It should come as no surprise to you, my constant companions, that it is a rare thing indeed for Ulesorin the Green to be outwitted. You who have been on the receiving end of my wisdom throughout the long and arduous years of my court mandated community service know the great intellect that simmers behind these watery eyes and lustrous whiskers. So when I tell you that I have been deceived, I know that you shall not take it lightly.

As it turns out, the Great Deceiver, also known as the Great Evil of Our Time, or less frequently as my ex-wife, had no intention of rectifying the great crevasse that her wickedness placed within our relationship. To my horror, I discovered that her recent overtures of romance were a ploy to encourage me to fertilise her eggs and spawn a new generation of wizard-lizardmen soldiers for her army of darkness rather than an expression of her deep-seated adoration for me.

Her attempts to set the existing forces of said army of darkness upon me were not, as I assumed, the result of my post-coital clinginess, but rather part of a carefully orchestrated plan to destroy me once and for all. 

Well I tell you this my friends: I may have spent the last month living like a rat in the catacombs beneath her dark lair, subsisting on a diet of luminous mosses and bouts of semi-cannibalistic consumption of as yet unhatched dragon-wizard eggs but that is not because I could not defeat the dragon in a fair fight. 

No. 

You know well the puissance and intelligence of Ulesorin. I am simply lying in wait. Choosing my moment to turn the tide.

Regardless, you did not come here to listen to my complaints. You came here for me to listen to yours. So on with it then!

***

Dear Wizard,

Our plane has recently undergone a terrible pandemic. In the interest of survival, my family and I have barricaded ourselves in our home for months now. As one might expect, this has strained our relationship somewhat. What are your tips for surviving a planar pandemic and most of all, your loved ones?

Sincerely,

Stay At Homebody

***

Dear Homebody, 

I am all too familiar with familial strains in close quarters. Indeed this dungeon dwelling experience, avoiding patrols of my own offspring in the hopes that they will not deposit me whole into the ravenous maw of their mother is perhaps the perfect analogy for your own situation, and so I suggest that you do something similar.

I do not mean that you should murder your children with a sharp rock when one of them strays from the rest of the pack and seriously consider taking the next logical step in your filicidal cannibalism.

Rather I suggest figuratively carving out some dungeon time for both yourself and the others.

Designate a certain time and space that shall belong to you and you alone. Do not feel obliged to fill that time when you are alone with anything beyond indulgence. Extend the same courtesy to the other members of your family, forcibly removing yourself and others from the area during said “alone time.” 

Those hours spent in the company of your family in an even more confined space without any distraction shall guaranteeably drive you to the very brink of madness, but you will be allowing some semblance of sanity to return to whichever of your kinfolk you have presented with this opportunity for peace.

This may seem like cruelty, but the time you have spent away from your shrieking spawn or devious fire-breathing murder-monster of a partner will actually allow you the breathing room required for you to pursue a mutually beneficial relationship once more when you come back together.

Unless they have been plotting your destruction this entire time. If that is the case, it seems likely that your relationship was never more than a mummer’s farce concocted solely to fulfil the needs of a dragon. 

In which case I would suggest biding your time, searching through the forgotten caverns in the dark of the earth where all of your belongings have been dumped – untouched – since the divorce, until such time as you recover both your greatest grimoires and the creased remains of your finest robes. But also the Grand Staff of Cataclysmic Firestorms that has but a single charge left.

Then, with the staff in hand, defy the logic of your senses to crawl through the crevasse to the source of the foulest smell that you have ever encountered and crouch there beneath the hole in the raw stone ceiling, breathing in corruption within the dunny pit of the dragon’s lair, waiting for her exposed rear to blot out the tiny circle of torchlight above you.

Vengeance shall be ours, Homebody. Vengeance shall be ours.

***

Having relationship issues? Need career advice? You name it, our ‘Agony Ant’ can help!* Email your problems to thefantasyhive@gmail.com with the subject ‘Ask the Wizard’, or leave a comment below.

*Disclaimer: All answers are provided for entertainment purposes only. It may not be in your best interests to follow advice provided by a 1794-year-old man who lives alone in a tower with nothing but the distant memories of past glories for company.