Sister Agatha had not been sleeping well as of late. Since the convent that she founded, Daughters of Immanuel, had taken control over the previous holdings of the Sisterhood of Delilah throughout the Archduchy of Renatus, Sister Agatha had been kept extraordinarily busy. Groups of nuns belonging to the Daughters of Immanuel had not only laid claim to old properties but had opened up new ones. Everything from chapels to orphanages and hospitals, and even an asylum for the insane in the Duchy of Condamner. Every year the faithful would gather and give thanks to the hardworking nuns, and every year more women of every age and from every social class would show up to commit themselves to the sacred causes that the Daughters of Immanuel championed. Sister Agatha had a lot to do and precious little time to do it all in.

This is because of her community of like-minded devotees, naturally, but there was another task that kept the aging Mother Superior out of the limelight and away from prying eyes. With the advancement of Renatus as a truly powerful nation its role in the Council of Schönbrunn was adjusted over the years to reflect the shifting balance of power between the member states. When one of the open seats on the Council became available, Archduke Xan asked Sister Agatha to accept the role. Being utterly fearless the humble nun accepted and began to work with the other councilors to try and unravel the mysteries of the Fourth Imperium. This was by far the biggest threat that the Council had on its plate and to say it devoured Sister Agatha’s time and attention was a comically absurd understatement. There was just so much to decipher and sort out about how Callidus Magna went about his mad tyrannical way.

Fortunately for the Council of Schönbrunn, Sister Agatha had a rare and unique gift among the nuns of her order. This was the gift of communing with the deceased, those that had passed on beyond this mortal existence and gone to wherever it was that they were judged worthy of going by powers omniscient and omnipotent. This is of course an over simplification. Sister Agatha did not merely chit chat with the dead as would a traveling carnival spiritualist. Rather she would truly connect to the spirits of those that had gone beyond and away, and in many cases able to pull back the curtain of the prime material plane to reveal glimpses into the realms beyond, or even to allow the living to step across the threshold and venture to places they were not necessarily meant to tread. It was via Sister Agatha’s remarkable abilities that the Council of Schönbrunn became fully aware that there was another reality, a sort of pocket dimension, or mini-plane of existence, that had settled like a parasite over the continent of Partum. Adventurers from Renatus could utilize Sister Agatha as a kind of conduit, allowing her to open a portal through which they could then explore this troubling, nightmarish version of their own reality. Even the Archduke himself and his closest companions had made these trips. Sister Agatha and her own adventuring group had done a great deal of exploring and through these treks had made some horrifying discoveries about this demi-plane and what it was capable of.

One of their first forays into what became to be known as the “Warped Realm” revealed that this was not a natural part of the multiverse as it was understood by sages and scholars. While there had been documented anomalies over the last few hundred years regarding sightings of haunted ships and ghostly armies, this was something altogether new and far more commonly occurring. As if the spirits of the dead were being sent back to the Prime Material Plane to cause as much misery as they could. But the Warped Realm wasn’t fully “the great beyond” that theologians and philosophers had debated for millennia. This was something more sinister and disturbing. The souls of those deemed “wicked” or “evil” were being caught up like butterflies in a net, but instead of being displayed in a glass cabinet they were being cast into the Warped Realm to continue their “lives” as if they had not died in the first place. What they were individually aware of and capable of remembering seemed nebulous, and in fact not all that were trapped in the Warped Realm could be considered deserving of this torment. Sister Agatha and her friends were able to find many innocent spirits that had somehow been kept in this nether existence. Finding them and freeing them were two very different things, however.

This led to the second great discovery about the Warped Realm. Rather than being a naturally occurring place such as academes would postulate, or a place of divine residence in line with religious belief, the Warped Realm seemed more to be a waking nightmare created and governed by a malign intelligence. It had clear borders, as if whomever had created this reality had no real knowledge of what existed over the far horizon and was thus incapable of recreating it in the Warped Realm. There were areas within the Warped Realm that were desolate and utterly deserted, perhaps indicating that the dimension’s creator hadn’t gotten around to building that portion of it yet. It was, to put it mildly, deeply unsettling to experience.

The third discovery was actually among the first to be noted among the Council of Schönbrunn, but it wasn’t fully developed as a theory until much later on. This was the ability of the Warped Realm to serve as a sort of bypass for entities of evil intent. Because most of the features of the Prime Material Plane were recreated in the Warped Realm, it was possible for dark and foul powers to enter the Warped Realm at some point in the known world, say a large city on the northern coast, and then travel unimpeded across the Warped Realm and reemerge via a portal into the known world at a completely different location. Entire armies were able to travel in this way, and every time these forces were those of the Fourth Imperium. Massive legions of troops would simply march into a vast portal in the heart of Forkanza and after marching in real time across identical distances exit through another portal anyplace that the Warped Realm itself encompassed. This made combatting the Fourth Imperium extremely difficult to say the least. The only saving grace was that there were apparently extremely few entities that had the power to open these portals in the first place.

But what kept Sister Agatha awake at night was knowing she could herself open such a portal. And she wasn’t the only one in Renatus that could do it, either. Fighting the enemy on what was well and true their “home turf” did not seem like an intelligent option. But perhaps there was a weakness in the Warped Realm. Maybe the power that created it had made its home there. Just pondering the possibility that such an evil could be tackled head on and destroyed, wiping out the Warped Realm once and for all… this was a wonderful notion. And that made sleeping difficult.