Death After Death Ch. 120-122 (Patreon)

Bonus chapter for my dear Death After Death readers. I hope you enjoy it!

Ch. 120 - Round Two

Simon spent the next six months the same way. Every morning, he drank three helmets of water and caught something with a crude spear from the jetty while he still had the energy to do so. Then, he would fill his clay pot with five or six gallons of seawater and begin to climb up the slope. 

There, he would use fire and salt to methodically make it further up the street toward the main square, destroying every tendril of greenery in any building along the way. Nothing behind me. That was his motto. He’d already been through the wood chipper once, and he had no intention of doing this half-assed and being forced to try again. 

After all, the plant couldn’t do shit to him. Not if he was careful. He’d been hit by spines a few times so far, but none of them had penetrated his armor, which he wore no matter how hot he got. His leathers fit him loosely now, even cinched all the way up. Since he could count his ribs when his shirt was off, that wasn’t a surprise. 

He was tanned in a way he’d never been before, too, and in all the time it took to get that tan, he’d counted a hundred and eight shooting stars, nine ships, and no people. The only thing he hadn’t counted in all that time was the number of fish he’d eaten. He might never eat fish after this. He was so sick of them that he’d taken to freediving for clams, oysters, and even shrimp sometimes, though he had very few ways to cook any of them properly. 

“I’m never going anywhere without a pan again,” he told himself as he hiked up the cliff with a gug of water that day. 

No, not that day, he corrected himself mentally. The day. 

Today was the day he was going after the central blossom. He’d already killed every trace of plant life between the road and the main square. It wouldn’t be the end of it. He’d still have the rest of Ionar proper, plus the palace grounds to purge, but as far as Simon was concerned, what he was doing today was half the battle. If he succeeded here, everything else was just clean up. 

He’d avoided it for weeks as he laid the groundwork, but that had given him all the time in the world to study to terrible plant. It had been growing for many years, which for a flower was an eternity, so at this point it was the size of an gnarled old oak tree. Instead of foliage, though, was a giant leathery flower that was very nearly blood compared to the marbled orange and red of most of the other large blossoms. 

He’d already destroyed many that were more than large enough to swallow him whole. Even the largest of those was only half the size of the main plant, though, and today, after what was probably decades of unending growth, he was going to end it.

Simon started the battle with the words of distant fire. It made the thing scream but did little to effect it. It simply closed its giant flower until the flames had passed. That was something that was largely true for the other large blossoms he’d defeated up until now, but it was still a vital step because that sudden burst of flame was enough to destroy or cripple most of the smaller needle-spitting blossoms. 

Once that was done, he advanced with his freshly sharpened sword. The tendrils attacked him before he was even halfway across the square. The smaller ones moved so slowly that they were only effective against prey that had already been immobilized, but these larger ones were as thick as his thigh and could be wielded like clubs. They were the next hazard that needed to go. 

Simon wove between them, hacking as he went, and over the space of a few minutes, he covered the square in the sticky green sap of his enemy. That was all he needed to do to reach the trunk. At least, that had been all he’d had to do in the past. This time, though, when he got close, the thing launched a cloud of evil-looking, red pollen at him. Simon staggered back, with his eyes and his mouth closed, and it was only when he was far enough away that he felt like the strong sea breeze had cleansed the air that he allowed himself to breathe again. 

“Got yourself a new trick, huh?” he said, studying the residue in his hair as much as the strange creature that had released it. 

He felt normal, but he had no idea what that shit did, so he used a word of lesser cure, just in case, then he went back to retrieve his jug of water. This thing was full of surprises. Fortunately, he was too. 

Simon ran at it again, but this time from a slightly different direction, and he was wable to dump half of the jug on the things roots before it could turn enough to try to dose him again. Before it succeeded in spraying him though, the thorny mouth at the center of the monstrous blossom started to scream. 

This wasn’t the first time that one of the flowers had made noises at him. He’d heard them growl on several occasions when they thought they were about to get an easy feel. This was the first time that he’d heard such a keening wail, though, and he backed away, fearing another strange sonic attack almost as much as the pollen. Simon backed away once more until his vision cleared, but the third time he advanced, he vowed he wouldn’t stop hacking at it until the thing was finally dead.

That’s exactly what he did, and it was messy work. He chopped at it until the tip of his sword broke off, but there was nothing it could do to defend itself anymore. No other part of it was in range to strike at him. Thanks to all his hard work, it was isolated and defenseless. 

