Death After Death

After taking a few steps down, Simon couldn’t help but notice how much colder it was in here than it was in the cave he’d just left. The stairs descended at least three floors before ending in a door with ornate carvings around it. The goblin cave had that moist dampness you expected in a cave, but this was different. It was almost like walking into one of those large refrigerators they had in restaurants. He could see his breath by the time he got to the bottom, but fortunately the stairs were ice free so he wasn’t going to slip and break his neck again.

The door at the bottom opened to reveal a crypt, with stone sarcophagi dominating the floor and niches on the walls where skeletons lay in perpetual rest. So the next level was a crypt, huh? That figured he supposed. Skeletons were even easier than zombies, so at least this wouldn’t be too hard. The skeletons mostly lay in moth eaten robes or other ceremonial garments, but the armor that some still wore had rusted completely through in places. Last time he’d tried to sneak by the monsters, but that didn’t work. They were probably programmed so that it would never work, he realized, wondering how far out he would pull aggro from creatures like this. Not that it mattered - this time he decided that he was just going to go for it as he walked to the first skeleton and swung down hard on the spine, between the skull and the clavicle. The skull fell away almost immediately and he moved to the next one, hoping to kill as many of these things as he could before they started to rise. There had to be almost thirty though, and by the time Simon had beheaded the third, the first few closest to him were starting to rise to their feet.

Once these things were awake and holding their ancient weapons he had to turn his attention from the easiest to kill, to the one that was the closest to killing him. This worked for the next few without any issue, but crucially he noticed that simply stabbing the head or severing an arm did very little. It looked like these things were operating on zombie rules: the only way to make them crumble into dust was to strike their head from their shoulders or to smash the skull to pieces with a savage overhead chop. It turned out that that was easier said than done. Any unexpected move, or half-hearted parry on their part and suddenly the blow he’d lined up to perfectly separate their head from their shoulders became a glancing blow at best. By the time he’d killed the twelfth skeleton he was practically surrounded and utterly exhausted. Now that they were fully awake they were swinging at him as well. Their weapons were slow and easily parried, but with so many attacking him at once the only viable defense quickly became to give ground.

Simon was slowly fighting his way back to the doorway when he saw it. Rising from the tomb farthest from him was a skeletal knight unlike the rest of the moldering skeleton’s he’d slain so far. They were little more than bones and rusted weapons, but it was actually a knight that had been buried in a suit of full plate armor. Even after decades or centuries of being interred it looked almost new, along with the great bastard sword that it unsheathed as soon as it was standing. That wasn’t what attracted Simon’s attention though. It was the glare. The rest of these skeletons only had empty sockets, which was unnerving enough, but the knight had a blue glow where its eyes should be. Simon found himself paralyzed by it, and was unable to look away. As the knight strode toward him in slow motion, he could see clouds of frost radiating from the joints in the armor and finally understood what the word terror really meant.

When Simon was younger he’d spent hours arguing with friends about the difference between fear and terror in different games. He thought that it was a dumb mechanic, and that it was impossible for there to be some sort of fear that was worse than fear itself. He was wrong. He’d obviously failed a saving throw or something, because he was utterly petrified by the personification of death that was walking towards him with unhurried steps. It was a nightmare - a waking dream, and even though he knew that the other skeletons were still a risk he couldn’t do much but hold his sword up numbly as they pressed their attack. Seconds later the first blade pierced his armor, slicing cleanly through his flesh. Others followed, and by the time he dropped his weapon from numb fingers he’d been impaled through the liver, the stomach, and the lungs by no less than six swords and daggers.

Unlike the other deaths he’d suffered so far at the hands of his enemies this one at least wasn’t too painful. It was cold more than anything. Each of the blades that skewered him was bone chillingly cold, but in his dying moments he considered that a small price to pay to escape the horrible gaze of that terrible knight. He lost consciousness before that awful opponent was able to reach him, and died grateful.

When Simon woke up the terror still hadn’t left him completely, and he laid practically paralyzed in his bed for ten minutes before he sat up. “What in the hell was that?” he asked himself. “It had to be some kind of spell - right?”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Either that or I’m a coward, he thought to himself as looked up and noticed the mirror was writing to him. ‘I’m not sure what you’re asking about, can you be more specific?’

