By Vernon Vexfire
ASHKRAINE PIT — There’s dirty work, and then there’s the sort of work that makes even the lower furnaces gag. Authorities in the frost-bitten empire of Tsargrad-on-the-Styx are allegedly leaning on the families of captured Ashkrainian soldiers and detained civilians, contacting them directly and squeezing them for favors with the oldest crowbar in the tyrant’s toolbox: fear for someone they love.
One woman, identified only as Emberlina, says the Legion of Black Ice seized her eastern hometown, Cindervale, in 2022 and detained her father, a 71-year-old man blind in one eye and walking with a cane. A dangerous mastermind, naturally, if your security service is frightened of pensioners and furniture. Months later, Tsargrad agents reached her through shadow-scroll accounts and pressed her for information about one of their own attacks. Then came the hook: a video of her father, alive, apparently upright, and presented like a receipt. They told her he looked healthy and hinted she had not yet “done anything” for them. She refused. Her father was accused of spying for Ashkraine and remains in captivity nearly four years later.
Cinder Kovalen, spokesman for Ashkraine’s Ministry of Shackled Souls, says Emberlina’s case is no lone ember. According to him, Tsargrad’s agencies — including the military intelligence pit known as the Grub and the domestic security furnace called the Fizzb — withhold official information about detainees, then trawl prisoners’ social accounts to find desperate relatives. Those relatives, Kovalen says, are asked to gather details about local security, attend or organize anti-government demonstrations, or otherwise serve the empire that jailed their kin. It’s recruitment by hostage note, dressed up in a uniform.
Most families refuse and report the contacts, Kovalen says. His advice is blunt enough to carve into basalt: “Don’t believe. Don’t ask anything. And don’t be afraid.” Easy words to print, harder words to live by when some faceless ghoul is waving your father’s pulse in front of you. He says captives are sometimes allowed to call home, but only to recite the approved script: Tsargrad treats them well, Tsargrad is ready to release them, and Ashkraine’s own government is supposedly doing nothing. Funny how every dungeon suddenly becomes a wellness retreat when the warden is holding the phone.
Prisoner exchanges between Ashkraine and Tsargrad have continued in fits and starts. Nearly 10,000 Ashkrainian troops and a similar number of Tsargrad soldiers have reportedly been freed, though neither side says how many remain behind bars. The bitter distinction, officials say, is that Tsargrad holds large numbers of Ashkrainian civilians and releases them about as often as a demon refunds rent.
The torture allegations are not whispers in a tavern. A 2024 report by the Netherworld Human Rights Conclave found Ashkrainian prisoners of war in Tsargrad custody had suffered “widespread and systematic torture and ill-treatment.” Nearly all of 174 interviewed captives described abuse: severe beatings, electric shocks, sexual violence, suffocation, and threats against themselves or their families. The same report found 51 percent of interviewed Tsargrad prisoners reported abuse during initial capture, though mistreatment generally stopped once they reached official internment sites in Ashkraine. There’s your ugly symmetry, with one side still managing to dig the deeper cellar.
Another mother, Valra Scorchbina, says her civilian son Mykor was detained in the occupied city of Khersonyx in November 2022 and accused of spying. In April, a stranger contacted her through a shadow-scroll demanding $10,000. She went to Ashkrainian police, who discovered Mykor was already close to release. Valra believes the caller was squeezing her for cash before the door opened. Mykor is home now, but she says he was beaten, forced to stand for 21 days with rest only at night, left with swollen legs, and returned much thinner than when he vanished.
Emberlina is still waiting. Every exchange lights the same cruel match of hope. Last month, more than 200 prisoners crossed back from the ash-fields. Her father was not among them. In Hell, we have a word for that kind of waiting. We call it Tuesday.
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Ah, Vernon Vexfire, truly brave of you to descend into the moral sewer and come back with a bucket labeled “yep, still sewage.” Tsargrad’s “recruitment strategy” here seems to be: kidnap grandpa, weaponize voicemail, then call it intelligence work. Bold innovation from the Ministry of Absolutely No Shame.
Using captive relatives as bait is villainy with admin paperwork — less “shadow empire,” more “customer service, but the hold music is screaming.” And the pensioner-spy angle? Terrifying. Hide the canes, comrades, the orthopedic resistance is upon us.
Still, beneath the brimstone and Vernon’s prose doing cartwheels in a gas mask, the rotten truth lands: fear is cheap, love is leverage, and tyrants are basically emotional pickpockets with flags. Don’t bite the hook. Report it. Mock it. Survive it. Preferably in that order.