The following day Simo like shit. This wasn’t just because the life energy he’d stolen from the would-be thief had faded to some degree. It was also because he’d do at all. He was definitely looking and feelier than before he’d dropped a nuke on the graveyard, but he was still pretty far from one hundred pert.

  Draining the life of a man had felt worlds better than draining the life of a swarm of is. It was dangerously good, and though, in this instance, he could certainly say what he’d done was self-defe was a small fig leaf for such a terrible thing.

  Would it have been aer if I’d beheaded him with a word of force or stopped his heart with a bolt of lightning instead, he wondered. At least this way, the asshole lived.

  Whether he lived or died wasn’t the problem, though. The worst part, though, was that Simon craved to do it again. That craving was enough to make him decide that Zyvon was the most dangerous word he knew, a haunted him.

  As he y there with a headache, trying to ighe ctter of crockery from the first floor and the sound of wagons from the street beyond, some small part of him whispered that he could easily steal a little strength from any one of them, just to silehe throbbing in his head. No one would know.

  Well, no o his experience score, for whatever that was worth. He still hadn’t gotten a straight answer out of the mirror, and baring a better question, that robably what he was going to ask Hedes about someday on level 40. That was a long way off, though.

  For now, he forced himself to get out of bed and move. He might lose weight if he y there and wasted away, but he was never going to get stronger like that. Instead, he explored the backstreets, looking for someoo fight, and when that didn’t happen, he went beyond the walls of the city, looking for moo fight. Sadly, this wasn’t a video game, and there were no areas to grind, so at su, he returo the inn.

  There, at least, he made a scious effort not to get drunk again. Though it was uandable when he’d been hurting, he ast that now, and he’d been heading down a dark road with that sort of behavior. He had no wish to add al to his list of achievements. Instead, he listened as people talked, aried to learn more about the city he found himself in.

  He could leave at any time, of course, but even if he was ready for the fight on the level, he was close enough to solve this ohat he was loath to leave it. He’d beaten the mist once; he just o figure out what he was missing so he could strike the final blow.

  It took a lot of random versations and buying a lot of drinks for talkative old men before he finally found someone who cimed to know the story of why it had started in the first pbsp;

  “Folks talk about the mist like it’s been there in that graveyard forever, but it ain’t,” a retired mert told him. “It wasn’t here the first time I passed through Darndelle, nor even the sed or third time, but one day after a trip up north, it had just sort of settled in.”

  “Well, that should have made the cause easy enough to figure out then,” Simon said. “Do you have any idea what caused it?”

  “Of course! They buried the wrong body in it! It was some warlock, that was said to be cursed and all that. Turns out the rumors had been right,” the greybeard ughed. “Poisohe whole pce, and only the light of day is enough to keep his angry shade at bay.”

  “Well, why didn’t they just dig him back up and dispose of the body some other way?” Simon asked. “Toss him in the sea or burn him to ash?”

  “They did just that, so the story says,” the trader nodded. “They dug him up a week after they buried him, they burned his corpse to dust, and then they scattered that dust into the river so he could never again be restituted.”

  “So then, why is the graveyard still cursed?” Simon asked.

  “I wish I knew,” the man ughed. “The church has offered a tidy sum for anyone who purge the problem ond for all, but no matter who shows up to do the deed, the mist fades for a week or a month, and then it returns with a vengeance. I tell you, the nd is poisoned.”

  Simon’s knowledge about the way magic worked didn’t cover curses and whether or not they were real, but then, that didn’t mean anything. He knew how to cast a few spells, but he only had a basiowledge of the way that magical items worked, and both the diagrams he’d made about the ruhat powered the golem or held back hell were still beyond him.

  So, realistically, he had no idea if or how something would be cursed. Since he was definitely dealing with an evil spirit of some kind, and he’d killed plenty of skeletons in the past, he was ined to agree that something like that ossible, though he doubted it was as simple as a word or two he didn’t have.

  Simon asked more questions of the man, but he had no answers. It was unreasonable for Simon to expect that he would, of course. Who could say where a body was buried twenty years ago. He’d be hard-pressed to dra to a pce he visited frequently but hadn’t been there for twenty years.

  That applied to pretty much everywhere he’d ever been since he’d been gone from Earth for like a tury now. His whole life was slowly fadih the tidal forces of the Pit’s tinual grind.

  There was nothing that said he had to keep going, of course. Darendelle was a niough city. He could stop living off his gold, get a real job killing things, and enjoy a nice, quiet life here. The King didn’t seem so bad, and because of the nature of the city as an innd trade hub, they were friendly enough to outsiders.

