined bride of the noble Prince Magaddor; for though Magaddor was of the line of Dormaggadon himself these sinister fiends sought to stop him from saving our kingdom from certain doom.     And as they arrived thus spake the Visionary: “I think I left the gas on back home.”     Whereupon Miss Framlicker answered: “According to my readings we have managed to get into the Dreary Dimension somehow! But that’s just not possible, the barriers were up, the whole place cordoned off by the will of the ancient Pantheons.”     And said Yo: “Yo is to be thinking that maybe power of cute ancient pantheons is not to be being what it used to be, and that perhaps somebody is to be having taken power and to be using it to get us past barriers.”     Then spaketh Nats: “You never did tell us how you got better so fast and found a way to get us here, Exile, dude.”     Finally the Great Enemy of the Dreary Dimension answered: “I made a few deals, okay? I didn’t have a choice. I had to get after Val.”     “Deals? Not as in a sign-on-the-line-with-blood kind of deals? Tell me Blackkhurt didn’t send us here,” sayeth dark Visionary.     “Hey no. I’m not stupid,” replied the Destroyer of All We Hold Dear. “It was the *cough cough cough*”     “Who?” Nats asked.     “The *humphed harrumph*”     “Who?” Yo wondered.     “It doesn’t matter,” Dread Derek told them.     “It almost sounded like he said the Hooded Hood,” Visionary worried. “At least we’d have had a loophole with Blackhurt.”     “He wouldn’t be stupid enough to make a deal with the Hood,” Nats suggested. “Uh… Exy? That’s your cue to reassure us.”     Thereupon the villains looked around the ancient temple wherein they had appeared, and encountered the one who was waiting for them. “Ah, greetings minions,” Dirth Vortex bade them. “You have arrived just in time.”           “There’s another side to this story though, isn’t there?” Erien guessed. “Right?”           “Dirth Vortex,” breathed Visionary. “He’s one of those cosmic archbaddie types, right?”     “He is to be being most uncute man of to be serving dark side of the Gaaah!” Yo explained. “Is not to be nice man.”     “Oh come on,” Miss Framlicker urged, “Dirth Vortex has his… eccentricities, but I’m sure we can work something out with him. He’s always been a good customer of ITC.”     “And I bet that’s how he got here, before the dimensional barriers went up, right Miss F?” demanded Nats.     “I don’t care how he got here or what he wants,” Exile warned. “He’s got five seconds to get out of my way so I can find Valeria or he’s going to be eating dirt.”     “Er, in case you hadn’t noticed, we aren’t the expected shipment of minions,” Visionary warned the tattoo-faced villain.     The Dark-Gah! Master smiled cruelly, showing his filed teeth. “Oh, but you are. After all, you have come in company with my son.”     “Uh, dude,” Nats warned Exile, “He’s looking at you.”     “Yes, Rick,” Dirth Vortex hissed at Derek Foreman. “I am your father.”           “This is getting seriously weird,” Bill Reed complained to Miss Framlicker as the two of them stood on a rocky cliff-edge and looked down into the Valley of Despair over the nine million assembled shock troops of the villainous black-Gah! master Dirth Vortex.     “You’re telling me,” the scientist from the Interdimensional Transportation Corporation, and Bill’s occasional boss, answered. “I thought we came to save this Dreary Dimension and rescue Exile’s friend Valeria of Carfax, not to cosy up with some guest-villain and inspect his troops before they set off to conquer the place.”     “Exile just feels he had to take an interest in the old man,” Visionary guessed. “I still don’t understand how Dirth Vortex can be his father.”     “Ah,” Yo beamed. “Is to be simple. When is that mummy and daddy is to be loving each other very much…”     Miss Framlicker felt it best to interrupt. “From what I can gather, somewhere centuries ahead of our own point in the timeline there were three women of destiny, descendants somehow of one of spiffy’s line and the Celestian Madonna…”     “You see that’s the flaw in this right there,” complained Vizh. “Descendants of spiffy’s line. That would suggest that one day…”     “It’s possible he could procreate,” reasoned Nats. “Well, probably possible. There’s an outside chance.” He thought harder. “His father can do retcons. And the girl could be drugged or something.”     “These three girls, the lovely Kumari sisters, all became pregnant on the same night, and each gave birth to a child who held a third of a massive cosmic power which when combined could shake the universe and would be used in some terrible war to resolve everything.”     “Is the Resolution War,” Yo explained. “But is Yo to be thinking is better maybe have to be a Resolution Party, with games, yes? And jelly?”     “And rabbits?” suggested Nats.     “Is always to be important to have bunnies,” agreed Yo. S/he stroked Rabito and then let the purple thought bunny to the floor so it could hop lopsidedly into a wall.     Miss Framlicker persevered with her exposition. “Dirth Vortex now claims that he was the one who fathered Exile, and that it was his hated rival Starseed who fathered Exile’s cousin Goldeneyed.”     “Starseed is G-Eyed’s dad!” Visionary gasped. “Gah!”     “In the future he will be,” Miss F. corrected the possible fake man. “He hasn’t done the deed yet in your timeline.”     “Yo is thinking that cute Manuel will be to be surprised to hear this,”     “Not as surprised as cute G-Eyed,” Nats suggested, “Uh, I mean just G-Eyed. Not cute. So who was Suicide Blonde’s father?”     Miss Framlicker coloured a little. “According to Vortex, it could have been him or Starseed, or a number of other possible candidates.”     “Oh.”     “Then the Order of the Observing Eye arranged to save the children from the forces that would have seized and manipulated them by taking G-Eyed and Exile back to the twentieth century to be raised as orphans. Suicide Blonde was found by Dark Thugos and raised by him. And as the children grew, they each learned they had a different way of accessing the massive power which was their inheritance.”     “Gah power,” Visionary surmised.     “No,” Dirth Vortex hissed, arriving on the balcony unseen and scaring the hell out of everyone.     “Eeep,” eeeped Yo.     “The Gah techniques are merely ways of manifesting a universal and fundamental force which underpins all things,” whispered the villain. “There are other outlets for this same energy – the Jarvis Cosmic, the plasmoid manifestations of the protector of the Universe, the power-cosmic of the Crimson Cyclist, the Spank Ray, and many others. The hated Starseed and I merely acted in accordance with the instructions of the Gah! in facilitating the Resolution of the Parodyverse. Our work is done and our interests have moved on elsewhere.”     “Well don’t look at me,” Miss Framlicker warned, moving behind Nats.     “Dirth Vortex – dad – is here on a mission of mercy,” Exile explained. “I know it doesn’t look like it, what with the nine million shock-troops and so one, but really, he is. You see, he’s trying to save the Earth.”     “By… pointing his nine million shock troops elsewhere?” ventured Visionary. “That’s what I’d do.”     “The Hooded Hood has been using the belief-energies of the gods for some devious plan of his own to conquer the world again. Now the gods are pretty weak, fading out. Soon most of them will be gone, except the Ausgardians who were left out of the deal. So to revive them there has to be a massive amount of godly power released, so they can rebuild themselves. And if you remember, all the pantheons combined their powers to create the Dreary Dimension as a prison for the late, unlamented Dormaggadon. So all that energy can now be recycled to save the gods!”     “Won’t that, um, destroy the Dreary Dimension, dude?” Nats checked.     “Of course not. It’ll just drop it back in the Mythlands. Right, dad? Dad? Dad…?”     “Let the assault begin!” commanded Dirth Vortex, and at his work nine million shock troops moved in formation against Prince Magaddor and the Legions of Light.           The glow of the burning towns was visible even by night, a raw red smudge on the horizon that the Lady of Shalandalor could see even from her balcony. The spells of the Enemy had woken many old evils, and even the mountains grew angry and spat fire. The Brainless Ones had risen to battle both sides with equal fury. The realm wept and the lady wept with it.     “Please do not cry, your highness,” Lady Miratopia begged Valeria. “You can't get married tomorrow with tear-reddened eyes. The people would misunderstand.”     “My poor realm,” Valeria mourned. “I must save it. I will save it. It must be healed, and only I can do it.”     “You are the one who was prophesied,” Miratopia assured her. “The priests have divined and scried and have found no suitable other who is descended from any of the ancient lines of Keepers.”     Valeria shuddered. “A thousand years is a long time to be gone. So much has changed.”     “The world must seem very different to you, your highness.”     “Not the world, Miratopia. Me. I have changed. I have lived three lives, you know.”     “My lady?”     “My first was as a happy child, First Daughter of Regis Trantor of Carfax and Shalandalor and Dame Sontergard of Fellwall and the Low Marshes, initiate and Keeper of the Secret of the Hidden Chalice, a maiden suitable for the sacrifice of destiny. Then Dormaggadon's lot fell upon me and I became his slave, prepared for his pleasure and destruction. That was a life of pain and horror. And then… then I was given to the ownership of the next ruler of this land as a tribute-gift. And thus began my third life, a brief sweet taste of freedom and joy.”     The lady-in-waiting was puzzled. “I do not understand, my lady. You were Dread Derek's abject slave, and he took you to far lands to be his chattel and trophy.”     Valeria smiled sadly. “He lifted me from my knees and he wrapped me in his mantle and he spoke works of kindness and compassion. He was kind and honourable and he never harmed me nor slighted me nor took the slightest advantage of me. I will treasure every moment of it in my heart for the remaining hours of my life.”     “Hours?” Lady Miratopia said. “Is your doom to be so swift upon your marriage?”     Valeria pointed to the burning hills. “How can it be otherwise? The Enemy would carve this realm like a pheasant and feast upon the carcass. Magaddor was wrong to think this could wait for another generation to be bred, or even to think it could wait a year or a month. I do not expect to live beyond my wedding night.”     “Magaddor will weep then,” Miratopia told her. “I think he loves you.”     Valeria shook her head. “I thought so when first we met, but it is not so. He loves the idea of me, the concept of the Maiden of the Chalice. He loves the lady of prophesy. That is who he wishes to wed, bed, and sacrifice. Not Valeria, who cries into cushions at romantic bits in sit-coms and loves to remember the old songs her mother taught her and stores up her memories like they were the greatest of treasures.”     Miratopia did not understand, of course. Then again Valeria was not to know of the broken engagement where her lady's maid had been cast aside by Maggador to do his duty and wed the Lady of Shalandalor.     “I have had three lives, and two of them were good,” Valeria of Carfax said. “I am content to offer what life I have left if only this land can be whole.”           The Iron Duke of the Ninth Justice Battalion brought his Paladin Cavalry forward past the town of Fernwell Ley just as Dirth Vortex's Elite Storm Troopers broke through the defensive screen and approached it from the other side. The screaming citizens were trapped between two massive military forces each of which viewed their homes as no more than temporary cover in a battle where civilian casualties did not count.     Vortex's black war-animals were spurred forward, each controlled by a cybernetic implant in their massive deformed bodies. Suddenly the front rank of the beasts reared and panicked and tried to shy away.     And what panicked them was a young woman in a black costume, cape, mask, and hat waving her arms and going “Shoo!”     “What is happening?” hissed the dark Gah! master as his vanguard broke formation. He willed himself over to the disturbance and saw Yo standing in the way of an army. “What is this?”     “Is to be no more fighting,” the pure thought being insisted. “Is to turn round please and be going some other way. Yo is not to be letting you uncute men past into this town.”     “A thought being?” Dirth Vortex sneered. “You think you can possibly thwart the will of a master of the dark side of the Gah!?”     “Yo is thinking so, yes. And what Yo think happens. You are to being a bad man, and Yo is to be stopping you.”     “A challenge?” Dirth Vortex reached for his belt and pulled out a black cylinder. “Gahhh!” he cried, and suddenly two incandescent blades of darkness protruded from it.     “Pooh!” answered Yo, and pulled his/her rapier.     And the battle began.           “Your excellence, there is some disturbance in the enemy lines,” a scout reported to the Iron Duke. “Something is delaying them!”     “Splendid,” the commander of the Ninth Justice Battalion answered, pounding his fist into his palm. “Then we shall surge ahead and raise the town to the ground before the enemy can plunder it.”     “Actually, no,” Visionary told him, trying to be as polite as possible. “We've sort of decided that nobody should harm this town, and we'd, um, we'd like you to take your battle somewhere else please.”     “Who is this?”     “Me? I'm real, dammit. My friend is stopping the other side and it's my job to stop your side, so please will you go round the other way.”     “A challenge, eh?” the Iron Duke thundered, drawing his broadsword.     “Oh dear,” answered Visionary.                Valeria of Carfax leaned back and poked the dimming fire with a stick. It was the middle of the night now, but none of her charges seemed ready for sleep. None of them seemed frightened now, either, caught as they were in a first-hand account of events that had shaped their world.         “So we had Vortex and we had the Iron Duke and we had a few brave friends trying to stop them. And I knew nothing of this, but was preparing to lay down my life in the hopes that this would somehow miraculously heal the land. It seemed like a small thing to give to end all the horror that was starting to happen. And Mageddon was counting on my self-sacrifice to elevate him to ever greater heights of power and glory.”         “He was not worthy of the Chalice,” spat Erien.         “All men may seek,” Valeria replied, “but few find, and only those who are worthy.”         “The best knight in the world,” recited Marchelle.         “Yes,” Valeria acknowledged with a little secret smile. “That’s right.”           Daylight streamed through the tall windows of the High Cathedral. The choir sang anthems which echoed from its graceful carved ceiling, and it was hard to remember that there was a bloody war going on less than twenty miles in all directions.     Prince Maggadon wore his golden armour and a mantle of white. He was the epitome of a handsome prince.     Valeria wore white and silver and walked on rose petals as she made her way in stately procession to join the groom at the altar. Everil Neverwend, the High Priest of Harmony smiled indulgently at her as she took her place before him.     “People of the realm…” he began.     The great doors at the rear of the cathedral were blown off their hinges and landed somewhere around the nave.     The Great Enemy of the Dreary Dimension stalked through the gap. “I object!” Exile thundered.     “We haven't got to that bit yet,” Everil Neverwend said faintly.     “You!” Prince Magaddon snarled, drawing his sword.     “Hey, not just him. What about me?” complained Nats. “Why does everybody wet their pants when they see him, but me they just go, 'Oh, flying guy in a cool jacket'? I'm starting to feel this lack of respect!”     “Rick!” gasped Valeria. “How…?”     “This wedding may not proceed,” Exile shouted.     “Guards!” called Maggador.     “My department,” Nats guessed, buzzing at low level and pounding a whole troops of guards backwards into a crumpled heap. “See this is why you people ought to be taking me more seriously.”     “Rick, unless I marry the ruler of the Dread Dimension I can't be the sacrifice that saves the land,” Valeria explained. “I know it's hard, but you have to understand…”     “Silence, slave!” Exile told her. “You are compelled to obey me. Obey me now. Step aside.”     With a startled sob Valeria did as she was told; she had no choice.     “So, Enemy, you show your true colours at last,” sneered Magaddon. “But I will protect my wife with my life, and I already know you do not have what it takes to defeat me.”     “I think this time you'll find I'm conscious and have my powers,” Exile spat back. “And she's not your wife yet. You heard her. She has to marry the ruler of the Dreary Dimension. Well buddy, long before it was you, it was me. And I'm here to take it back.”     “You… dare to claim the Dark Throne?” the high priest stammered.     “Dark Throne, Dreary Dimension, Lady of Secrets, everything,” Derek Foreman replied. “I don't like the way all this is going, so I'm going to make it go my way.” He turned to the Prince and gestured. “So come on Magaddon, bring it on!”           Dirth Vortex’s night-black double edged blade moved with a screeching sound and left a dark smear in the air as it sliced through Yo’s shoulder. The pure thought being staggered back. Something cold and searing burned in the wound.     “Not as indestructible as you thought you were?” mocked the dark Gah! master. “Finding that there are limits to how good a swordsbeing you can think yourself to be?”     “Yo is being good enough to beat you, uncute bad man!” the genderless hero in the Zorro costume replied, avoiding Vortex’s next thrust with a high somersault and using the villain’s head as a stepping stone to tumble to freedom. “Is not to be that Yo thinks Yo is better fighter. Is only that Yo knows Yo must be to be stopping you!”     Yo was right. Dirth Vortex’s shock troops marched with him, a devastating wave rolling towards the capital city of the Dreary Dimension. They thought little of the helpless village in their path except as a source of raw materials and another minor target to eliminate. Yo thought differently, and his/her thoughts shaped reality.     The duel was a matter of personal honour, so Dirth Vortex has not called upon any of the myriad forces at his command to eliminate the troublesome thought being. Now the battle was dragging on, and the wounded Yo was still not defeated. “You know you cannot overcome me, little thought entity,” he sneered. “I shall shred your sense of self so that you will be no more.”     “Yo is thinking that scary bad man has to be being winning first,” the thought being answered. “And Yo is also to be thinking that is to be important to not be letting bad man to be winning.”     Then Yo threw him/herself onto the point of Dirth Vortex’s blade.     The weapon drove through Yo’s chest and jutted out through her back. With his weapon so captured, Vortex could not fend off a rapier thrust from Yo that caught him in the throat.     “Gaaaahhhh!” Dirth Vortex shouted, staggering back bleeding. Yo slumped to the floor grinning.     “Gaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!” Vortex called again, struggling to force his damaged throat into the proper resonances to keep himself alive.     “Yo is glad Yo is winning,” Yo said, clutching at his/her own bleeding chest.     “Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” Vortex screamed, releasing a blast of power that sent Yo tumbling like a straw in a hurricane.     Yo beamed with joy as the sinister energies washed over him/her, and activated the dimensional transference device Miss Framlicker has entrusted him/her with.           “Can’t we talk about this reasonably?” Visionary asked as the Iron Duke tried to slice bits off him. “I thought you were supposed to be the good guys.”     “We are the Legions of Light!” the iron Duke boomed, slashing again. “We are the last bastions of virtue in this threatened world! It is our duty to hold off the forces that would ravage our Dimension until our Prince has wed the Maiden of Destiny and can cast all evil from our lands forever.”     “Fine,” agreed Vizh, slithering to the floor before the whirling blade. “No argument from me there. But I don’t see how good guys can just massacre an innocent village and still be good guys.”     “It is a necessary sacrifice.”     “Don’t they get a vote?”     “They have the comfort of knowing that they died battling a great evil for a greater good.”     “Ah. Then in that case I have a call for you,” answered the possibly fake man. He pulled out the dimensional transference device that Miss Framlicker had cobbled together earlier. It was bleeping urgently, and for a panicked moment Visionary had to try and remember which button to push. Fortunately there only was one button, so as the Iron Duke brought down his bastard sword in a killing stroke, Vizh fumbled the device on.     “Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” came the cry from the device. The Iron Duke was pounded backwards, his troops and their ordinance scattered before the hurricane power.           “Bingo!” smiled Miss Framlicker from the rocks above. The scientist from the Interdimensional Transportation Corporation twisted a few more wires together. “Now just don’t explode yet,” she advised her ad-hoc dimensional folding device. Right now it glowed with the captured dark Gah! energies. “Not till we make this little pleat in local time/space. There! A stitch in time…”     There was a bright actinic light which dazzled both armies. When their sight cleared they found they had been transported two miles to the west, and now each side faced their enemy with no intervening village. In fact they were mixed in amongst each other. Some of them were even wearing the armour and clothing belonging to the opposition.     “That should keep them busy for a while,” muttered Miss Framlicker.           The handsome Prince had rescued the beautiful damsel from enslavement to the villain who would destroy the realm. But now, even as he stood at the high altar of the cathedral at the very centre of the Dreary Dimension, the villain had returned to challenge the hero one last time for bride, realm, and all.     Magically enchanted to obey the villain’s will, Valeria, Lady of Carfax and Shalandalor, Maiden of Destiny, Keeper of the Secret of the Hidden Chalice, backed away from Prince Magaddor as she was commanded and kept silent; but her knuckles were crammed into her mouth and her face was as pale as death.     The only sound was the hero unsheathing his Sword of Virtue and saying, “This time, Exile, you die.”     Strange energies rippled round the former tyrant of the Dreary Dimension. “This time, Magaddor, you’re not beating up a helpless sleeping opponent.”     “Wait!” cried the high priest Everil Neverwend, “Wait I beg you! Dread Derek, if you fight now you destroy our only chance to save our world. Unless the Lady weds the master of the realm and sacrifices her life we cannot stave off the forces that would tear our realm apart for its divine energies. Dirth Vortex is not the greatest of these, merely the most obvious. Would you kill us all to slake your lusts?”     “It’s not lust!” snarled Exile, circling round as he and Prince Magaddor jockeyed for position. Lots of wedding guests were clearing a wide circle with unseemly haste. “I love her. Do you love her, Magaddor? Or is she just your idea of the perfect accessory, a way to save your people and damn what a shame she has to die to do it?”     “She and I both understand duty, outworlder. This isn’t about love, it’s about what is right and necessary,” the warrior in the golden armour answered.     “Just like it was right and necessary to cripple me for life after you stole Valeria from me?” Derek Foreman demanded. The former slave-girl gasped as she realised what Magaddor had done.     “I was merciful last time,” the Prince replied. “This time your head will bleed on a pike by Traitor’s Gate.”     As the two enemies closed there was a blur of movement and Nats swooped down between them. “Hey, time out!” he called. “Exy, I know you wanna carve this guy up big time, but I can’t let you doom a whole world. We’ve got Yo, Vizh, and Miss F buying us some time. Now let’s try and get to the bottom of all of this before it goes tragically wrong.”     Valeria nodded her head urgently.     “Let her speak, dude,” Nats urged Exile.     “What is it, Val?” Derek asked, his heart on his sleeve.     “We are all pawns of prophesy here, Rick,” she answered. “And I more than any, though I chose this burden myself. I have to do what is necessary to heal my people and their land, and to make them safe forever. You know I have to.”     Exile wanted to reach out to her, to keep her safe forever. “Val…” He could stop her, command her, keep her safe… but it wouldn’t be his Valeria that remained if he did that.     “It is the final test,” opined Everil Neverwend. “The Lady’s final temptation as prophesy foretold.”     “Y’know I’m getting pretty pissed with prophesy,” Nats warned. “Right, you, high priest guy, this prophesy. What does it say, exactly?”     Everil spoke with his most melodramatic, grandiose voice, “Lo, in the years after the fall of the tyrant Dormaggadon…”     “Bzzzt! Uh-uh! Hold it bud,” Nats interrupted. “Not the epic bound version. The actual prediction. What did it really, originally say?”     “I know now,” admitted Valeria. “A Stranger came to Dread Avatar and spoke thus: ‘There's a Secret hidden in your realm, Al. May I call you Al? There's a Secret that was old when the Mythlands from which this place was carved were birthed. When the time of trouble comes, look for the Secret, and the maiden that guards the secret. When she comes to marry your ruler and die to save the Dreary Dimension then you'll understand what I'm talking about.’”     “Really?” frowned Exile. He exchanged glances with Nats. “That’s what it said?”     “That is my doom,” the slave-girl admitted.     “And this is yours!” shouted Prince Magaddor, stabbing Exile in the back.           “Yo thinks that Yo is dying,” the pure thought being in Visionary’s arms confided in his/her friend. The wound in his/her chest had more or less stopped bleeding, because there is only so much blood in the human body. Now only Yo’s thoughts were keeping that body alive.     “No,” Vizh told him/her. “No, you’re not going to die, dammit! You won’t! I won’t let you!”     “Cute-Visi,” smiled Yo. “Is to be saying goodbye to cute Cheryl for me. And cute Donar, and cute Enty, and cute Lisa, and…”     “I said no,” Visionary insisted. “You can’t die because… because… because I believe in you.” Somewhere at the back of Vizh’s mind was the story of Peter Pan and Tinkerbell. “That’s right. I believe in you. Lots of people do. We love you, and you… you show us that no matter how horrible the world gets there are some things that are always worth fighting to save. That imagination is… is wondrous. And that innocence and joy and love aren’t weaknesses, but gifts beyond price. And that everybody should have a Happy Place. Everyone.”     “Aaw, Visi,” Yo grinned. “Is to be nice that you are to be saying that. Is to be nice what you are thinking. Is nice…”     “Why don’t I have more thoughts, dammit?” Vizh raged. “Yo! Yo!”     “I believe in you too, Yo-being,” Fin Fang Foom added.     Visionary looked round is surprise to find the Makluan dragon and a man he didn’t recognise looking down at him. Finny guiltily spit out some of the Cavalry of Light’s giant war turtle armour.     “Foomy?” Yo called. “Is to be true?”     “Of course it’s true, Yo,” Finny promised. “Not all of us can be spontaneous and laughing and stuff. Not all of us can just think ourselves to be who we want to be. But we all appreciate you, Yo. We all value the things you bring into our lives. We d-don’t want you to go away. We… we love you, blast it! You are our Happy Place”     Yo sprang out of Visionary’s arms and planted a huge kiss on the surprised dragon’s lips. “Oh Foomy!” the pure thought being laughed, completely thinking away any injuries. “Yo is to be loving all of you too.”     “Well I’ll take your phone number,” Al B Harper agreed as the renewed thought being danced on the grass.     He was still smiling right up to the moment where Miss Framlicker tapped him on the shoulder. “Al B. Harper?”     “Yeah?” he asked, just before she punched him in the teeth.     “I told you that was what you’d get if I ever saw you again, you cheating, good-for-nothing, backstabbing weasel,” she told him, and marched off.     “Looks like a job for you, Yo,” Vizh suggested to the pure thought being.           “You bastard!” screamed Nats, hammering into Prince Magaddor as Exile slid from the Prince’s blade. Magaddor pounded the pommel of his weapon into the small of the flying phenomenon’s back, sending them both carooming into the cathedral’s great organ. Magaddor’s golden battle-armour shielded him better than Nats, so as the ITC courier staggered to his feet Magaddor was able to land a rain of mailed-fist blows upon him.     “Ack!” said Nats, spitting a tooth and trying to work out how many of his ribs were unbroken.     Magaddor kicked out with a spike-toed boot and shattered Bill Reed’s left kneecap.     Nats didn’t need kneecaps to fly. He rolled his shoulder and propelled Magaddor into the roof.     Magaddor pulled a golden dagger and tore Nats open from groin to throat. The two of them toppled like broken dolls into the choir stalls. Only Magaddor rose. “So die all minions of the Dark Lord!” he proclaimed, raising his sword for the killing blow.     “No!” shouted Valeria, breaking a six-foot candelabra over the Prince’s back. “Leave him alone!”     Magaddor knocked the impromptu weapon aside and stared at his bride in amazement. “What foul enchantment has turned you against me now?” he demanded.     “None whatsoever,” Valeria answered. “But I have seen what you are really like, Prince of Light. And I have to tell you, the wedding’s off.”     “Don’t be ridiculous,” Magaddor laughed. “The realm…”     “Doesn’t need saving by a man like you,” accused Valeria. “You disguise cruelty as valour, and self-serving as duty. I do not believe that marrying you will fulfil the prophesy.”     The Prince’s face suffused with rage. “As if you have a choice,” he hissed.     Exile’s energy blast pounded him right through the high altar. “She does,” Rick Foreman told him, limping forward. “Leave her alone. She’s with me.”     Valeria ran to keep Exile from falling. “It is true,” she confessed to the Dark Dimension. “I am with him. I am his.”     “His slave,” Everil Neverwend mourned.     “His friend. His companion. His…”     “His love,” Exile added. “And nobody is going to come between us.”     Prince Magaddor rose from the ruins and raised his sword. “We shall see about that,” he vowed.     A slim form broke out from the shocked congregation and flew to block Magaddor’s path. “Noo! Beloved! Do not do this! Please!” Lady Miratopia cried out.     Magaddor cut her down and strode forward.     Exile and the Prince came together for the last time. The enchanted blade of light swung at Exile’s neck. Derek had no chance to avoid it. Instead he dredged up all the energies he was holding back, all the power he had kept in check for so long, all the fury he has suppressed and all the passion he had held back; and he released them all in one searing arc.     Magaddor was vaporised along with his sword.     Valeria ran to Derek as he toppled down and breathed his last. “Rick!” she called. “Rick!”     The skies darkened. Lightning ripped the heavens apart. The land screamed as the forces which sought to sunder it made their move. The ring of volcanoes at the edge of the land burst their tops filling the realm with the stench of lava and brimstone.     “It… it is the end,” stammered Everil Neverwend.     There was a beating of mighty dragon wings as Fin Fang Foom took the top off the cathedral and landed with his teammates.     “I didn’t break the mountains,” Vizh explained quickly. “It was probably spiffy.”     “I’m reading a massive dimensional discontinuity,” Miss Framlicker noted. “They’re pulling the Dreary Dimension apart!”     “We’re too late!” gasped G-Eyed. “Rick!”     “Is not being too late,” Yo insisted, sliding down from the dragon’s back and running over to Valeria. “Is still time, yes?”     “What do you mean?” she wept.     “Is still time for Exy and Nats and land, yes?”     “How?” Valeria asked. Her wedding dress was stained crimson with Exile’s lifeblood.     “Is prophesy, yes? Is done now. Is time.”     “Of course,” Everil Neverwend realised. “It is fulfilled. You did come to marry our ruler, and to die for the Dreary Dimension. It never said you actually had to marry him, or to actually die!”     “I would gladly die to save him,” Valeria promised. “I would… Very well. Stand back everybody. This is a mystery from before time began, and I shall call upon it… now.”     The girl began glowing, and the light from within her washed away the darkness that cloyed the land. She reached out, and suddenly in her hands was a rainbow cup, the chalice or grail that her family had guarded for time out of mind. In the brightness she was transformed, radiant.     Only Yo realised that this was how Exile saw her all of the time.     “We hold the Grail, but we hold it for another,” Valeria said. “We save it for he who is worthy, him whom we love.”     Across the Dreary Dimension everything stopped. Armies no longer fought. Brainless Ones no longer destroyed. Refugees no longer fled. Even the restless mountains stopped their turmoil. Creation held its breath.              Valeria had been silent for a long time.         “And then?” prompted Adela urgently.         The Lady of Carfax snapped out of her reverie. “And then?” she answered. “The good bit.”           Valeria of Carfax kissed Exile, then gently poured the contents of the cup between his lips.     The light danced from her to him, and from him to Nats, and from Nats into the ground and along the walls until the whole ruined cathedral shone. Then the city itself was alight, and the brightness danced along roads and fields and to the far mountains themselves. Wherever the light went it searched, and some it touched burned screaming, while others were made whole. Even the gods and demons which vied for the scraps of the ravaged realm were not immune to the radiance, and many perished in the judgement of a force far higher and deeper than they. It washed over the Lair Legion, and suddenly Goldeneyed found all his hurts had gone, and he laughed to find Laurie Leyton in his arms. It filled the skies and the waters and the deep caverns and went on and on and on…     The quest maiden had fulfilled her duty at last.           The Dreary Dimension was no more. In its place the land which had once been carved from the Mythlands was returned from whence it came. The people of that land, those who had been tested by the light and found worthy, blinked up into a clear blue sky and smelled the fresh air or freedom.     “Wow,” Al. B said, since the light had healed the jaw Miss Framlicker had dislocated. “I mean… wow!”     “We’re definitely in the Mythlands,” Miss Framlicker reported, checking her sensors. “It seems the… whatever it was returned this land to its original location. Minus the Brainless Ones and a lot of other unpleasant beings.”     “You did it!” Lisette congratulated Valeria. “You saved the land.”     “He did it,” Val answered, pointing to Derek Foreman, who stood a little stunned in the centre of an admiring crowd. “I knew he could. I prayed he would. But I never expected it.”     “What now, my Lady?” Everil Neverwend asked, smoothing his scorched mitre and using extreme deference towards the Keeper of the Secret. “Will he rule the land, or will you?”     “I can’t stay here,” Exile answered. “Finny needs me to help out the other Legionnaires, and then we’ve got a few universal domination plots and stuff to take care of back home.” And a bargain with the Destroyer of Tales, he remembered grimly.     “And I must go with him,” Valeria added. “Remember that I am bound to him, his property. I cannot stay away from him for long, else I will die.”     Yo frowned. “Yo is thinking that all curses would be broken by the… ah. Yes. Is to be sad that cute Valeria must be to be being cute Exy’s housekeeper once more. Yes. Sad.” Yo didn’t look sad.     “So who will rule the realm and maintain the wellbeing of the people?” Everil Neverwend worried. “Prince Magaddor is ashes, and was in any case proved a murderer with poor lady Miratopia.”     “You do it,” Vizh suggested. “You already have a nice hat.”     “Me?”     “Treat my people kindly,” demanded Valeria of Carfax. “Do well by them. I may be back one day to check.” She cupped the high priest’s chin and turned it towards Exile. “And if I do, I’ll have him with me. Count on it.”     “I shall take great care of my charge, my Lady,” Everil promised hastily. “Great care.”              “And you did return, didn’t you?” Adela said triumphantly. “You and Lord Exile. To look after us in this strange new world we found ourselves in. To guard us against those who seek our lands and our lives. To teach us how to be a free people?” “Yes” agreed Valeria. “We came back.”           It was raining in Hell’s Bathroom and Lisette and Goldeneyed nearly missed the little alleyway that led down to Xander the Improbable’s plumbing and watch repair shop. They raced into the building, sending the poorly-attacked bell over the door pinging away where it knocked free a stick holding up a rickety shelf of crockery, which in turn crashed down onto a see-saw that span an apostle teaspoon high in the air so that it landed on the lever that activated an old-fashioned wind-up gramophone. The scratchy 1922 rendition of Here Comes the Bride alerted the people in the backroom that visitors had arrived.     “Bry? Laurie?” Rick Foreman puzzled as he peered through the streamers in the doorway to the back office. “What are you doing here?”     “You didn’t think we were just going to let you and Val slip off to the Mythlands without saying goodbye, did you, cuz?” G-Eyed chided.     “We didn’t want to make a fuss,” Valeria of Carfax explained. “You see, since they got shifted back out of the Dreary Dimension my people have needed leadership and protection, and they invited Dread Derek to help them. And… and me.”     “Yes, we heard from Nats that you’d contracted ITC to shift the whole of your island to the Mythlands,” Lisette revealed. “And that Xander was sending you off there tonight while we were all busy with the new LL and stuff. But we thought you deserved a proper send-off.”     “With presents,” grinned G-Eyed. “Six bags of Bulbasaur-Chow, a PS2 and X-Box, a bunch of DVDs in case you feel the urge to watch stuff blowing up, and a box of cookies with extra double choc chip.”     “Then I’m glad you made it,” Exile grinned back.     Valeria politely added the cookies to the seven cases of other cookies that Rick had already packed. Laurie took the moment to have a private word with the otherdimensional princess. “You know, I’m really going to miss you, kid. Who’s going to stop me becoming a bitch supreme now?”     Valeria smiled mistily at her old friend. “I guess you’ll just have to start admitting how big your heart is, Laurie. And not being afraid to let people into it.” She glanced across at where Bry and Rick were shaking hands and patting each other’s backs. “Especially him. You need to tell him about his son. He deserves to know. You can’t deceive him forever.”     “One day, maybe,” Laurie swallowed. “And what about you? How long before you give up the good gal stuff and jump Exy’s bones, huh?”     Valeria allowed herself a little secret smile. “One day, maybe,” she answered. “There’s a very traditional ending to that story where a gallant hero rescues an enslaved princess, and I’m starting to think that it might just come true.”     “The bit where Rick finds out that you don’t have to obey his commands any more, like ‘Hey, stop that, get offa me, what are you doing with my pants?’” Lisette suggested.     “The bit where we live happily ever after,” Valeria answered.     Xander the Improbable just watched with a far-off look in his eyes until it was time for them to go.           The campfire was just embers now and Valeria and the candidates were swathed in shadows. “And that is my story,” the Quest Maiden told them, “And Rick’s.”     “Then the adventure is done,” Marchelle sighed. “The prophecy done.”     “So there is no need for a new Keeper of the Chalice?” Valeria asked. “This adventure is done, my friends, but there is always another adventure. And the Grail is always there for those who really need it and most deserve it. And by amazing grace for those who deserve it not but need it anyway.”     “So your adventures with Dread Derek aren’t over?” Adela realised.     “Our adventures are hardly begun,” Valeria promised. “But the Chalice needs a new keeper, a new maiden for a new quest. Maybe it will be one amongst you.”     “Why not still you?” blurted Marchelle. “You’ve done so much, become so wise…” ;    “The Keeper is a maiden,” Erien understood. “And there are some adventures that men and women must embark upon that are beyond maidenhood, and they may be the best adventures of all.”     The candidates blushed. “Oh.”     “Oh indeed,” blushed Valeria with them. “You are perceptive beyond your years, young Erien.”     The stars twinkled above and Valeria rose to her feet. “One last secret,” she told them. “Whatever happens on the morrow, whether the Chalice chooses you as its keeper or no, you will always carry within you life and love, and a calling to nurture both for the wellbeing of all. I charge you to bestow those gifts carefully, and on someone who is worthy, that our world may be full of heroes. And that is the challenge to every living soul.”     And the slave turned priestess walked off into the night.           She reached her tent in a thoughtful mood. She looked at the old Lair Legion sweatshirt for a moment and remembered friends far off. She stared at herself in the looking glass and tried to see herself for what she was. She brushed her hair with the little silver brush Yo had given her. She touched the locket that had been a gift from Lisette.     She reached a decision.     Ben the Bulbasaur hardly stirred at his position guarding the entrance to Exile’s tent. He and his master had ridden far the day before, hunting down a pack of trolls that were troubling some of the outlying settlements. He knew Valeria well enough, and was rewarded with a quick scratch of his eye ridges.     Rick Foreman was laid on his chest on the pile of furs that was his bed. As always when he slept the wary belligerence of the day was gone from his face, leaving a touching innocence that only Valeria ever saw. And as often when Valeria crept to sleep beside him he didn’t wake.     But this time the girl woke him. “Rick.”     “Wha? Oh, Val. Hey.”     “Rick, do you love me?”     Exile blinked to consciousness. “Yes. You know I do.”     “Do you want me?”     Rick sat up. “What do you mean? What is this, Val?”     “Tell me to go away. Order me to go away, master.” ;    “What? Why?”     “Do it, Rick!”     “Okay then. Go away, Val. Even if I don’t understand why.”     Val gave him a triumphant grin. “No,” she told him. “Never.”     At last Exile began to understand. “Never?” he asked cautiously. “Not even if I command it?”     “I don’t have to obey your commands, Derek Foreman. I’m not your slave, you know.”     “You’re not? Then…”     “Now order me to stay with you,” Valeria told him urgently. “Order me to stay with you forever and be your love and share your life now until our lives endings, to be your lover and your wife and the mother of your children and the lady of your heart till the stars grow old and die.”     Exile reached out for her and pulled her to him. “Will you?” he asked. “I don’t order it Val, but I beg it. Will you do all that?”     “Yes. In this I will obey you, Rick, my lord, my love.”         “And not because of any spell?”     “Not because of any power less than love, which is magic from before the dawn of time and can never be broken.”     Then Exile reached for the Lady of Carfax and drew her to him and kissed her with all the urgency of long waiting. And Valeria forgot her long-rehearsed words and her long-practised techniques and melted into his arms as if she had been made to be there.     And somewhere behind the Mountains of yearning the sun began to climb to a new dawn. Hearts and Footnotes: I’ve tried to make this story as self-contained and self-explanatory as possible, but long-time readers will realise there’s an awful lot of Exy-Val history to fit in. I apologise if vital information has been omitted because it was self-evident to me but not to the audience. Those with really good memories will recall that some, but not all, of the flashbacks in grey text are lifted wholly or in part from previous stories. I didn’t really want to do the literary equivalent of a “clips show”, but I did want all of the important elements of this story in one narrative. So I borrowed.      