Chapter 86: Stranger and Stranger
When Simon realized he was back in his cabin instead of his sick bed back at the inn, he sighed and rolled over to go back to sleep. This was to keep away the parts of his brain that flickered to life with a persecution complex almost instantly more than any fatigue, though.
She only killed me because I was starting to find happiness, his mind told him.
That wasn’t true, of course, probably. It was far more likely that life was short and capricious, especially in the medieval era. Even with magic to keep the perils of disease away, not all of his deaths would occur at the hands of people who were trying to kill him. Some of them would just be accidents.
But the idea that most of those accidents seemed to occur when he was happy enough to let his guard down stuck in his craw. Simon’s life in Slany hadn’t been perfect, of course, but it had been pretty great. A community full of people who knew him and thought well of him, a woman who was into him, and all the time in the world to experiment with magic. He’d been burning through his life at the rate of about a decade a year as he experimented, so he wasn’t exactly destined to lead a long and happy life by any measure, though there were solutions to that if he could stomach them.
Eventually, he dragged himself out of bed and stoked the fire in his stove so he could roast some sausages. “Alright, mirror, tell me what we’ve learned from this life.”
Simon expected it to show his character sheet or tell him it didn’t understand. Instead, when he looked over at it, his mouth fell open. There, printed on the glass, was ‘As you requested, you are to avoid the tar in Liepzen castle, and you should avoid fighting fire elementals on level ten in your next journey into the Pit.’
“Wait… How do you know that?” Simon asked. “I thought you couldn’t tell me things about the individual levels.”
‘Nor can I,’ it answered. ‘But you can tell me things, and I will remember them for you.’
“Wait, back up. Didn’t Helades say that you were supposed to help me?” he asked.