Chapter 107: Burning Questions
As the strange memory that wasn’t his own faded, Simon found himself alone on the dark floor of the cave. He wanted to thank Helades, but the goddess that had given him such terrible, brutal insight was gone, and he was, along with his self-loathing, for not having done more to make Freya happy.
The whole thing had ripped open the infected wound that was her passing, and right now, it hurt almost as much as it did in that terrible moment. That it might heal cleanly this time did nothing to stop the sobs that wracked him for the next few minutes as all the emotion and the poison poured out of him in the privacy of that foul cave, with nothing but the sightless eyes of the dead ogre to see his shame.
He might have lingered there for hours, wallowing in his self-pity, but eventually, the minor wounds on his back that had been inflicted by the spray of stone and bone shrapnel began to ache, and he was forced to speak a few words of minor healing to address them.
That one small act was enough to remind him of where and who he was. He had infinity to mope if he wanted to, but that wouldn’t get him out of the Pit.
“Just what, seventy levels to go?” he muttered as he forced himself to his feet. “I fuckin’ wish. More like eighty I think. Maybe ninety. It’s hard to say.”
As Simon groped his way toward the light, he vowed to make a proper accounting on his next trip down through the levels and use the mirror to make sure that he knew exactly how many levels he’d completed, even if that seemed to be occasionally subject to change.
Still - he was pretty sure he’d completed at least ten percent of them. That was something, right? Thirty percent explored, ten percent completed? Yeah, he could live with that.
As Simon got closer to the entrance, he could see the dried gore and half-devoured corpses that decorated the place and took solace that the monster he’d killed, however crudely, would never trouble these people again. He wondered what people would make of the stone-entombed corpse when he found it, but that was a riddle for someone else.
“I probably should have checked for treasure or something,” he mused as he approached the entrance, but he just shrugged the idea off. A careful search of that place would be disgusting. And he wanted no part of that. Fresh air was the real treasure as far as he was concerned.