Ch. 447 - Gravestone’s Scrawlings

While he wasn’t much of a drinker anymore, Simon let himself get caught up in the celebration. For the first hour, it involved only storytelling in the common room and any number of cheers. After that, though, as word spread throughout the tiny village of Lostelam, eventually the small inn became so overcrowded that the festivities spilled out into the street, and the affair became an impromptu festival. 

These days, getting drunk was something Simon did when he was in serious pain from an injury, but for once, he got smashed with a smile on his face and danced jigs with several young women who made it quite clear they were available. That was Simon’s night, in a nutshell.

He would dance until he was pestered into telling his story again, then, after a few toasts and another mug of beer gone, he would get back to dancing to the simple music that the villagers had to offer him. They cringed each time he described the moment that the vampire lord nearly prevented him from staking him and held up his black and blue wrist as proof, but they enjoyed the way he tricked the guards the most. 

That was for the best, since he intentionally skipped over slaughtering the other vampires in gory detail. Everyone was in much too good a mood to hear how messy that had been. Simon ate until he was full and drank until the world started to spin before he finally ended up in an upstairs bed at the inn. That he managed to end up in bed alone was only because he’d explained, “I’m a holy warrior in the service of Saint Cenarious, restrained by my vows and cannot lay with a maiden,” to half a dozen interested women eager to show him their appreciation. 

Simon was sure that their gratitude was genuine, given that the alternative was probably to become dinner, or worse, to the monsters he’d killed. The idea of being with someone again even appealed to him, but he knew that ending up with a random girl was just begging for him to spend levels obsessing about the relationship when it went wrong somehow. Somehow, though, the idea that it might end in a fling so casual that he wouldn't care what happened to his partner horrified him even more. Even drunk, he didn't believe that's who he was.

Was he really ready to handle that after Zoa? Drunk as he was, Simon played it safe and woke up with a hangover instead of a half-naked stranger. On the whole, it was a poor trade, but he made his peace with it over a late breakfast of warm beer, cold oatmeal, and a ham steak. 

After that, he made a trip to the baker to secure some decent food for the days he planned to spend studying the runes that marked the walls of the strange castle. He’d danced with the busty baker more than once the night before; she reminded him of someone he’d known in some earlier life, but he couldn’t quite recall who that was. 

Did I know a baker? He wondered, racking his brain. For some reason, he thought of Daisy, but that was a mule’s name, not a person’s.  

While she was happy to give him several loaves, she wouldn’t accept his money. That was good, because he was pretty much out of coin. So, instead, he gave her a blessing for good health and long life, and she accepted it like he was a true holy man.

“Pity I’m not,” he told himself as he walked down the road and began the return to Castle Gravenstone that would likely take the rest of the day. “If I were, perhaps I could make my prayers matter.”

Simon spent most of the rest of the day inventing a fake religion, based on the one he started when he’d been in the mountainous kingdom of Charia. I could embed words of healing in the most important prayers, and turn every holy symbol into a real force for good, not just a symbol, he reflected. 

Simon spent hours planning that, including sketching out in his mind what the cathedral would look like, and how it would harvest the prayers of the faithful to cure their ills and help their community. It would require years of actual development, of course. Not only would he have to work out the spells involved, but he’d have to disguise them as the delicate stained glass veins that held up the broad windows and then figure out what picture he could make to disguise those efforts. 

“Brin hasn’t even invented stained glass yet,” he said to himself with a laugh.

It was a good intellectual puzzle, and figuring out how he could bootstrap a religion with the words of power he had without actually having a god kept his mind occupied until he spotted Castle Gravenstone on the horizon. That muted his enthusiasm for his hypothetical religion and turned his focus once more to the task at hand. 

He no longer feared that he would be murdered by a vampire, but some part of him still felt he might yet be transformed into one. It was irrational, of course. The vampires were dead, but perhaps the dark magic was in the walls of the place itself. Maybe that’s what the runes and markings he wanted to examine did: they turned those who dwelled within their walls into evil bloodsuckers. 

