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He’d rather be a zombie again than be forced to witness that. Of course, he’d also rather not have to cast a fire spell if he didn’t need to. He’d already freaked out Freya enough, and the last thing he wanted was to send her screaming into the night at the first chance she had to escape from him.

Just before he rounded the final corner where he could usually see it, he whispered to Freya. “Stay calm. The thing I was talking about before? It’s right there.”

No sooner did he round the corner than he saw the pale wiggling thing gorging itself on the bloated body of a young man. It didn’t see him yet, so Simon carefully lined up his shot. That plan was interrupted when Freya took a look and screamed bloody murder as soon as she saw the slimy, tentacled thing devouring corpses.

It charged them immediately after that, and Simon waited until it was much closer than usual before he put a bolt in its belly just to be sure he wouldn’t miss. For a moment, that felt like a mistake as he thought the thing might just keep going, and he almost threw his crossbow in the water, so he could free a hand to draw his sword. Fortunately, that proved unnecessary, and with its usual screech, it turned and fled back into the pile of bodies it had built by the main sewer grate.

“No way I’m getting any closer to that thing! What in all the hells was that?” Freya asked as she resisted Simon’s efforts to drag her forward.

“It-it’s a carrion crawler,” Simon said slowly, wishing he could take the time to reload his crossbow, but he had nowhere to set down his bundle. For a moment, he really missed the fine backpack he’d had made the last go around, and he wondered how adventurers ever did without that sort of thing. “And it’s not really interested in us. It eats corpses.”

“So if it kills us, then it will become interested?” she asked skeptically.

“Well, when they’re wounded, they tend to steer clear, but if we stick around too long….” Simon let his words linger, both because he didn’t want to say anything too awful and because he’d had to suppress his need to be a know-it-all and explain to her that they would be perfectly happy to paralyze the two of them and then devour them both while they were frozen in place.

Eventually, she accepted the need to move, which caused a dilemma. Simon wanted to send her up the ladder first, but he feared what would happen to her if he wasn’t physically holding the portal open. So ultimately, he climbed up, set his bundle down, and then sat in the opening with his legs dangling while he helped her up. They’d been intimate several times now, so there shouldn’t have been anything embarrassing about touching her. Somehow, though, the combination of closeness and coldness that was currently between them made the whole thing incredibly awkward.

Still, she’d made it through, and the carrion crawler hadn’t killed them, so what else could they ask for?

“Where are we now?” she asked in a voice full of wonder while he was bent over, reloading his crossbow. Her words reminded Simon she’d probably never seen someplace tropical or even heard the word jungle in her life. Though her reaction to a desert might have been just as extreme.

“We’re in a warmer sort of place that…” Simon’s words trailed off as he looked up and saw her approaching the vine-covered wall, intent on one of the large orange and pink blossoms that dotted the vine-strewn masonry.

“Be careful!” he yelled, dropping everything he was doing and running to her so that he could drag her away before she got too close. He didn’t think that was one of the blossoms that launched the darts at him, but he couldn’t be sure.

“It’s just a flower,” she said, shaking him off. “What the hell is your problem. You act completely calm when monsters charge at us, but you freak out when it’s a flower? What the hell!”

Simon shook his head. He tried to see her point, but really all she was showing off was her own ignorance, and he wasn’t about to explain it to her right now and fuck things up even more.

“Look, I’ll tell you later when we get somewhere safe, but first, we have to climb that!” he answered grumpily as he pointed at the largest ziggurat in the ruined city.

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“What in the name of the gods is that thing?” Freya asked. “It’s like a mountain but shaped very strangely. Did people make that?”

“Probably,” Simon answered. “I’m not really sure.”

They took a small break by the river so that they could both drink plenty of water before Simon filled his skin back up, and Simon’s heart fluttered as he saw her lovely pale skin in the sunlight for the first time. That made him smile. They’d never actually been outside together before.

Did that make this their first date, he wondered. The idle thought made him smile. What a terrible first date that would be: a walk through a sewer filled with rotting corpses and a city slowly being devoured by plants. Real nightmare fuel right there. It kind of made him wonder what sort of relationship could be built on such a fucked up foundation.