Even after he felled it, though, and the thing’s keening screech ceased, the battle still wasn’t done. He still had to dig up the seed itself. If he didn’t, in a day or a week, it would start sprouting all over again. That was just its nature, and by now, he had learned not to underestimate it. 

No matter how hot the lava or how thick the crust of stone it left behind, this awful thing would reach the surface and blossom once more. Even if he drowned it in seawater, he was sure that once it had dried off, it would spring to life all over again. In that sense, it was the most terrible creature he’d ever faced. It was more tenacious than all the zombies he’d ever killed, put together, and if he’d left it lying anywhere besides this desolate place, he was sure it would have eaten half a continent by now. 

That was the only silver lining to this, Simon decided as he poked around in its stump with his sword looking for dark, fist sized object. No matter how deep he prodded, though, he saw nothing promising.

“Yeah, it’s like a dandelion,” he nodded. “You gotta pull those out by the roots, or they always come back.”

“Gervuul Oonbetit,” he yelled, starting to feel a little hoarse. 

He’d used a lot of minor words today but didn’t use a log of major words during his time on Ionar. There was no point. The enemy he faced wasn’t powerful. At this point, it wasn’t even dangerous if you were prepared. It was, however, so numerous as to be nearly endless. 

The stump came out of the ground and was pulled a few feet in the sky by a titanic force that shattered the nearby cobblestones. It came out roots and all, and it was there, at the very bottom of the longest tap root, that he finally found it. 

Simon noted that it was already starting to sprout new life, even as he’d killed its old form. He immediately chopped it off of the now-dead body of its former host with a single quick stroke of his blade before he sheathed it. 

Then, he dumped what water he had left on it to stimy and further growth, then he pulled his coin purse full of gold coins from under his breastplate, and said, “Meiren,” heating them so much and so quickly that they became molten almost instantly, and burned right through the thin leather, drizzling down on the cursed thing. 

Simon had to use a word of fire a second time, along with the word of earth, to make sure the thing was fully enclosed and sealed in a metal shell that it could not escape from. It was only when that was done that he retreated to his safe area to rest in the shade for a little bit and decide what to do next. 

He figured it would still take months more to kill everything else, even with the heart cut out of this monster, but over the next hour, every vine stopped twitching, and every bit of foliage began to change colors. First, it faded to yellows and browns, and then, even before the sun started to dip below the horizon, almost all of them were black. 

He was overjoyed but unwilling to be fooled. He wasted no daylight looking for evidence that somewhere, some part of this plant continued to thrive. Simon finally made his way down from the ruins well after nightfall, after he’d checked to make sure every single vine and tendril really was wilting. 

He was exhausted after what he’d accomplished, but not so exhausted that he hadn’t used a few words of distant fire to create a fireworks display to celebrate the event. Even if no one else had seen it, he decided that wasting six months of his life to mark his triumph was more than worth it. 

Once he was reached the beach he looked at the golden orb he held in his hand, then he started walking out to the jetty to finish this. There were a lot of places he could put this gleaming evil seed. He could take it with him. He could leave it on the cliff, but in the end, given its weakness for salt water he decided the safest place for this thing to end up was the sea. 

After all, no matter where he buried it, once this thing’s container got damaged, it would grow again. He was pretty sure that’s what had happened in the sewers. Someone had died trying to steal it or possess it or something, and eventually, it had grown up and consumed the city. If he had tools, he would have built a salt-filled time capsule and buried it in the deepest part of the ocean. He didn’t, though.

Instead, he used the word of earth three times. Twice to turn two large rocks into hemispherical shells to contain his golden artifact, and then, one more time, to meld them into a stone egg that he hoped would protect its precious cargo for thousands of years. Then, once that was done, he stood on the farthest point of the ancient stone jetty and launched it with a word of force hundreds of yards out into the water where no one would ever find it again. 

Even after that victory, though, he sat on the beach for several days wondering how much this one thing had already changed history. How many ships didn’t stop here that would have? How many people that were supposed to never met? Other than curing the zombie outbreak, this was probably the biggest single thing he’d done to alter the flow of the world events since he started, and it had been on accident. 

There was no way to fix it now, of course. He would have to get on with his adventure eventually. Still, for a couple nights, he basked in that wonderful feeling of completion and wondered if there was any way to truly fix what it was he’d done.

