As night settles over the besieged Cavigor, Vathek and Drake lick their wounds and learn some worrying things from several prisoners.
- Armor-Piercing Question: Arthur asks Vathek and Drake something that catches them off guard: why exactly he and his friends are imprisoned miles away from home in Cavigor.
- At Least I Admit It: Arthur and Manny voice their opinion that when compared to the rebels who imprisoned them and Torgo, Phobos is at the very least honest about his evilness instead of pretending to be a flawless hero while acting quite the opposite.
- Big "NO!": Vathek lets out one as he refuses to share the consensus that the prisoners must be killed before Frost has a chance to free them.
- Bring News Back: Arthur, Manny and Torgo state that they tried to deliver to the capital a letter from Riverdeen's mayor so that Elyon would do something about the corrupt rebels who're making everyone's lives difficult. Said rebels caught them and sent them to Cavigor when they refused to give them names of more suspected Phobos loyalists. Manny is convinced they're not the first nor the last ones to end up in Cavigor for the same reason.
- Character Development: The change Vathek's Heel Realization has made in him shows when he's speaking with the three prisoners; while furious for their disrespect towards Elyon and the Rebellion, he can't bring himself to violently lash out as he would have before as a part of himself wants to find out if there's any truth to their words before dismissing them as lies like he did with Jade/Kage in the original story.
- Cliffhanger: Vathek decides that whatever happens at Cavigor, he must get out alive and inform Elyon about what's happening in the Swamplands.
- Due to the Dead: Frost's soldiers honor their casualties with funerary pyres, but the rebel corpses they rob of valuable items and throw into Cavigor's burning moat to demoralize the defenders.
- Equal-Opportunity Evil: Arthur, Manny and Torgo prefer Phobos over Elyon and the Rebellion because while the prince may have been a tyrant, his actions have done more to bring Meridian's various races together than those of the past rulers, while the rebels have been in a hurry to use their ignorant queen to find pretext to eliminate/detain the races they consider too different from them.
- Eyes Never Lie: While Drake's displeased by Arthur's words, the latter's eyes tell him the fisherman is not lying.
- Good Is Old-Fashioned: The prisoners from the Swamplands criticize the rebels for their self-professed heroism of fighting to bring down a tyrant because said tyrant's efforts at least brought peace between Meridian's various races, and since Phobos' downfall, the "heroes" have been clinging to "good old ways" that include Fantastic Racism and having a female ruler, even one as ill-equipped for that responsibility as Elyon has admitted herself to be. The prisoners even suggest the rebels have exaggerated Phobos' evilness to discredit him as much as possible, including accusing him of his parents' deaths without irrefutable evidence, simply because they didn't want a man on the throne.
- Internal Reveal: Vathek and Drake learn about their fellow rebels' harassment of the Swamplands' inhabitants, only with more detail than what was told in the previous chapters.
- Interspecies Friendship: Arthur and Manny, two human fishermen from the Swamplands, are close friends with an ogre Lurden named Torgo.
- Loud Gulp: When Vathek threatens his dissident soldiers with what he'll do to them if they dare to act no better than Phobos' servants, the lead soldier gives a slight gulp as he confirms Vathek's made himself clear.
- Noisy Shut-Up: As many of his soldiers voice their wish to execute the prisoners, Vathek makes them shut up by roaring "THAT IS ENOUGH!".
- Not What I Signed on For: When Vathek's berating his comrades for considering to summarily kill the defenseless prisoners, he tells them that he fought Phobos to free Meridian from his tyranny, not to see the Rebellion simply replace him as new tyrants.
- Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: When Arthur tells Vathek and Drake that they are worse than Phobos, Vathek demands him to "say..that..again". Arthur complies and asks if he spoke slow enough this time.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Arthur and Manny, fishermen from the Swamplands who've been incarcerated in Cavigor along with their Lurden friend Torgo by zealotic rebels, give Vathek and Drake a piece of their mind that the Rebellion as a whole is worse than Phobos because for all of his faults, Phobos hasn't really tried to excuse his evil deeds with noble intentions or persecuted anyone because of their species, while the rebels are clinging to the old traditions and preaching loyalty to the naïve new Queen to cover their own bigotry and desire for revenge.
- Spiteful Spit: Vathek spits on the ground when he guesses that Arthur and his friends are incarcerated for acting like any of Phobos' servants.
- Taking You with Me: The rebels are already considering killing the prisoners to ensure that even if they die, Frost won't gain any possible recruits for Phobos.
- That's an Order!: Vathek says this when he forbids his soldiers from killing the prisoners.
- Villain with Good Publicity: It turns out that at least in the Swamplands city of Riverdeen, Phobos is thought more highly of than in the rest of Meridian due to bringing the local races together and having the decency not to pretend being a hero, especially when compared to the Knight Templarish way the rebels have been acting there to detain any "monstrous" races and Phobos sympathizers.
- What the Hell, Hero?: When many rebel soldiers agree with the Warden that it would be best to execute the prisoners to deny Frost the victory of recruiting them for Phobos, Vathek rips into them for being willing to stoop so low as to slaughter defenseless prisoners who might not all be actually guilty of any real crimes.