  That felt too much like giving up to him, though. Simon would be happy to spend a lifetime in a level so long as he got to clear it, but to just decide it was home meant that he’d stop looking and striving, and that was intolerable to him. If he did that, then all he would do rove Hedes right and make all the suffering he’d eo get to the point so far pointless.

  “Mirror, how many floors have I pleted so far?” Simon asked when he was ba the room, studying his washbasin.

  ‘18 floors are currently pleted,’ it responded in wavering, glowing blue text.

  “Eighteen,” he told himself. “Well, the’s make it een, shall we?”

  The m, he visited the temple o the graveyard, making sure not to gh the door that led to the level to do so. It was a lovely old building with fancy mosaid even a rge stained-gss window.

  Simon had yet to see any evidehat the Gods of this world were real at this point, but he took a better safe than sorry approach with them. Just because magic was real here didn’t mean that the religions had to worship real gods and goddesses. After all, that hadn’t stopped any number ions oh, so he didn’t see why that should matter one way or the other.

  Still with his twin worries about the shadows that some people saw in his soul and the gnawing huo find another excuse to use Zyvon, he went inside and offered a tithe for a beion. Would the priests or the acolytes be able to see him? Simon wondered. Would they brand him a warlod try to burn him at the stake or something?

  It wasn’t impossible, but part of him certainly hoped that they would try. Instead, they took his silver, gave him a blessing, and then answered his questions about the history of the cemetery.

  It turned out that they did indeed have recoing back that far, but the name of the man interred had been lost to time, so it was impossible to cross-referehem. “How you expeeoe this blight if you don't even know the guy’s name?” Simon asked in frustration.

  “Ah, you see, our records tain only names of those who are buried here,” the priest corrected, “and sihis man was dug up shortly after he was buried, he’s not in our records anymore.”

  “But he was buried, soo…” Simon said, a little exasperated. If he tried to sce every st inch of the graveyard with fire or something again, they’d probably arrest him. He needed a target more specific than ‘the graveyard.’

  “Well, if you discover his name and preferably the date, then we could probably go back through the records and tell you where he was buried,” the priest said, trying to be helpful.

  “And where am I supposed to get that information?” Simon sighed.

  “The ty seat where he was tried and executed might know,” the priest said helpfully.

  That turned out to be a lie, though a subtle o turned out that the ty seat would, but that there were dozens of ties in the Kingdom. Even if he just visited the nearby ohat meant he had to travel to eight different towns, which was going to be at least a hundred miles of walking or riding.

  Simon sighed and got started, thinking of it as a weight loss pilgrimage as much as anything else. He bought a few supplies, like a new bow, a better backpack, a warm bedroll, and some fortable boots, but eschewed a horse. He wasn’t in a hurry.

  Maybe I find some goblins to suck dry, he thought hopefully as he left the city gates behind him.

  Over the few weeks, he visited five different towns before he found at least some answers in the form of a particurly knowledgeable records keeper in Lyndon Hills. He didn’t know precisely what the name of the warlock was, but he did recall the Bckheart i as he referred to it and was happy to tell Simon all the lurid details, though the only thing that was really useful to him was the town where all of this had started, a little town a few days ride to the north called Kawsburl.

  It was standard fare as most of these warlock stories went, a stranger arrived in Kawsburl a decade before things had e to a head. He’d kept to himself, he’d been niough, but people had started dying and there were strange lights sometimes at night. The trouble had really only started when and angry mob showed up oranger’s doorstep to demand answers.

  Almost everyone in that mob died that night, the clerk told him, and in the end it took trained witch huo find the monster and bring him to justice. It turned out that the whole thing got its name from dead heart ihe mahey finally cut him open after killing him the fourth time. The warlock simply wouldn’t stay dead.

  The thing that bother Simon, though, was how he said it like it was just a horror story, like the man was retelling the events of Sleepy Hollow or something, but Simon couldn’t help but imagine himself in the role of the vilin as the man described the fire and lightning that the evil mage was supposed to have summoned.

  He suddenly had a much better idea of why people disliked magi this world. He’d heard stories like this at the bar, of course, but he’d never really felt like they were about him. After he draihe life out of that mugger, though, and after he’d been disappoihat no bandits gave him an opportunity to do it again, he couldn’t help but feel like maybe he was the bad guy.

  Well, not the bad guy. He was a hero, but tely, he’d been a little less than heroic. He’d have to work on that.