Ch. 121 - The Long Way

 With only his mirror, half a sword, a particularly ragged bedroll, some salt-encrusted armor, a small piece of flint, 8 silver coins in a canvas pouch, his trusty fishing spear left to his name, and a pair of boots that weren’t going to last much longer, Simon finally left that familiar beach and started walking east along the coast. These lands were not completely wild, and he was sure he would find villages along the way. 

It only took four days to find his first fishing village, and two more to find his second. It even took less than a week to find his first bandits, though he seemed to have little enough worth stealing, and they left him alone as he walked past, looking more than a little like a crazy old hermit. 

It was a pity, too. A couple of those toughs had nice swords, and Simon would have had no compunction stealing one of them from their corpses. Simon continued his journey in near silence, breaking it only to hail travelers going the other direction and ask them for news from up ahead. 

Well, that and hunting. Thanks to the deprivations of the weather, Simon no longer had a bow, but he was also completely sick of fish. So, when he saw a plump hare feasting on grasses not so far from him, using the lesser word of force to turn a pebble into a sling bullet and give it the force his arm never could was the easiest choice in the world. 

After all, he’d much rather give up a week of his life for something to eat that wasn’t from the sea at this point. That would have been true even if he wasn’t going to get it back when he died. 

That night, he feasted on salty, greasy meat for the first time in months, and he lay there in the scraps of his bedroll feeling blessed. “How can I be this happy with this little?” he asked himself. 

He didn’t try to answer his own question. He just appreciated it.

It wasn’t until he reached the first town of any size in Fia, almost a hundred miles away from where he'd started at Ionar. It was there he learned that he had over a hundred fifty miles to go to reach Abrese, but he wasn’t in a hurry. Why wasn’t he? Because the portal he needed was almost certainly gone by now, and even if he managed to track down the Sea Seraph to whatever port she was currently in, he doubted that the portal would still work after all this time. 

No, I’m probably trapped here for a long time, he decided, for better or worse. 

Still, that certainty was no reason to mope about it. He was sure he could get up to some fine adventures here on the coast. Maybe he’d even take up sailing for fun. He was a strong swimmer now, and other than a bit malnourished, he was in excellent shape. He could do about anything he wanted. 

And tonight, what he wanted more than anything was a hot bath. So, he traded away one of his precious silver coins for a handful of coppers, a soft bed, a warm meal, and a hot bath. He even vowed to get a shave tomorrow when the barber was finally open. Once he was clean and fed, he started to spend those coppers one at a time for another delicacy he’d dearly missed: warm beer.   

After two large tankards, he settled into a warm haze of contentment and listened more than he talked to the other travelers that were there that night. He heard that the plague in Abrese was largely resolved, but he’d already expected that to be the case. These things didn’t last forever. More interestingly, though, was the news about Ionar. 

“I heard someone finally slew that wretched, evil plant monstrosity,” an older trader who’d come from the west said. “Of course, I ain’t seen it with my own eyes yet, but I want to believe it’s so.”

“It will never happen,” another said dismissively. “Mount Ionis could rain fire across the whole area day and night all over again, and those cursed orange blossoms would still reappear. If you ask me, it’s only a matter of time before they start heading this way.”

The two bickered about it, and Simon was tempted to tell them the truth, but he decided against it. Not only did he not need the fame, but they wouldn’t have believed him anyway. At this moment, he looked more like a crackpot than a hero. Instead, he just listened and only chimed in when topics like goblins or centaurs came up because it wasn’t so far-fetched that he’d actually know something about them.

That night, after winning enough coppers at dice to pay for his drinks and his meal, Simon went to bed feeling blessed. He’d made the world a better place, and even though he’d fucked up big time by opening that golden container, it had all turned out for the best. 

After the shave, he felt like a new man. It took another week to find a larger town further inland, and from there, he traded his services as a veteran warrior guarding the caravan for steady meals and a new bow. It wasn’t the best quality, but it shot straight enough for him to take out a bandit without magic when they were finally attacked a few nights later, and that was all he could ask for. 

The rest of the nights, he stood quiet watches and played dice around the campfire while he traded stories with men he doubted he’d ever meet again. Despite the poor quality of the food, though, it wasn’t so bad. After all, he thought to himself, at least it’s not fish. 

That night was the only danger he faced before he arrived, and even though he was invited to stay on for the next leg of their trip with a better share, he decided against it, and thanked his comrades for watching his back before heading deeper into Abrese. There, he didn’t work as a guard, but as a healer. 