He dismissed the thought immediately. Lots of humans were living in there when you were there yesterday, he reminded himself. That was true, but he practiced the gesture for light in his mind and considered the pros and cons of sleeping outside its walls every night for the foreseeable future. 

When he arrived, there were no new signs of bloodshed. The only thing that had changed was that the looting was more complete, and the disused structure was entirely abandoned; even the large double doors which led to the main hall were left ajar, and the stables were predictably entirely empty. Simon stood in the courtyard for a minute, looking for any signs that anyone still dwelt there with his eyes and with true sight, but he saw no one.

Then he descended into the basement, briefly, before he realized there was no light. “Of course,” he sighed, backtracking to the kitchen. 

He found no supplies of oil there, and all of the candelabras were gone, but the servants who had taken them had discarded half-used candles in their hurry to take the more valuable objects, and Simon scooped up more than a dozen of those. 

While lighting a wick with a flint spark was all but impossible, a quick trip to the stables for some straw handled that problem admirably. After that, he was able to head back to the vampire’s crypt and turn the guard’s oil lantern into a small candle-powered affair, which worked great. It wasn’t a lot of light, but in its glass case, it didn’t flicker much and gave him more than enough to see. The bigger problem was where to start looking first. 

According to the story Freya had told him, the man who had ruled here in ages past had accidentally transformed his wife into a vampire in a bid to save her life with magic. That account not only mirrored legends that he’d read about in the Unspoken’s library, but was also very similar to what Simon had done when he was trying to stop Freya from becoming a zombie a couple of dozen lives back. 

The real question is, does this place have anything to do with it? He asked himself as he moved to the nearest wall and started to read. 

The first place he picked was dirty enough that he had to rub it with a rag to make the scratches in the stone readable. Just because they were readable didn’t mean they were particularly legible. 

None of the marks in this area were particularly deep, and as he studied them, he decided first that they were Charian, and second, that they were done in a hurry. They’d probably been made with a steel knife or dagger instead of something more proper, like a stone chisel or something supernaturally sharp. 

The meaning of the marks took longer, and when Simon managed to decipher enough words in a row to do that, he was disappointed. It was a crazed rant written by someone who had been locked away in this very room for much too long. 

“I sympathize, buddy.” Simon sighed as he switched to another wall and started again, hoping for something more interesting.

He struck out his second time, too. Then, he found a long and rambling apology that focused more on how terrible the writer felt to someone named Thedonia. 

Simon couldn’t say for sure if that was a man or a woman, but still, the synchronicity stuck him more than anything. Someone had been locked in this room until they went insane. They’d been locked in the same room he’d been walled up inside so long ago. What were the odds?

Eventually, he decided that what had done the scratching was not a metal implement, but the claws or nails of someone, probably a vampire. They’d been left in here to do nothing but write until they met their end. 

Of course he made that determination only when he left the room to look at other writing. In the hall, the marks were clearer and deeper. There, they were done in steel, which made them deeper and clearer. As soon as Simon saw that, he breathed a sigh of relief. He’d thought he was going to have to go through this entire place with a magnifying glass like some archaeologist and was relieved that wouldn’t be the case.

Where he didn’t have it easy, though, was deciphering this new message. While the last two had been rambling messages, the marks on this hallway were more like formulas or nonsensical math equations. He even found a couple of what might have been words of power scattered among them, like Eszloum and Hyakk. That was exciting, even if the marks were far too rough to ever channel real power, and he doubled down, spending hours more trying to uncover the hidden meaning there.  

While he made some progress, after burning through four candle stubs, he decided to call it a night and find some place to sleep. That turned out to be the right decision, because when he returned to the first floor, he found it had gotten quite late. 

“You're in no hurry,” he reminded himself as he started looking for a safe place to sleep for the night. There probably wouldn’t be any midnight visitors, but if there were, he wanted to give himself every advantage. 

