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“It’s fine,” Simon grumbled. “Now you get a paying customer, and I get a week to enjoy it.”

“A week?” The old man laughed, walking off to chat with some of the locals at the other end of the bar. “At least!”

Simon ignored the man. Instead, he kicked himself for his cockiness. He’d been so sure that he’d been in Helades head about this that he’d walked straight to the damn arch that had taken him to the owl bear level, and there he’d found nothing but a throne room that had long since been picked clean of anything of value, and evidence that someone occasionally used it as a sheep pen. He’d spend hours scouring the grounds and other nearby buildings, looking for an arch that contained a portal.

It was only when he’d walked outside and seen the ship raising its sails that he realized how long his wild goose chase had taken. A quick run down the mountain, which resulted in a close call at one of the sharper corners on the path, got him down the cliffside in ten minutes instead of the hour it had taken him to hike up it, and he arrived at the pier just a few minutes too late.

Even as he watched the thing lumber toward the mouth of the harbor, he was sure he could have made it with the judicious use of force magic. He also knew that wouldn’t have ended well. At night, he might have risked it, but in broad daylight? Well, there was no way people would miss that.

So, instead, he was stuck waiting for the next ship, whenever that was, but he had no idea what he would do from there. All he knew now was that the portal wasn’t here, so it was either at his destination or on the ship he’d just been on. The ship seemed to be the more likely choice, of course, but the world was a big place. He might never catch the ship again.

“Does that mean I’m stuck here the rest of my life?” he muttered to himself.

“Probably not the rest of your life,” the sailor sitting two stools down from him said with a laugh. “But certainly longer than you want! Me, I’ve wanted off that tub for too damn long, and Ionar is as good a place as any for a break. Figure I’ll crew up for the next ship that is not run by Captain Darnis and make my fortune elsewhere.”

“What’s wrong with the Captain?” Simon asked. The only thing he was the least bit interested in was changing topics, but a little insight into the man wouldn\'t hurt.

“The man’s a bloody fool,” the drunken sailor roared. “Who takes refugees instead of paying cargo? Huh? Answer me that. Women at sea, too! Mark my words, that kind-hearted Captain will run the Sea Seraph aground any day now. This voyage or next will be the last that that fine ship ever takes.”

“Bold words,” Simon said, not knowing how much of any of it to believe.

“Indeed,” the man said, treating his skepticism like a toast. “To bold words and the bold men that wield them. You ask me, you’re lucky you missed that ship. What is it you do anyway, stranger? You look a little well-fed for a mercenary and a little too tough to be a merchant.”

“Simon,” he volunteered. “I do a little of this and a little of that. Let’s just say I come from a distant land, and I’m learning more about the area.”

“Well met Simon. I’m Arrion, and there ain’t much to be learned around here,” the sailor answered. “If you want to see interesting sights you should stay north in places like Brin or Nigh. Or maybe across the seas in distant Thay. Lots of places more interesting than these parts.”

“If this area’s so boring, then why are you here?” Simon asked, mildly curious.

“Hey - I’m not here for excitement. That’s you,” Arrion answered as he finished his drink and waved for another one. “I grew up on Orvan, and on that little island, there’s only two kinds of professions: those that involve sheep and those that involve the sea. Sailing across the shallows and through the straits under a good captain - that’s more than enough excitement for my life, but there ain\'t much in the way of stories there.”

“Well,” Simon answered, draining his tankard and opting not to get another for now as he stood. “Never say never.”

That conversation set the tone for his hopefully brief stay at the small port community. Simon had known that this place had fallen pretty far, but to go from the capital of the Kingdom of Ionia to a ghost town of less than two hundred people in a single evening was terrifying.

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Simon could see many of the wrecked or abandoned villas in the upper city. Their blue tile roofs and whitewashed walls were forever stained with soot, but at least they weren’t buried under feet of hardened black lava like the rest of the place. The people here had gone from a palace and a constant supply of ships from distant lands to a well, a bar, and a harbor that was slowly filling with silt. Other than the handful of herders and fishermen, the place was just a place to stop on the way to go somewhere else now.

It was sad, but it was sadder still when seen across the sweep of history, and it forced Simon to consider whether or not he might go so far forward as he went down layer by layer that eventually places he knew much better than this one became nothing but ruins. It was a sobering thought.

