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It was tough going, but honestly, it wasn’t so bad. The weather was nice, and the game was plentiful, so he took his time with it. As a mountain range slowly rose above him to the north he wished he had a camera to capture the rugged beauty of the vista, but sadly he had no way to capture it.

“I guess I’m just going to have to learn to paint,” he sighed after another attempt to get his mirror to ‘take a picture’ for him. The thing would faithfully render what it saw, of course, when asked, but it had all the soul of an architect\'s elevation or an engineer\'s technical drawing.

On his third night out of Lyndon Hills he was ambushed by a small nest of goblins. Fortunately he woke up before the first blow was struck and had time to smash the head of the first one to come at him.

After that, he used a word of lesser force to leap to the top of a large boulder and used his bow to take them out one at a time while they searched for him. Many times he missed the shot and had to fire twice which lead to him chastising himself.

“You can’t use magic to solve everything,” he grumbled. “That’s how you’re going to die horribly one day!”

That was his mantra these days, both because he thought he was using it too much and because he needed to resist the urge to drain these little guys dry like some kind of energy vampire. The very fact that he still felt the urge to after weeks without uttering the word Zyvon was worrying to him. It was like quitting smoking or something.

The rest of the trip beyond that was fine, and after a few more days of walking and a day spent waiting out the rain, he finally found the town he was looking for. Village was probably the better word, though. It had seen better days.

Simon had seen several places in his trip that had fallen on hard times, though the version of Slany that existed after Gregor lost his arm was the clearest example. This place had obviously been important, once upon a time, but no more. Someone had worked hard to raise real city walls and create the two stone bridges that crossed the raging river that it sat astride. Even the homes looked like they’d been created by wealthy people, but no longer.

Many of them were in various states of disrepair now, and less than half of the homes looked lived in. Other than a tin mine and a tannery, the place seemed to have little in the way of industry, either.

No one was particularly welcoming to Simon, though when he lied and told them he’d been sent by the temple to gather vital clues necessary to finally cleanse the world of the Blackheart incident, people were a little more cooperative.

“Aint a lot of strangers in these parts,” the gate guard told him. “You can never be too careful.”

One of the town watchmen was assigned to show him where it had all started so long ago. The man didn’t know much about the actual incident, which was less than helpful, but he was able to show him the plaque in the town cemetery that memorialized the event and the lonely burned-out ruins of a cottage on a large hill at the edge of the cemetery. The cottage ruins and the plaques weren’t much, but the grandeur of the mausoleums in the oldest parts of the cemetery again hinted at former greatness.

Simon tried to ask the man why he thought all of this had happened, but his escort seemed carefully coached not to have an opinion. Questions like, “Where do you think this warlock came from?” or “Why do you think he chose to stay in Kawsburl?” were met with a studied disinterest.

“The Gods work as they will,” the man shrugged, “But I hope that this little trip helps you get some insight to end the blight this monster caused just the same.”

Those were empty words, though. There was nothing new here, and Simon had to fight the urge to leave on the spot in frustration. The only reason he didn’t was because one detail nagged the back of his mind. It wasn’t that there weren’t so much as weeds clinging to the low walls of stone that had once been a cottage; that was easily explainable as the result of magic. He was quite sure that he could drain a spot so dead with a spell like Zyvon that nothing would ever grow there again.

It was that the ruins had a stone floor. That bothered him even after he went to bed in the inn that night. Every cottage he’d ever stayed in, in this world, had a floor of earth, or in rare cases like inns, wood. The Baron’s mansion in Slany had a stone floor. The castles and temples he’d been in did too. A cottage, though? That seemed unlikely.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Simon left at the crack of dawn to give that another look, and after a few minutes of examination, he figured out what game was being played here. The stone of the floor was laid in after the walls and stuck up slightly above the doorway. Someone had laid this down to hide evidence instead of making it look like it had always been here.

He thumped on each stone with the hilt of his blade until he found a cluster that sounded hollow. He tried to pry one of them up with his dagger, but the mortar was too tight to make fast progress.

“Fuck it,” he growled, looking around to make sure no one was nearby to call him a witch before he whispered, “Aufvarum Vosden,” and used lesser earth to make the mortar flow aside like muddy water.