He looked at the servants' quarters first, and the ransacked pantry. Both had no windows, but flimsy doors. The nicer rooms were upstairs. They had solid doors, but completely open windows. 

They didn’t seem defensive enough either, so Simon went up another floor. He wanted something with a heavy door and as few windows as possible. Ideally, there would be zero windows, but he never found that. He did find a small room at the top of one of the towers that was just about perfect. 

Unfortunately, it proved to be occupied. After a moment, he recognized the occupant as the maid servant that he’d spoken with briefly at the end of his last visit. She was sitting upright, looking at him fearfully. This clearly wasn’t her room. Not only was it too nice to belong to a maid, but it had probably belonged to a man before all this. It was only after he took all that in that he noticed she was hiding a knife in her lap. 

I can hardly blame her for having some personal protection, Simon realized. 

“You don’t have to be afraid,” he told her. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’ll just go and—”

“Oh, it’s you,” she said, apparently only recognizing him when he spoke. “The vampire hunter.”

Simon considered correcting her, but instead thought better of it and made a small bow. “At your service.”

“Why did you come back?” she asked. 

“There are a few things I wanted to investigate in the crypts to make sure none of this happens again,” Simon answered vaguely. 

That led to a whole conversation where she assumed that he’d been here the whole time, which scared her because she thought she’d been all alone. Simon assured her he would leave her alone and find somewhere else to sleep, but when he did, she looked like she was going to cry.

“No, stay, please,” she insisted. “I-I’d feel better if I didn’t have to sleep alone again.”

It was an awkward moment for Simon. He wanted to tell her no, but the way that the fear swirled across her aura, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. So, instead, he closed the shutters and wedged his knife in the door, and then he lay down on the bed next to the maidservant as he tried to remember her name? 

Mildred? Mira? He wondered. 

It wasn’t until she asked his name and they introduced themselves to each other properly that he knew for certain that her name was Milie, but when he did, he felt bad for forgetting it in the first place and vowed to treat her better and hopefully persuade her to leave for Lostelam or whatever village it was she’d come from originally.

Ch. 448 - Wandering in the Dark

Simon rarely had trouble sleeping, at least when he was indoors, and there was no risk that a goblin might sneak up on him. Still, no matter how comfortable the bed he found himself in, lying in it with someone else was strange enough to keep him awake for an hour. It was even stranger when, later that night, Millie rolled over in her sleep and started cuddling him.

It was innocent enough. She’d put her weapon on the bedside table, and they were both clothed, so he saw no need to push her away. She obviously needed to be comforted, but he just didn’t feel right embracing a complete stranger.

Still, he ignored the smell of her hair and focused on the carvings downstairs, and eventually, slumber took him. In the morning, he woke to find himself in bed, with no evidence that he’d been attacked or robbed.

He went downstairs, munching on a half-stale loaf of bread, and found the girl cleaning the kitchen of all things. “I don’t think that’s part of your job description anymore,” he told her. 

“As long as I stay here, I need to keep it clean,” she repeated, almost as if she hadn’t heard him. “We’ll get rats otherwise. The others left a frightful mess, and when a new lord arrives, well, they wouldn’t want to keep me if that was the case, now would they?”

“So that’s your plan?” Simon asked, still confused. “To stay until a better master shows up and earn your keep?”

At that, she nodded enthusiastically, and when he asked her what she would do if the next one was no better, she smiled for the first time and said, “As long as they’re human, I promise you, it will be better.”

They chatted for a few minutes longer, and Simon tried to pry out her reasons for staying, as opposed to leaving, but she changed the topic enough that eventually he felt rude for trying. So, he made his excuses and went down into the basement to renew his research.

