Chapter 74: Horrible Timing
“Damn it!” Simon cursed as soon as he felt himself lying comfortably back in his own lumpy bed once more. It was a cheap fucking death, and he pounded his fist against the straw mattress in frustration. Just like that, less than a week into that run, it was over, and he was back where he started.
He’d been prepared to fight more zombies or maybe a necromancer. He’d been banking on some new twist he could sink his teeth into, and with any luck, a tome with a few new words of power, but a trap? Right now, he wanted to vent his frustrations on the bottle of wine or even the mirror, but he forced himself to calm down and lay there with his eyes closed. While everything was still fresh, he took in every last detail and tried to make sense of a trap that felt like it had been laid especially for him, even though that should be impossible.
“No one even knows I exist anymore besides Helades,” he whispered to himself. “That’s half the problem of this damn place.”
Instead, he focused on the dead body and the magic at play. Obviously, his decision to kill the zombie in the coffin had triggered the whole thing, but was the result of the people who’d originally buried the man, or had that spell been cast by whoever laid the trap? That was unknown and more than likely unknowable.
When Simon went back, he could always check the inscriptions he’d seen here and there on the stones, but those seemed more like prayers or little summaries about the deeds of the men that had been entombed in the barrow than anything that was actually useful.
Had the paper crown replaced a real one? Is that what the author had meant? How could he have known that whoever found it would have a next life? He sighed, slowly sitting up before he reached for the bottle.
“Mirror - does anyone in the pit know that I’m not a part of their world? Like - that I’m an outsider and doing this over and over again?” he asked, expecting another complicated version of I-don’t-know.
Instead, he was pleasantly surprised to read, ‘Some supernatural entities that dwell within the Pit have realized that there is something unnatural occurring on their world, though they are rare.’
“Interesting,” he answered, leaning forward. “Can you give me examples or tell me if…”