This time when they set off again, he had her take the lead. He’d never seen anything dangerous in this place that wasn’t plant-based, so he felt like she would be safest where he could keep an eye on her. After that, things went fast, and eventually, the icy distance between them thawed somewhat as he explained to her how some parts of the world were warmer than others and that in the warmest parts of all were jungles, which were like forests but filled with far more life.

This time when she peppered him with questions about all the new sights, he didn’t mind answering. He did his best, of course, interpolating what he remembered from history class about the Mesoamerican civilizations, but ultimately he ended up telling her more about Teotihuacan than he did about wherever this place was. After all - he had some idea of where Schwarzenbruck was compared to a number of other cities and portals he had access to. He was even pretty sure that the wyvern ruins weren’t so far from that area just based on the way it looked. He could be way off, though, given that New England and actual England also looked pretty similar.

They took a break when they reached the giant ziggurat and again when they were halfway up the structure. Freya seemed to be in slightly better shape than Simon, but to be fair, she wasn’t hauling an extra thirty pounds of armor and weaponry. When they reached the top, they just sat there for a good long while enjoying the setting sun, and eventually, she laid her head on his shoulder, and he took that as permission for him to put his arm around her as they admired the reds and oranges dancing above the jungle canopy.

“It just goes on forever,” she said

“It does,” he agreed, “Jungles are generally pretty huge places.”

“No,” she corrected him, “these strange portals of yours. They just keep coming one after another, don’t they? I’ll bet there’s another one just past this one and another past that, right?”

“There is,” he agreed, unsure of where she was going in all this.

“And somehow, you don’t just summon these portals or know where they’re going to go, but you already know what’s on the other side, like you’ve been here before.” she continued.

“And if I have?” Simon parried, answering her question with a question.

“It’s… I don’t understand, and I’m not sure if I want to, but… I’m not sure what that says about you, you know?” This time she looked away from the sunset to look at him directly. “You can wield magic and walk through the same moments twice, so does that make you a god or a demon?”

“Neither,” he answered truthfully. “I’m just a man trying to be a hero.”

“Well, you’re my hero at any rate,” she said. He was about to thank her, but when he saw that she was moving in for a kiss, he decided that seemed like a better idea. So, they shared a long, tender moment together.

Afterward, there was more talk, and he told her what he could without confusing things further, but really all he could say was that he was on a quest to help a goddess fix a few things, which seemed to satisfy her. As long as Simon wasn’t in league with dark forces, it seemed that she could tolerate the rest.

Freya was quiet after that. Eventually, after they’d crossed into the next level and found a nice spot to make camp near the edge of ruins, she finally asked a question that had obviously been on her mind for the better part of the day. “Does that mean we’ve done this before?” she asked. “Is all this just a part of your secret quest?”

“This? No, we’ve never done this before, Freya. I-I promise you that,” he said, briefly choking on his words. “I\'ve met you before this, but we didn’t even escape from the inn together. This is all uncharted territory. As to if you’re important to my mission - I honestly don’t know, but I know that you’re important to me.”

She smiled at that, and it was only afterward while Simon was wondering why a cheesy pickup line like that would have worked so well that he realized she’d never seen a romantic comedy in her life. He hadn’t either, of course, not all the way through, but he’d probably listened to a hundred of them in the background while he played his switch in the living room and his mom watched some sappy show. That was a skill that he never thought would come in handy, but as he watched her suspicion melt away while she clung to him, he hoped this might work out yet.

That night they slept near the embers of a fire that he’d actually managed to make without resorting to magic, and between Freya’s body heat and the stone wall behind them to keep away the wind, it was actually one of the nicest nights he’d had in the wild ever. It certainly beat the chilly trip down from the goblin cave. He was sure that, eventually, he would lose a couple toes to frostbite on that trip.

In the morning, they started down the mountain, holding hands. There was no trail to speak of, and the way was more than a little rocky. It wasn’t so bad, though. In the distance was another small town on a river, which seemed to be a theme for this part of the world, and it seemed like as good a place as any to take a break before they found somewhere they could put down roots.