Nothing had changed there, but before he started on the hallway he’d been working on last time, he made a thorough audit of every room he could find in that vast, sprawling basement. He looked in every store room, main room, and dead-ended hall, looking for altars, summoning circles, or anything else that was so significant that it deserved to be the focus of his attention. As he did so, he also looked for the portal to the next level, which he still hadn’t found, but he was disappointed on both fronts. 

He even swept the floors in several likely places looking for magic runes hidden beneath the dirt floor that might indicate what had happened here, but he was out of luck. There was no portal, and there was no altar of accidental vampire creation. What there was were endless rants, poems, screeds, and research notes. 

Why did the madman write across the walls instead of in a tome or grimoire like a normal warlock? Whoever they were, Simon didn’t know, but it would have made his life a lot easier. 

Very little of what he found was even about magic. In fact, there was only enough scratched into the stones here and there like a trail of bread crumbs to keep him interested. More often than not, though, even those bits were nonsense.

The most dominant element among the scribblings was about his wife. Sometimes he’d saved her, or regretted saving her. Other times, he hadn’t yet worked out the secret to preserving her life. That was the only element that gave the madness some sort of chronological order.

He found an ode to the word of healing, Hyakk, that began, ‘Words of healing, most archaic, Hyakk is the key to life’s mosaic…’ before trailing off into nonsense. While the rhyme and meter felt tight, there was no art to it. 

Hyakk was, unsurprisingly, the word that this warlock returned to the most often. Sometimes he tried to compare the words to each other, using pseudomathematical proofs, like they were variables in a grand equation. He’d only discovered four, to Simon’s nineteen, and yet he declared that there were only twenty-one in total, and that all things were made from these twenty-one shape-sounds, as he called them. 

The only two things about that theory really interested Simon. The first was that 21 was only two more than he had, and implied that he’d collected almost all of them, which was interesting to consider. The second point was purely aesthetic. 

The reason that the warlock thought there had to be 21 was because they lined up neatly in a pyramid that way. On the top row, there was one, then came two, followed by a row of three, four, five, and six words. That shape put exactly six words on each side, and when they were folded, he contended they became a single, striking symbol that would unlock the truth of everything. The way the warlock's ramblings described it, he imagined it as a malformed Rubik's Cube shaped like a Murani pyramid. 

For a moment, he paused as he studied the word Rubik’s cube, which had been dredged up from deep in his memory. It was a toy he’d once owned with spinning colorful sides, but not something he’d thought of in lifetimes. He couldn’t remember much about it, besides what it looked like, but it was an apt metaphor for what the warlock was discussing.

His theory was more holistic than any Simon had ever come up with. Really, it was too holistic to be sane, yet still somehow more sensible than the dominant three-element theory that Simon had heard time and again during his lives as a healer. 

‘The shape of the word is nothing but the sound of its speaking,’ the anonymous warlock insisted, ‘Which makes it quite different, the opposite, even to normal words which are drawn in shapes that are merely convenient to write.’

Much of it was nonsense, especially the mathematical proofs where he compared the values of Hyakk and Gelthic to determine that life was greater than death, but not by as much as he’d previously assumed. 

“How does a nut like this make a vampire?” Simon wondered aloud whenever he came across a particularly crazy line. Only his sympathy for the man’s ill-fated quest to save his wife, and the occasional true word of power, kept Simon going. 

He immersed himself in that search completely, looking everywhere for some new piece of information that would justify all of these efforts. In doing so, he lost all track of anything but the walls and the melting candles that allowed him to read them. 

So, he practically jumped out of his skin when Millie suddenly appeared by his side and studied the wall beside him. She was so pale that for a moment, he’d mistaken her for a ghost because of the way the light of her bright lantern reflected off her pale skin. 

“Will you be finishing soon?” she asked, nervously, as Simon noted with only a little envy that the oil lamp she was using was much brighter than the candles he’d been using all day. 

“Eventually,” he sighed. “There’s so much to translate, but if you’re tired, you can go to bed without me. I’ll find somewhere else to sleep tonight so I don’t disturb you.”