The plague still lingered here, and many of them bore the ugly scars of a survivor. Somehow, though, despite that, life was returning to normal. Most citizens still wore masks and veils as if that would somehow ward away the foul vapors that cause the disease a second time, but he wasn’t about to explain the idea of acquired immunity to them. 

For his part, Simon wasn’t sure exactly what was causing the sickness. It didn’t look like flea bites like last time, but he wasn’t exactly an expert. He’d never gone to medical school or anything. 

Still, he cured enough difficult cases with reasonable advice about nutrition and sunlight, along with a few whispered words of power that people started to treat him as if he were a real healer. He only used that attention to study the symptoms, and he spent a few days looking over the worst cases.

Those he didn’t really try to save, but it did help him to understand the course that it took. Over the next several months, he did what he could to save lives and bring this suffering to an end. He was in the process of working with a few of the other doctors to try to locate the source, by documenting the cases on a map of the city when he found out that many of the ships were still sunk in the harbor.

“What if that is where the disease is coming from?” the learned Doctor Fallster asked when they were reviewing a cluster of cases near the waterfront. “What if it still leaks from the hold of a submerged ship like poison? How will we cure that?”

Simon might have explained to them that such a thing was extremely unlikely, but instead, he wondered if the Sea Seraph might be down there and, if it was if the portal to the next level might be functional. 

Until that moment, he’d thought that opportunity was lost to him, but now it ate at him, even when he lay in bed at night. These people needed him, but really, how much did he owe them? In his next run, he would prevent this evil and save all their lives. As it was, he would run out of years in his own life before he ran out of people to save. 

He stayed conflicted about that for several days, and he had a particularly terrible idea when he realized it was time to leave. Somewhere in the back of his mind, that thirst for the sweet life force still lingered, even after all these months. It was there when he, the stray thought that he could steal the life of the criminals or the dying and use it to heal those that were worth saving. 

That was too much power in his hands, and he knew that as noble as his aims might be, he’d end up as a junkie or worse. So, with only a little gray in his hair, he resolved to leave before it was too late. So, he stripped down to nothing but his under clothes and his knife and took to diving in the harbor every day looking for the answer to that burning question. 

At first, his search was slow. It took several days of diving in those murky waters before he found the right ship. Apparently, the city had endured at least as much chaos as it had disease because, ultimately, the pier he sought had been burned to the water line. 

As a result, he dived the wrecks of a dozen ships that weren’t even close to where he needed to be before he found the Sea Sereph. When he finally located her, she was lying on her side, half drowned in silt. 

Simon had no word for air, though he dearly wished he did. So, instead, he rested for half an hour before he dove as deep as he could to see if the portal in the captain’s quarters might still be in place, somehow, against all the odds. Then, refreshing his word of minor light, he took a deep breath and dove deep, kicking as hard as he could to get twenty yards beneath the waves before he felt the nagging need to breathe force him to return to the surface. 

This time, well rested as he was, it was almost easy, and he quickly reached the captain’s cabin in the stern castle. The door was shut, and he couldn’t open it, so he swam around to the back and came in through the broken window. 

He was starting to run low on air, but he wasn’t worried yet, and his light was still bright enough, so he looked around for any clues about what might have happened in all this. All he found, though, was the captain’s skeleton pinned to the wall by the same desk that Simon had seen the man slumped over the last time he was here. The skeleton had been picked nearly clean, but Simon saw a coin pouch on the ground that was not so far away, so he scooped it up. 

He was free-diving with nothing but his small clothes and a knife, after all. If he got through this portal, he’d need to funds to buy new gear in Crowvar or somewhere similar. 

With Simon’s air starting to run low, he hurried to the door, and tried it from this side. It was still stuck, which was something he could have fixed in an instant with a word of force. He didn’t have one of those right now, though. So instead he braced himself against one of the roof beams and pushed with all his might. 

I’m not fucking drowning again, Simon thought to himself as he stretched and forced the strong muscles of his legs to give everything they had against the stubborn, waterlogged wood. For a second, he feared it wouldn’t be enough, but then, he felt it budge just the smallest bit, and a second later, it gave way entirely. 

Simon worried the portal wouldn’t open after all this time, but it did, and suddenly, he was riding a waterfall out of the ocean and into the darkness of the cavern beyond. It was a vaguely terrifying experience, and he landed on the stone floor gasping for breath and more than a little banged up. Still, he’d survived, somehow.

