Simon didn’t return to his house to take anything with him. Nothing he’d left behind was worth the ghosts he would see there. He had his sword, and that would be enough to get him where he o go. There was nowhere in any world he could find soce, but he did know one pce where he could get some answers, and that would have to do for now.
The guards had just mao lift the portcullis by the time they came outside, but with his sword in one hand and the young Baron’s ne the other, no oried to stop him. “I’ve gotten my vengeance from the rest of the Raithewait family,” Simon told the first man to front him, “and as soon as I get to the gate, you have young Erik back then unless you want to end the line right here.”
No oried to call his bluff, which was good because it wasn’t ohe truth was it would be faster if they just cut him down here. It might even be more satisfying. But if he died, then he wouldn’t have her ring anymore, and that meant more to him than walking all the way back up that mountain to the wyvern.
The trip back was uful. As they’d ridden south together, Simon and Freya had feared that the zombies were nipping at their heels and would sweep across the world. They’d never e that close, though. After the fall of Schwartzenbruck, they’d bee an endemic threat. They’d pop up periodically, but the people of the area knew how to hahem. Some people even believed that there were ways to cure the retly bitten before they turhough Simon had yet to see any evidence for that cim.
There was a lot he still didn’t uand about this world, but right now, he didn’t care anymore. He just trudged forward from camp to inn and vilge to town as the mountain he o climb loomed into view.
The whole time Varten’s words haunted him, too. It didn’t matter that he khey weren’t true. All that mattered was the way that they picked at the open wound and made him despair and doubt what he knew. Was it possible that Freya had been unfaithful to him or that she’d never really loved him? Simohat their courtship had been more than a little rushed and that he could have been a better partner, but even so, he found it impossible to believe she could lie to him well enough to be true.
Simon tried hard to stay positive whenever his rage faded enough for the despair to seep into his soul. As the trip wore on, this habit, bined with the familiar surroundings, made him more than a little nostalgic. He couldn’t help but think about the way Freya ughed or made fun of the way he pronounced certain words. It seemed like everything along the road brought baemories, but it wasn’t until he got to a bridge he didn’t reize that he realized that he’d gone almost a day too far to the north.
No one on the road bothered him, or even noticed him as he turned around and started walking back the way he’d e. Maybe bandits could see his little storm cloud that followed him around wherever he went, or maybe they could see he really wanted an excuse to kill someoher way, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the hike up the mountain.
It took two days to get up this time instead of the three days it had taken to get down. Simon was a little amazed that he was in that much better shape, and he even stopped early one night to roast a ewe that he’d taken with his longbow earlier.
That was something else he’d gotten much better at, and he doubted he’d go back to a crossbow ever again unless he had to. Once you developed the teique for pulling ba the string, it was just so much better than having to step iirrup and reload the damn cross. He was under no illusions that he could take down the wyvern with ohough.
He’d seen it twi his the mountain, and though it might theoretically be possible to shoot it in the eye and bring it down in a single blow, Simon had missed several rabbits from cle i few days. That was the reason he was eating goat. Because it was bigger.
Even the meal made him miss Freya, though. They’d had goat and sheep often in Crowvar because it was much cheaper than beef and signifitly healthier than pork. His dried-out spit roast made him miss the way that Freya would do it, basting in herbs for hours during the months he was at home.
Simon sighed. The whole time he’d thought he was making a safer world for her, but iy, he’d just been wasting time they could have spent together. That thought was enough to make him lose his appetite, and he cried himself to sleep.
Simon reached the ruined castle just after noon on the following day and found the portal just where he expected it to be. When he ope, the seaside Mediterranean-style town was still burning, and the volo was still erupting, which was both expected and strange. As glitchy as this whole arra was, Simon always thought that if he lingered long enough, he would find nothing oher side of this door but a wall of cooling magma and ash, or worse, he’d open it only for a tide of magma to er him immediately.
It never happehat way, though. Instead, it always lio the same spot, like the levels operated in some way that was entirely indepe of each other.
“You know this whole arra ignores basic ws like causality, right Hedes?” Simon asked, knowing he wouldn’t get an answer. She probably wasn’t even listening, except for the parts where he was suffering.