“Oh, it’s not time for bed,” she answered with a shake of her head. “It’s dinner time, and I thought you might like to join me.”

His stomach growled at that. He’d completely lost track of time and hadn’t eaten all day. He almost said he wouldn’t want to impose, but at the last moment, his hunger flared stronger than his manners, and he said, “That would be delightful. What are we having?”

“The soup is almost done,” she declared. “You can join me in the kitchen whenever you’re finished here.”

Simon promised that he would, and quickly packed things up, unsure if he’d made enough progress for the day to keep digging. “Is there even anything here to find?” he wondered aloud as he followed her up the stairs, only a few minutes behind Millie. 

In the kitchen, he found her ladling a thin vegetable broth into wooden bowls. She asked how his day was, but rather than burden her with his arcane ramblings, he focused on the soup. 

“I didn’t even know we had this much food left in the castle,” he said with a smile. “What a feast.”

She blushed uncomfortably beneath his compliments, explaining their bounty away as the last of the usable scraps, then the two of them carried their meal into a nearby room that turned out to be the servants’ dining room. 

Simon found it interesting that she’d chosen to dine in the cramped servants' quarters with him instead of the main dining room, or even the parlor, but he didn’t say anything about it. Force of habit, he assumed, as she busied herself serving him instead of just sitting down so they could eat. 

Despite the fact that she said the soup was made out of scraps, it actually smelled quite good, and he shared what little bread he still had with her. Together, his stale bread and her thin soup actually made for a nice pairing, and in that quiet room, they had as lovely a dinner as one could ask for in a creepy abandoned castle. 

It was there that she told him why she didn’t want to go home, and about the lottery that had sealed her fate, placing her in the service of the castle’s former master. It wasn't even something he tried to draw out of her this time. He was just complimenting her meal, and how much she’d done with so little, when it was like a dam broke inside of her, and it all started coming out.

“Twice a year, before the planting and after the harvest, we draw stones from a kettle, and if you draw the black one you…” Her words faded. “Why did I have to choose the black one?”

Simon tried to comfort her, but from across the table, he could do little. The most he could do was sympathize and tell her how awful that was. 

While that felt right, that sent a storm of emotions across her aura that reduced her to tears. “Maybe it would have been less so if Sophana or Freddi were still alive when I arrived,” she sobbed. “I-I knew that we’d have to serve the monsters that lived here, but I didn’t think they’d eat us…”

She broke down in tears then, and Simon had to get up and walk around to the other side of the table and give her a shoulder to cry on. He tried to explain that it was over now, but she kept bawling and talking about how common the practice was. Apparently, the tithe was the only way to keep the monsters away, but they still ignored it half the time, and people still disappeared. 

“Especially from small, isolated homes in the country,” she told him. “Whole stretches where there’s just nothing but fallow fields and empty pens for miles in any direction.”

Well, that certainly explains why Helades dropped me off where she did, Simon reflected. But it doesn’t explain why one family should be more important than any other. 

By the time Millie calmed down and they finished their meal, the soup was cold. She apologized for that, but Simon didn’t mind. “I’m just glad we have something to soften the bread,” he said with a smile, trying to give her some small piece of normalcy. 

That night, they went to bed together again, but Simon still didn’t let his guard down and locked the room down tight as best he could. That included moving the heavy wardrobe in front of the window. They might be four stories above the ground, but some part of him feared that a flying visitor would appear in their sleep.

Ch. 449 - Hidden Ways

That night passed without incident, and so too did the night after that, and the night after that, as the two fell into a sort of rhythm. By day, Millie tidied up the castle as if whoever came there next would thank her for her service, while Simon spent his time studying the ancient ravings of a madman. 

After a few days, they got a fresh delivery of vegetables. Apparently, those deliveries were regular and routine, but that didn’t stop Simon from worrying that bandits or adventurers had decided to lay claim to their castle. Instead, it was just a handful of farmers who came to deliver what they usually did.

