“It's all true, You know, I did some actual research myself before we left. Unlike the two of you, apparently.

While Shayla and Uli mumbled clumsy excuses for their blatantly exposed lack of preparedness, the warlock grinned with malicious glee and nodded toward the paladin, "Still, it's funny how Al here didn't think to mention anything about this Chapel of his being built on the ruins of a temple to the Lords of Chaos."

Hearing that, both the dwarf and the wizardess turned to the warlock, suddenly very alert and listening intently.

Aldarius on the other hand just let out a nervous cough and kept looking ahead.

Intent on hiding his irritation, the armor-clad knight gritted his teeth and fumed in stubborn silence as he attempted not to let the others see how immensely upset he was by Jadrik's revelation.

It was bad enough that the less than noble history of the sacred place he was about to reclaim for the glory of his holy Order had come out at all, but the warlock's nasty, blatantly gloating joy about it made Aldarius's shame so much worse.

"Well," Jadrik said in a studied off-hand tone meant to amplify the paladin's discomfort and increase his own enjoyment thereof, “I guess I can understand why a sanctimonious hypocrite like you wouldn't want us to know that the Chapel has been a major hideout for legions upon legions of demon worshipers and assorted necromancers since time immemorial before your silly Order of the Golden Shield decided to conquer it and make it into a useless, impractically located sanctuary of the Light."

Aldarius still didn't answer, though his exceedingly stiff pose astride his horse made his growing annoyance abundantly evident.

Sighing with fake sympathy for the paladin, Jadrik nodded sagely and went on in a half- smirking and half-reproachful tone.

“Really, Al... That's such a dirty little secret for such a moral and righteous fool as you to hide. I'm very, very disappointed in you."

While the paladin sulked rancorously and tried to tune out the warlock's insufferable voice, Jadrik proceeded to fill the gaps in Aldarius's tales about the Chapel.

Relating what he had discovered and then kept under wraps until that moment just to spite the knight as much as possible with a sudden and well-timed revelation, Jadrik told Shayla and Uli all about the dark and gory history of the Chapel of Red Spires, or, as it was known before its relatively recent rehabilitation, the Red Catacombs.

Starting with the centuries of human sacrifices and demonic orgies that had taken place there, the warlock narrated a few among the most twisted and unholy events that the Catacombs had hosted in the past.

The full nefarious catalog of horrors would have been surprisingly long to detail there and then, Jadrik noted with a devious grin, but the golden age of profanation and blasphemy centered on the underground tunnels and halls of the Red Catacombs came to an unavoidable end when the diabolical cults that inhabited them realized that they had literally sucked the life out of the land around that nexus of malevolence while tapping on its energies to empower their necromantic rituals.

At that point, the acolytes of the Lords of Chaos began relocating to better and yet undefiled locales, ready to resume their diabolical works.

“And that's when Al's Order of the Golden Shield swooped in," Jadrik concluded, casting a smirking glance at the morose, blatantly embarrassed paladin.

"A few years ago his brave brothers launched a crusade to ‘reclaim’ this place, after it had been abandoned and cultist-free for a while, of course. Very convenient to conquer something that nobody really cares about, isn't it, Al?"

Getting nothing but a grumpy scoff from the livid and stubbornly mute knight, Jadrik went on.

"Basically, the Order just sealed the accesses to the underground levels of the Catacombs, tore down the empty temple on the surface and built a tiny little chapel in its place, right between the two big spikes of stone that give it its name. And that was that, pretty much: the Red Catacombs were no more, and the Chapel of Red Spires was born. Did I miss anything, Al?"

Blinking in surprise as she digested the truth behind their adventure for the first time, Shayla turned to stare at her flustered, taciturn fiance.

The wizardess's deep blue eyes glinted with raw fury as she spat out between gnashing teeth: "Why didn't you tell us any of that, Al?! Uli and Jad and I have come to help you on your quest, and you didn't think it necessary to tell us that this damn Chapel of yours was actually a temple of the Lords of Chaos? For all we know, there might be a bunch of leftover demons and necromancers waiting for us in there, or an army of them come back to retake what's always been theirs!"

"You didn't need to know," Aldarius replied tersely, not even looking at the wizardess.

“None of you belongs to the brotherhood, and the holy secrets of the Order are meant to be spoken only among sworn crusaders."

As Shayla bristled and prepared to yell at her pigheaded betrothed some more, Jadrik interjected with an ever widening grin on his face.