Simon strolled casually up the hill toward the river of va aually, the pace, but the panig tide of humanity running the other way toward the harbor made progress slow. That didn’t bother Simon. He knew where he was going, and it retty short trip from here.
This time, on a whim, he walked past the turnoff to the pad all the to where the va was flowing down the cobblestoreet like a river of fire. It was a view he’d seen several times from a distance, but standing so close to it that he could feel the heat rippling off of it was a different experieirely.
On past trips, he’d seen shapes moving in the heat haze there, but this time he saw a man made of red-hot stone and burning magma standing there like he was direg the flow of the whole thing. It stared at Simon briefly before it went back to doing whatever it was doing.
“So that’s a fire elemental, huh?” Simon said, nonplussed. “Looks a little basic. You could use some better art dire here.”
The only surprise of the whole level came whe to the pace. This time it wasn’t in the form of Hedes waiting for him, though. The portal was wrong. It still hung in the same spot, but it no longer led to the forest as he expected. Instead, it led to the entrance of the covered bridge. The far end was too dark to see, but Simohat the bridge troll waited down there for him somewhere. It always did.
“Really, Hedes? Your world is glitg out now?” Simon said in exasperation.
Or maybe the portal wasn’t wrong at all, he realized. Maybe he was. Was it possible he got the levels out of order, he wondered? Was it possible he went over the bridge and then got to the owl bear? Simon thought about it hard, but in the end, he determihat it was impossible. He’d definitely gone forest, children, miller, and bridge the st time he was here. In that order. There was no question.
Thinking of that made Simon wonder how those kids were doing. He hoped someone else would be around to save them, though. Because apparently, he wasn’t going to get that ow, he thought sadly as he uhed his sword and stepped through the portal to ruin this thing’s day.
In all the errands and quests he’d run for the Raithewait family over the better part of the st year, he’d never seen aroll, or really anything like it, Simon thought. The closest he’d e were hobgoblins and orcs. That made him wonder just how rare these beasts were, but that didn’t matter to him. It wasn’t like anyone would cry if this endangered species weinct.
“You and me have unfinished business,” Simon said as he strode toward the thing in the near bess of the wooden bridge.
He couldn’t see the monster, but he could smell it, ahought it was fasating that it was trying to preserve the advantage of surprise. Not that it really had it. That was an illusion because Simon wasn’t surprised.
As soon as the ten-foot tall warty monstrosity leaped out of the shadows to devour him, Simon rolled between its legs, slig deep into one calf as he went and chopping all the way to the bone oher side once he rolled to his feet, making the troll roar in pain as it colpsed to its knees. It still spun around and tried to grab him with its giant hands, but Simon was already well out of reach.
He walked backward to the far end of the bridge and looked around town to see where the best pce to kill this thing might be. Its calf muscles were already almost pletely healed in seds, so he khat his sword wasn’t going to cut it.
For a sed, he sidered letting the thing chase him into the churd pushing it into the portal to hell, but then the part of him that had seen way too many horror movies realized that if the thing messed up the circle as it charged through it might unleash hell in this world instead, and that was too big a risk to take.
Simon was fairly sure if he died in hell, he wouldn’t be ing back. He’d just be suffering for eternity. He’d already dohat once, of course, and had no i in doing it again.
In the end, Simon decided that simple was best. He dodged the thing’s strikes a few times as it lured the creature te barn he’d notiot so far from the bcksmith’s building, and then just when it thought it had him ered, he shouted the words of fire, erasing its fa a sea of fme and raking its chest with charred lines of power.
With the amount e he felt, he wasn’t surprised that shouting “G????????????r???????v?????u?????u????????? ???????M???????e???i???????r??????è?????n????” had hurt more than usual, but it was hard tue with the results. It lit up almost as easily as the wooden walls and the straw-filled stalls that surrou, giving Simon more than enough of an opportunity to slide around it in the chaos and bar the door, so the monster would be trapped in there until the whole pce burned down.
Its chilling, painful screams followed him all the way across the town until he ehe church door and shut it behind him. Strangely, they didn’t bother him even a little bit, though. Right now, they just sounded like victory.
