Chapter 101: Thirsty
Simon searched the city for two more days and never once found the portal. So, in desperation, he retraced his steps and went back to the south again. He found three burned out villages before he found the one that he’d started in weeks ago.
The fires were long since out, and since most of the corpses had been picked clean, the carrion birds had largely left too, leaving him alone with the wreckage. He wasn’t sure if he’d find what he was looking for here, either, but if he didn’t, he wasn’t sure where exactly he was supposed to be looking for.
He didn’t find it on the first day he was there, or the second. It was only on the third day when he was getting ready to leave that he noticed that the bleak plains that surrounded him looked a little more like a full-blown desert through one of the doors than the rest of the landscape. That was when he knew he’d finally found his damn portal.
In that house he found another dead family. It was tragic, of course, but he’d seen this tragedy a dozen times in the last 24 hours, and it had lost its impact. In this case, the way that the woman hadn’t been burned to a crisp or picked clean compared to everyone else made him think she’d died later than them.
“Is this really what I was here for?” he asked in frustration. “There’s a whole war going on, and I thought I was supposed to stop that, but really I just needed to save this one person?”
Simon shook his head. That was crazy. He would definitely come here first the next time he was here, but the thought that this woman had died because the instructions had been unclear was more than a little infuriating.
Simon turned from the body and spent several minutes studying the portal to the next level, but other than the fact that it was a desert, there weren’t many clues to make out. It didn’t look too dangerous, and part of him thought there was something familiar about it, but he kind of suspected that he’d feel that way about all deserts after his time as a statue.
He was about to go through when he changed his mind. The idea of leaving this woman and her family here just dead was simply too miserable, so he decided he’d experiment a little with his new word and build them a shallow grave.
It’s the least I can do since no one told me I could save them! He thought in frustration.