Once that was done he started lifting paving stones out of the way, and he quickly found what he’d expected to, a dry rotted old trapdoor. For a second he got the feeling of déjà vu, but he quickly realized that this couldn’t possibly be his cabin. Despite the commonality, they were in totally different locations.

The second wave of déjà vu hit him harder when he finally opened the door and saw the stairs beneath. Those he’d definitely seen before. He knew that even before he felt the cold air wash over him.

“Son of a bitch,” he swore as he drew his sword and started down into the cottage. It wasn’t built on a hill. It had been built on a burial mound… like the one he’d been crushed to death in not so long ago.

Suddenly, he was on edge, and he moved down each step with caution as he retraced a path he’d taken at least three dozen times by now. This was the skeleton knight level; he was sure of it, and somehow, he’d made his way back to it.

It looked a little worse for the wear since he’d seen it last, but he wasn\'t too concerned about that. His first concern was why it was here, and what this could possibly have to do with what he was looking for, but his second was even bigger.

If those stairs are in a burial mound, then what’s normally behind the door in the goblin cave? He wondered.

In his mind, everything had fit together in a certain way. They were in order. First, there was one level, and then there was another. It was predictable pattern. Goblins came before skeletons, and they came before orcs. Now, suddenly, the whole thing was lining up more with the real world than with the levels in the Pit in his mind. Suddenly he was thinking about where each of those well-ordered levels was on a map, and the idea made him dizzy.

When he reached the bottom, he found nothing unexpected. The room was scattered with the wreckage of bodies and looked about like he remembered. The knight itself was dead on the floor, too, but Simon looked at it only briefly before he produced some light and moved to the gate at the far end of the sepulcher. If that didn’t actually lead to the next level, then where did it lead to?

The answer turned out to be an antechamber and another set of stairs. He changed his mind. This was nothing like the burial mounds he’d been in before near Schwarzenbruck. This was more like one of the Egyptian tombs he’d seen while watching one too many documentaries on the Valley of Kings.

There were no hieroglyphics, though. Whatever had been painted on the walls had long since flaked away. Simon continued down into the darkness, and it was there he found another room full of the dead.

He raised his sword to shatter the first one as soon as it started to move, but it didn’t. Instead, it just lay there on its dais, confusing him even more.

“Why aren’t these ones coming to life?” Simon wondered aloud as he explored the room, but he had no answer.

Unless… for a moment, he stood stock still in that cold room as inspiration struck him. What if the same thing that animated the dead here caused the ghosts to rise in Darndelle. That wasn’t so far-fetched, was it? Here they had bodies to move around in, and there… well, no bodies meant they had to use the souls themselves or something.

It wasn’t a complete theory, but it was a working hypothesis, and for now, he clung to it as he turned and ran back up the stone stairs, taking them two at a time. Something that was here when he left wasn’t here now. The Warlock in question had taken it, and it was very probably still buried in the graveyard. The question was, what.

Upstairs, the first thing he did was look for the sword. He found it laying just about where he’d probably left it, but was slightly disappointed by its discovery. I mean, if that was the answer I would have solved this place ages ago by accident, he thought to himself with a sigh.

Next he looked for the key, since that was the other prominent item he had experience with, however when he turned the skeleton knight’s body over, he found something completely unexpected: there was a giant hole in its breastplate. To him it looked like something had just punched right through it or grabbed the metal and ripped it open like wrapping paper.

Does that mean there’s a strength word of power? He thought as he studied the hole left behind by whatever had done this.

Simon had searched the room a couple of times, but he’d never thought to take the armor off the skeleton knight, and now that was biting him in the ass.

As he looked at the hole in the chest and wondered what might have been there, it suddenly occurred to him. “Don’t tell me that Dark Heart is actually literal and not, like, a cool name for the damn warlock,” he sighed.

He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at that revelation, but he was fairly sure it was the correct one. Whoever had dug up the rotten corpse had left the cursed artifact behind, and that was what was stirring up all the dead. Now it was up to him to find it and destroy it. The only question was, was it the right thing to destroy it in this level, or back in the skeleton knight level instead?