For those who are really interested, the Dreary Dimension was first described in the long-running story arc that began in Untold Tales #18. Dormaggadon make the career mistake of slaying the Hooded Hood’s lover, Rigatonia of the Amazons. The Hood of course instituted a long-term revenge plot that involved him shaking all reality. In some ways Exile and Valeria’s story is one side-effect of those events.      As our flashbacks open, Exile is already beginning to suffer the effects of being bonded with the Dreary Dimension. He was present at Dormaggadon’s destruction, and rather than allow the dimension’s power to be grabbed by somebody unscrupulous, Xander instead bound it to Rick Foreman (without asking). The first sign of this was that electronic equipment started ignoring Exile as he was gradually phased out of the prime reality into the Dreary Dimension. That’s the problem Exy and G-Eyed are discussing when they first meet Valeria.      Xander was playing a longer game, of course. To counter the Hooded Hood’s attempts to control the cosmic office holders of the Parodyverse and rewrite all reality, the sorcerer supreme needed a place far detached from that reality as a rallying point for the heroes who could oppose the Hood. This is only obliquely relevant to this story, but may help to explain what G-Eyed is talking about regarding his mission for Xander.      The history of the Dreary Dimension goes something like this: Dread Dormaggadon threatens the stability of the Parodyverse. The gods get together and pool their power to carve a portion of the Mythlands away and trap him forever. The last remaining conduit is guarded forever by the Amazons – until Falcon accidentally breaks the magics and Dormaggadon gets free. After Dormaggadon is destroyed, the Dreary Dimension seeks a new owner and is naturally attracted to energy-manipulating Exile. When it is finally weaned off Exile it adopts Avatar, a probationary Legionnaire, an android created to serve the monstrous Parody Master but having achieved free will. Following designs made by Yo and Valeria, Avatar reigns long and well and restructures the Dreary Dimension. It is during his time that the meddling Paradox Stranger arrives and makes his prophesies about the Quest Maiden. After Avatar’s eventual passing, a line of kings emerges from Dormaggadon’s bastards, until at last King Maggadon rules at the time when Dirth Vortex seeks to steal the energies the gods invested in creating the Dreary Dimension. When the Quest is fulfilled, the Grail heals the realm and restores it to the Mythlands as it once was. Exile and Valeria have been caring for the people and re-establishing them safely in their old/new home since then.      Our story reveals something more of the Maidens of the Grail, whom we have only previously glimpsed. Readers may choose their own allegory for the Magic Cup. I suspect that’s every person’s right. However, there’s a very old storyform about the maiden guarding the chalice of life and the hero becoming the lord of the land by winning her and it after recognising her despite her seemingly humble state. Cinderella may originally have been one such example of this storyform.      The Yurt is a combination of a Russian peasant hut and a nuclear reactor plant worker. The stupider he gets the stronger he gets. In a previous battle against Sir Mumphrey Wilton the Yurt had been cast into the Interdimensional void. This story shows where he was eventually cast up. The Manga Shoggoth is a multi-dimensional elder beast, who at the time of his appearance in this story was working off his debt for having a VCR fixed by Xander.      Laurie Leyton, Lisette, debuted in Untold Tales #5, but didn’t become a significant cast member until the original Untold Tales Valentine Special, #40. Her first meeting with Valeria is drawn from there. That scene also features the start of the convoluted and painful Goldeneyed – Lisette relationship, which is still spawning subplots even now.      Valeria was briefly the property of the Slimy Slaver Lovetoad around the time of Untold Tales #54, and was kidnapped by De Brown Streak during the Trial of the Magnetic Techbird in Untold Tales #68. Prince Magaddon’s “rescue” of Val and crippling of Exile took place in Untold Tales #78, and the Quest Maiden plot was resolved between then and it’s culmination in #85.      Sydney St Sylvain, the Fashion Faerie, is a companion of CrazySugarFreakBoy!’s. Meggan Foxxx is CSFB!’s mother. The other characters present at Exile’s bedside in Tokyo are all listed in the Who's Who in the Parodyverse, but special mention may be given here to Visionary, the hapless, good-hearted possibly-fake man, to Nats (Bill Reed), the flying delivery boy, and to Miss Framlicker, his employer at ITC, the Interdimensional transportation Company.      Dirth Vortex is a sinister master of the Dark Side of the Gah!, a vocal force that draws upon power underpinning the Parodyverse. This story recaps the revelation that he is actually Exile’s unknown father. A mind controller, a skilled warrior, an ambitious cult leader, and a master planner, Dirth Vortex was a significant enemy at the time of this story, and this was one of his most deadly plots.      Fin Fang Foom, draconic leader of the Lair Legion, appears late in this story, and is actually in the process of reassembling his scattered team ready for Untold Tales #86. Scientist Al B. Harper was Miss Framlicker’s former fiancée, which is why she slugged him. That plot was almost as convoluted as the G-Eyed-Lisette thing, so we won’t try to recap it here.      Ben the Bulbasaur is indeed a Pokemon, the last survivor of a brief craze amongst posters to have their characters adopt the strange little marketing ploys.      As usual, some of the background and all the references stories are available at The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom, Who's Who in the Parodyverse, and Where's Where in the Parodyverse. Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 1999-2004 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 1999-2004 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.