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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. He 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. Simon used the lesser word of force to turn a pebble into a sling bullet and gave it the force his arm never could. It 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 charred, 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 herefor 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.

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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 caused 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, 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 even when he healed the sick in his makeshift hospital. 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 followed him everywhere.

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 Seraph. 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 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.