Chapter 23: Traumatized
Simon lay there for a long time, just struggling to put the pieces of his mind back together.
He was whole and unharmed, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t escape from the flashbacks that kept springing to his mind unbidden. In the absence of the constant fog of pain and hunger he’d been lost in for so long, his mind was suddenly too sharp, and all the terrible things he’d done were in better focus now than when he’d been doing them. The taste of flesh. The feeling of impossible hunger. The guilt for the people he killed. All of it consumed him until he wanted to scream.
But he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.
Instead, he lay there in a fetal position, unable to even work up the strength to grab the bottle of wine that he knew was sitting nearby. That sour grape juice would at least cleanse his mouth of the coppery taste that still lingered, even though he knew that he’d never devoured human flesh before. Just building up the nerve to do that much though took several more minutes of uncomfortable soul-searching.
It was only once he’d risen and finished half the bottle that he even considered what he should do next. Food? He had no appetite. Fighting? He wanted to die. Conversation? There was no one to talk to except for the mirror, and the very last thing he wanted to do was look at his character sheet after everything that had happened.
“You said that every time I died, I would come back here,” Simon said quietly, still staring at the floor between his feet. “I’ve died some pretty gruesome deaths, but at least that was what you promised. This… this isn’t what I signed up for.”
‘You returned to the entrance of the pit as soon as you died,’ the mirror typed as soon as Simon spared it a glance.
“After I spent a FUCKING MONTH in my own corpse,” Simon yelled with a sudden burst of anger that took him by surprise.
‘Undeath is a special case that blurs the lines between—’ the mirror started to print, one flowing character at a time, but Simon was done with its bullshit.