“I’m not talking to you,” Simon said automatically before thinking about it. “Actually wait - do you know if the skeleton knight on the fourth floor has some kind of fear based ability? Is it gaze based or an aura or what?”

‘I have no knowledge of the dangers that await you in the pit,’ the screen answered with its normal blue cursive letters.

“Then what good are you? What are you even here for?” Simon asked, but he didn’t care about the answer. He was already standing up and walking to the cabinets to rifle through them for something to eat. Looking at his options didn’t exactly take long. Every time he came back it was the same few options. He could choose between the bread, the cheese, the wine, or the sausages. That was his whole world now. On the bright side he didn’t have to worry about running out of food. All he had to do was die again and his meager larder would be full. As he bit down into the bread he wondered how long it would be until he was hopelessly sick of these choices. At least that was a tomorrow problem, he decided.

The only today problem was deciding what to do with today because he definitely wasn’t ready to go back down into the pit again. Just the thought of it made him shiver as he remembered that cold soulless glow. Maybe tomorrow he’d feel like it, he decided, pocketing the rest of the loaf and slinging the water skin over his shoulder. On his way out the door he belted on the sword but decided not to bother with the crossbow or the leather. After all, if the woods were the same every day then the weather probably was too, and it was going to get hot later. Besides, he wasn’t looking for a fight, he just wanted to get a lay of the land for his mental map and clear his head before he went back down there.

So he went for a walk. First he went part way back along the trail just to make sure everything looked the same. Before the cabin was entirely out of view though, he took a left into the forest, following a small stream to make sure he didn’t get lost. If the rules were the same as his last walk then eventually he’d come back to the trail from the other side. It turned out that he didn’t, but it was hard to say his experiment was conclusive, because walking through the underbrush was slow and exhausting compared to walking on the trail. He did find something new though.

Perhaps a quarter mile and maybe twenty minutes from the trail he stopped for a break with his chest heaving at the edge of the meadow. The meadow wasn’t the important part though. While he waited to catch his breath and make sure there were no monsters patrolling the area to aggro on him he realized the rock he was sitting on wasn’t a rock at all: it was a slice of a toppled column. Once he realized this he stood and pulled his sword looking for the guardian of the ruin to spring out and attack him, but no one did. He did find the rest of the temple set back slightly further into the shadows though. It was so obvious now that he was looking at it, that he wondered how he missed it before.

Simon hacked away at the worst of the vines as he slowly made his way to the top of the stairs. The whole thing seemed almost Roman to him with thick stone pillars, one surviving arch, and part of a surviving Apse. The ceiling was gone though, and the only decorations that survived were stone carvings in the walls and floor. Some of them were pretty, but none of them were in a language he had any chance of translating. He poked around for a while, pushing on larger stones, looking for a secret passage or hidden chest but came away empty handed. “Come on guys,” he grumbled “a location like this and you don’t even have a quest giver? Who’s designing this thing?”

Reluctantly he left such a promising find unfulfilled. Why would it have been included in the game or the challenge or whatever it was with no actual purpose? When he reached the bottom of the stairs he thought about traveling further to see what else might be beyond the meadow but decided against it. One unhelpful discovery for the day was more than enough for him. Instead he walked back, finishing his water before he got to the trail so he could refill it on the way home. The only real disadvantage to his picturesque cabin was a distinct lack of running water, and if he got thirsty after dark the last thing he wanted to do was go outside.

On the way home he finished his bread and had his heart set on roasting a couple of those sausages, but when he got back to the cabin he discovered that the embers in the hearth had gone stone cold and after an hour spent trying to light a piece of wood with the flint and steel he gave up and settled for cheese. He could try again with the sausages tomorrow.

Without a light when the sun finally set behind the trees it got really dark. That was another surprise to Simon. He hadn’t been on a camping trip since he was twelve, so the idea of not being able to turn on a light switch or use the flashlight on his smartphone to solve the problem was like a slap in the face. Reluctantly he went to bed early, but only after he closed and barred every shutter, plunging the already dark cabin into total blackness.

His dreams that night weren’t pleasant, and he woke up repeatedly to visions of that terrible skeleton. It was an awful experience, and as he lay in bed breathing hard after it happened for the third time he heard something very softly rattle the door, and then go around the house trying each window one by one. Simon practically held his breath while all this was going on, and it was only after everything returned to silence that he went outside in bare feet holding the flanged mace to investigate, but there was no one there.

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