Ch. 122 - The Harder They Fall

As Simon crouched there on his hands and knees, taking in huge lungfuls of air, it took him almost a minute to remember where he was. “The spiders,” he whispered to himself.

No, the spider, he corrected himself. Remembering the giant that loomed in the darkness somewhere above him in the darkness. Suddenly, it all came back to him. The webs on fire, the spiders surrounding him, and the giant spider towering over it all were each a terrifying memory all on their own, but together?

For a second, he wondered if he should set the place ablaze again, but then he realized he had precious little choice. Last time, no one had noticed him until he’d sliced through his first web on his quest to get to the next doorway. This time, though, he could hear skittering and chittering around him on all sides in the darkness, and worse, he was glowing. 

Between the exceptionally loud way he’d entered this level and the light, it was like he’d painted a bullseye on himself. So, aiming toward the closest sound, he uttered, “Meiren,” and sent a long streamer of fire out into the dark. 

That single blast wouldn’t be enough to kill even one of the dog-sized spiders he saw moving toward him, but it was enough to catch all of their very flammable webs on fire. As the monstrous creatures fled the flames, he ran toward them, seeking the relative safety of the known clear area as the fire started to spread throughout the cavern. 

For now, he wasn’t heading to the exit or to anywhere else. He was just staying a moving target, just in case, as chaos unfolded all around him. It was literally insane, he decided, but he couldn’t help but smile to fight the madness.

He was running through the center of a firestorm, and that firestorm was illuminating a spider stampede of dozens of eight legged critters, several of which certainly out weighed him. That was just the warm-up act though. As soon as the fire spread far enough, it finally illuminated the two nearest legs of the spider god that towered over everything else that was going on.

Simon’s light had dimmed enough to be invisible, and the light of the next level was lost in the thousands of tiny temporary flames that raced along the spiderwebs in every direction. The world was on fire now, and that afforded him just enough light to make out some of the larger details. He could see that this was a city, or at least it had been one, long ago. Beyond that, he could see the bottom of the giant spider’s abdomen and thorax, lording over everything. 

It had to be thirty or forty feet tall at least, and though it was possible he might have been able to cut through one of the thing's massive legs with a battleaxe, there was no way that the dagger he currently had was going to do more than scratch it. That was okay, though, because he had other weapons. 

He quickly ruled out fire because this didn’t seem to be bothering the thing. Next, he considered force, but he knew that it would take a lot of words to chop up something with eight legs. So, eventually, he settled on earth. Why not? It had worked for the ogre, so it should work for the spider, too, right?

“Gervuul Vosden!” he shouted, aiming past the creature to the ceiling that loomed above it as he tried to cause a cave-in. 

Try, it turned out, was the wrong word. As a result of his magic, there was a terrific crack, and half of the cavern came down on top of the thing, crushing it like a bug. That much, at least, was appropriate, he thought as he ran to the nearest doorway he could and wondered if he would survive long enough to celebrate his victory. 

At least this will clear the level, even if I die, he reassured himself as he stood there enduring the end of the world. 

The sound of falling rocks was deafening, and once the choking dust billowed throughout the cavern, it was enough to smother any lingering flames, plunging him into total darkness. 

He stood there for a long time, controlling his breathing and waiting for the taste and smell of rock dust to decline before he did anything. He wasn’t dead. That was what mattered. He’d survived, and none of his limbs had been crushed, but even if he lit himself up like a Christmas tree, he wouldn’t see anything but dust. 

So he waited, breathing slowly and deeply in the darkness, ignoring the occasional skittering sound of shifting rubble. It was a terrifying hour or so, but it gave him plenty of time to think, and by the end of it, he had a plan. 

“Gervuul Barom!” he shouted before coughing slightly at the strain of using two greater words in a row. After that, he stood perfectly still, listening to his voice echo at random through the partially collapsed cave. 

Greater light wasn’t something he used very often, but in this case, it was the right choice. He didn’t go for anything fancy. He just created an orb of white light hanging in the center of the cavern like a tiny sun. He wasn’t sure how long it would last, but at least it wouldn’t draw the eight-eyed survivors right to him. 