When Simon announced that the vampire lord was dead, they rejoiced. They took most of their bounty home, though they did leave some behind in thanks for Simon after he let it slip that he was the one who had done the slaying.

After that, they ate better, and when Simon put out some snares in likely places outside the castle walls, they even added some meat to their diet. It made their evenings nicer, and once they went to a nearby village for a sack of flour, and had bread, she even started bringing Simon lunch in the dungeons where he spent nearly all of his time. 

That made his days nicer, but didn’t bring him any closer to the truth.. The rhythms of his life were getting comfortable here, but truthfully, if he’d found the portal to the next level, he probably would have left already. 

That was the real reason he’d laid snares around the walls and visited the nearest village, because he was looking for an excuse to go to new places and look for the tell-tale flicker of magic that would indicate his way out. 

What would Helades want me to do on this level that I haven’t already done? He wondered for the hundredth time as he tried not to let his frustration cloud his judgment. I saved the family and cleared out the nest of vampires. Exactly what else is there to do on this level?

He’d solved the level according to the mirror, so presumably he could just kill himself and find his way to the next level from the cabin, via the wyvern level, but that felt cheap. He wouldn’t let such an important piece of information hide from him. The locations of the entrance and exit were one of the only things that gave him some insight into what Helades wanted him to do. 

So, every day, Simon devoted a little time to searching the castle, looking for something he’d missed. He searched for hidden rooms first, but after that, he started on the furniture, opening up every cabinet, wardrobe, and chest looking for a secret path forward. 

Millie looked at him strangely when he ran into her now and then during these activities. She always assumed he was looking for treasure, and assured him there was nothing left to find; nevertheless, he persisted. It was that or continue to dig through the rantings in the basement that he’d started to increasingly disregard. 

He didn’t care about the harmonic rhyming qualities of a given word. Nor did he think that they needed to be sung for proper effect. At this point, Simon was fairly sure that the proper way to cast spells was with long, linked incantations. Only his desire to maintain his clarity prevented him from experimenting extensively with the concept. 

When his doppelganger had helped rehabilitate him from the soul damage Simon had suffered, he hadn’t failed to notice the syntax of his magic. That was almost certainly the right approach. Using the specific purposes of many small words instead of a single large word that had to be brute forced into shape by your will, as he’d done for most of his time in the Pit, had many advantages. 

Unfortunately, that wasn’t something he could carve into wands, not something he expected he’d be able to mimic with any amount of hand motions. It would be much too slow to be practical in most cases. However, complex as his theories about proper magic use were, they didn’t require optics and rhyming or obscure geometric patterns. 

Eventually, though, he tired of all of those activities, and Millie’s visits became the highlight of his day. She’d long since learned not to ask him about his research and instead talked to him about her day. These were mundane conversations that revolved around song birds or unexpected discoveries in whatever bedroom she’d been cleaning that day. 

Those conversations were never important and rarely informative, but they were always a nice change of pace, and Simon grew to look forward to them. After the second week he grew to think of the old castle as their own private domain. They were the king and queen of a land that held precisely two subjects. 

“You could add to that, you know,” he told himself one day. “You’re the hero who slew the vampire. You could just stay on this level for a lifetime and build a tiny kingdom. Who would stop you? By the time Brin figured out what was going on, they’d probably just have to acknowledge you as the lord of the whole region.”

Part of Simon liked that idea, but his focus wasn’t so easy to change. He’d promised himself new levels and a long-awaited conversation with Helades, and he wasn’t going to trade the promise of temporary power for such an answer, no matter how tempting it might be. 

Still, as days passed, he was forced to concede he might not have a choice in the matter. At least, that was the case until a minor miracle occurred. 

One day, Simon was in the portion of the basement that had been devoted to wine, and he was poking around for anything that might have been hidden beneath the floor when Millie came to visit him again. She started telling him at length about how much wine had been stolen from the room the day after Simon had slain the vampires, but he didn’t really care. 

