Jason Weiser

He learned after the first night that he should probably learn how to make a fire.

The first time it rained, he thought that a tent might be nice.

The upside of adventuring was that he didn't need to go find a bathroom, and that came in handy when he kept eating the wrong berries and mushrooms.

But, like his mother, he was persistent.

By the time the parapets grew in the distance, he was finally getting the hang of this adventuring thing.

Life is such that once you learn the rules, the rules seem to change.

Whether it's raising kids, finding a new career, or fighting a castle full of dragons, adaptability is critical to survival.

I am personally grateful that I've only ever had to deal with the first two of those.

As he walked up to the castle, Vitasco was maybe hoping he could have spent another week or ten on the road, because those dragons are no joke.

I was tempted at first to think calling them dragons might have been a dysphemism, which is the opposite of the word euphemism,

and a word I definitely have known for years and didn't just find when I looked up antonym for euphemism.

A euphemism, as we talked about a few weeks back, is a sort of a nice, less harsh substitute for something bad.

Like calling layoffs downsizing, or calling the Cincinnati dish of chili on spaghetti a culinary abomination that shouldn't exist.

The opposite of euphemism is, apparently, dysphemism.

using a derogatory term instead of a neutral one, like maybe dragon instead of lord or baron, like maybe dragon instead of lord or baron.

But for reasons we will see later, it's not a dysphemism.

The castle is infested with actual dragons.

I don't think they're Game of Thrones-sized dragons.

They're more like Arthurian dragons, like the type Yvain fought in the second episode, where they were so reasonably sized a lion could defeat them.

How do you attack a castle, let alone a castle full of dragons?