Before Simon moved, he simply took in the devastation. The place had been nothing but ruins before he’d done what he’d done, but now it looked like the aftermath of a disaster movie. There was rubble everywhere, and though in places he could see spiders moving around, the cavern as a whole was dominated by the corpse of the giant spider. It was splattered across half the cavern and…

“Damn it,” he whispered as he realized where it was that the crushed monster had landed. It was pretty much right on top of the gateway that he needed to go to the next level. 

That meant that this was the end of his run because, by some miracle, even if the magical doorway had survived the impact, he wasn’t digging a mineshaft through spider guts to reach it. 

“Well, it was a good run,” he told himself as he reflected. He’d almost certainly solved this level, and though he still hadn’t managed to figure out what was going on with the plague, the plant should be resolved, too. 

That’s what? Four levels this run? He wondered. Not bad. 

Hell, it might even be five, he realized. He had no idea if what he’d done at that terrible party was enough to count it as solved, but he supposed he’d find out next run. 

Against that backdrop, it was hard to beat himself up too much, but he still felt disappointed in himself. This was the first time he’d ever destroyed a portal, and though he didn’t think that would fuck anything up long-term, he still felt like an idiot. If he’d just been more precise with his spell, he could have…

“Precise with an avalanche, huh,” he chuckled to himself. “Good luck with that.”

With that thought in mind, Simon climbed out of the little hole he found himself in and started exploring the place. Even the light he’d made wasn’t enough to illuminate the whole cavern, and shadows were everywhere. 

The first thing that he did was go back to where he’d entered the level to find the pools of salt water he'd left behind from his dramatic entrance. Then, after he washed himself in one to remove the thick layer of dust he’d accrued, he froze water from one of the cleaner pools to his knife like a Popsicle. He would have frozen more, but he had nothing to carry it in, and without a water skin, this was his only real chance to get a drink since frozen salt water was very low in salt.

 After that, as his light slowly faded in the distance, he started looking for a way out of there. His movements were slow and careful so as not to become spider bait, but the catastrophe he’d inflicted on them seemed to be enough to make the survivors slink off to their hidey holes and question their life choices.

After that, time became harder to track. He was pretty sure that his light spell lasted for another six hours, before he had to turn his dagger into a minor word of light so that he could see, and if each of those smaller lights last for about two hours, then it took him half a day to find an exit. 

In that time, he discovered a few human bodies, and a lot of goblin corpses that had long since been reduced to yellowed bones and desiccated flesh. Other than the fact that they’d died to spiders and in turn been eaten by them, there wasn’t a lot he could learn. 

Why did humans live underground? Where was this in comparison to the rest of the world? He had no clue, and that was frustrating, but not as frustrating as finding a iron gate part way down the corridor that he’d thought was an exit from spider city. Not only did the thing look very sturdy, but it had long since rusted shut. 

Fortunately, that wasn’t going to be a problem for him. Even though he spent the next few minutes coughing up blood, Simon used his third greater word of the day. This time, it was force, and with a terrible shrieking noise, both sides of the gate were hit by an invisible fist of forces that had to be at least as strong as the semi that had brought him here. 

He cringed at that memory. It didn’t come up often, but when it did, he was embarrassed by it. How could he have ever been so selfish and stupid, he wondered? 

His embarrassment did nothing to protect the doors, though. Both of them caved in, and the right side of the gate was torn entirely off its hinges and sent tumbling end over end down the hall. 

Simon healed his throat with some effort and then produced another small flashlight and started walking down the hall. This one was the dimmest one he’d made so far. That wasn’t because he couldn’t make them stronger. Instead, it was because he was trying to make them last longer, and there seemed to be a definitive relationship between the strength and longevity of the effect when it came to magic. 

At this point, he’d definitely used too much, and even the weakest words of minor light were a strain, but it wasn’t like there was anything he could do. He was lost in apparently endless caverns, and the best he could manage was to not be completely terrified by the idea. 

Simon went to sleep that night in a crevice without any answers, and the day that followed was no better. On the third day, he continued without light because he worried his throat could no longer even take a minor word. That was until he heard the sound of running water. 

Simon stayed there for more than a day, drinking deeply until he couldn’t and giving himself a chance to rest. At that time, he expected a goblin or a spider attack, but this place was a desert. In the end, his only enemies were silence and thirst, and all he could do was keep going and look for a way out. 

He went as far as he could and as long as he could, but after that, he didn’t find water again. Somewhere, exhausted and hungry, Simon finally succumbed to deprivation and passed out in the dark. He didn’t wake up again, at least not in that life.