“Some of it was quite valuable, I’m told,” she said, trying to keep the conversation going a little while longer. It occurred to him at that moment that she might be flirting with him, but then, as he looked at her and smiled, he noticed the way her shadow was moving. 

He couldn’t hear what she was saying after that. He was looking past her, to where she’d set her oil lamp. Its flame was small, but it was doing something he hadn’t seen it do up until now. It was flickering.

“Is something wrong?” she asked, as she noticed his distraction. 

“No, not wrong,” he told her. “But something might be right. See if you can figure out where that breeze is coming from.”

At first, she didn’t understand, but after she finally noticed her lantern’s behavior, she started to look at the wall behind the shelf. Even as she did that, though, Simon was breathing slowly and deeply, sharpening his sight, and looking for any clues. Walls might not have auras, but with better senses, he could focus and perhaps figure out what it was he’d been missing this whole time.

Have you finally found the warlock’s laboratory? He wondered. Is this where I learn how his crackpot theories about the words of life and death lead him astray, and he accidentally transformed his wife into a monster?

He didn’t know, but could see a seam that didn’t make sense, and even as Millie pointed it out, he was already moving toward a stone that had a slightly different color than the rest of the wall.

“You’re right,” she told him as Simon pushed the stone, and felt it give. “It’s coming from right here. What do you think it is? A vault? A treasure room?”

“Better than that,” he said quietly as the gap she’d pointed out began to widen as the false wall swung inward. Simon expected to see the altar he’d long sought, but it was too dark to see much. He could see in the dark, of course, with some effort, but not when he was being blinded by Millie’s bright aura. He suppressed his sight to rely on his vision and her lantern, then, but even as he did that, something felt wrong.

Millie moved toward it with her lantern to investigate, but even as she did, Simon moved toward her and saw something else he hadn’t expected. Just before she walked through the doorway, the portal he’d sought sprang into existence, and she walked into the next level. 

“Hold on,” Simon called out, striding toward her and grabbing her by the arm, but he was a moment too late. 

He couldn’t pull her back through, though. Even as he tried, she came up against an invisible barrier. Simon had long known that he couldn’t go backward through the levels. Once he was in one, the previous was off limits. He could transport people and things forward, but he couldn’t return. That seemed to be just as true here, for Millie, and he swore beneath his breath. 

“What’s wrong?” she asked, as a hint of fear flashed across her aura. He wasn’t sure if she’d noticed her predicament, or if she’d only noticed his reaction to it, but either way, she was spooked. 

“It’s fine,” Simon answered. “Everything is—”

As he was trying to calm her down, a scream rang out from somewhere in the dungeon ahead. It was distant, but bloodcurdling, and it told Simon that whoever had made it was in a great deal of pain.

He had a terrible decision to make. Simon had left most of his gear upstairs. While he wore his sword on his belt, his armor, his supplies, and even his mirror were five stories above them. He hadn’t expected to find the portal to the next level. He certainly hadn’t expected to blunder into it like this, but now, if he retreated to fetch all of that, the portal would close, and Millie would be alone and terrified. 

Part of him felt confident that no time at all would pass. He’d step away from the portal, it would vanish, and then when he came back, it would reappear at that exact moment. Still, he couldn’t take the risk. 

I can get another mirror, he told himself, as he stepped through and covered Millie’s mouth before she could scream. 

“You must be very brave,” he whispered in her ear. “This wasn’t what I expected to happen. I never meant to involve you, but you must be very brave, and very quiet, do you understand?”

Millie was stiff for a moment, then she nodded in a brief, frantic burst, and he released her and drew his sword. He didn’t know what he was supposed to do on this level, or what he was meant to kill, but right now that didn’t matter. He could do the level over again, but if he got a helpless thing like the scullery maid who clung trembling to him killed, it would take a long time for him to forgive himself.