Simon did some exploring while he waited for another ship and even walked up to the volcano caldera one day to see if there were any clues behind the eruption since it was the one topic that no one in Ionar would talk about. He’d been hoping to find the temple of some elemental god, but instead, all he found were a few steam vents and some bubbling mud.

Nine days after Simon arrived, a galleon named Spindrift Strider made a port call, and both he and Arrion found their way aboard. This ship had much more cargo and many fewer people than the last one, which Arrion assured him was utterly normal for cargo ships of this sort, and once they were underway, they made good time to Abrese. Six days later, and almost two full weeks behind the Sea Seraph’s pace, they found the large port town they’d been looking for.

It was a gloomy day, and there was a pall of smoke over the town, which was apparently not unusual given the foundries and forges that were always running, but when they got closer, even before Simon noticed the ship he was searching for listing by the quay, he knew something was wrong. They all did.

“Something bad has happened here,” the first mate said, and after a brief conference with the Captain, they decided they would not be docking after all. Instead, they would go east and inform the powers that be that something terrible had taken hold in the city.

It’s a smart decision, Simon told himself as he started to strip down out of his armor. Normally, he’d applaud it. Some sort of evil was definitely in the town, and whether it was magical in nature or something more mundane like the plague, the streets were all but empty.

But he couldn’t stay away. He needed to get off this ship and onto the Sea Seraph or die trying.

Simon didn\'t take much with him when he jumped overboard. His clothes, along with his boots, dagger, and coin purse bundled in a sack, were all he thought he could manage to swim with for such a long distance. He felt naked without his armor, of course, but there was no way he was swimming in tight leather armor.

People thought he was crazy, and one sailor, whom Simon suspected was Arrion, tried to throw him a line, but Simon continued on, and a few minutes later, he was dragging himself up the ladder of the closest pier, exhausted and halfway drowned.

“I’ve really got to work on my swimming,” he said as he coughed up water and caught his breath.

As he made his way down to the Sea Seraph, no one challenged him. There were other boats at the dock, and some of them had obvious crews aboard, but those did not have a gangway down, and they menaced him with weapons as he walked by as if he might try to come aboard.

“What happened here!” Simon yelled. “Where is everyone!”

“If you don’t know yet, then you best jump back in the water and start swimming,” an old sailor yelled. “Because the bloody pox will infect you just the same!”

“Great, another fucking plague,” Simon said to himself as he kept walking. That was no danger to him, of course, but he couldn’t exactly spend weeks or months healing thousands of people as it worked its way through the city.

Why does it always have to be diseases, Simon wondered.

Honestly, it was a dumb question, and he knew it as soon as he thought about it. Disease and war were pretty much what drove all of history, and he was probably going to see a lot more levels related to those things than little caves filled with goblins.

As he crept on board the abandoned boat, he realized his mistake, though. That ship, or someone on it, was almost certainly the cause of this. If Helades had wanted him to deal with the plague or the aftermath, she would have sent him here. She sent him to the ship, which pretty much had to mean he’d had a chance to save all these people, and he’d blown it.

With a sigh, Simon navigated his way across the slightly leaning deck toward the Captain’s cabin. There were bodies here and there, and the smell from the hold was even more foul than it had been before. The Captain’s cabin door opened without issue, and as usual, it unfortunately contained no portal. Instead, it showed him Captain Darnis\'s well-appointed cabin. The man had died and was lying face down in his logbook.

Despite the gross red sores on the man’s arms, Simon picked him up off the book to see if there were any clues to be gleaned about what might have happened, but the pages were blurred and fused by pus and blood that had leaked out of the slowly putrifying body. The man had been dead for days.

“But I was on here for three days and saw nothing like this,” Simon told himself as he looked around in the room in confusion to see if there was anything else he could scavenge.

Thinking back, a couple of the kids did have small red sores on their bodies, but Simon had merely assumed that those were lice or something similar. Had he inadvertently cured the most advanced cases with fevers but left a Typhoid Mary or two left to spread whatever this pox was far and wide?

He wasn’t sure, but as he borrowed the Captain’s cutlass, he decided it was a decent operating theory to start with. Next time he came through here, he’d be more diligent.

Simon moved to the door. He’d decided that he’d go out into the city and do what he could while he looked for the way to the next level. That’s not what happened. Instead, the door opened to reveal a shadowy forest.

He sighed. “So the portal only appears here if you approach it from this side. Or, does it only appear if the boat is moored here? Make up your damn mind!”