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.

“Vosden,” he said, carefully pronouncing the word for earth for the first time as he imagined the grave opening up directly below where the bodies lay.

It worked flawlessly, opening up a three-foot-deep grave beneath the knot of tangled limbs. The sudden motion scared the crow perched atop one of them enough that it flew away rather than be buried alive.

Simon whispered the word a second time, and the earth smoothed over the corpses, making them vanish from sight as if they’d never been. It was only once that was done that he finally turned around and stepped through the portal.

The differences were small but immediate. Where he’d just left the burned out village, the rocky soil was missing its patchy yellow grass only because it had been burned away. Here, though, on the other side of the invisible line, he doubted there had ever been any vegetation at all. This was a true desert, not a temporary one, and the fine yellow sand couldn’t hold in any of the water.

Or maybe because there isn’t any water to hold in, he thought, looking at the distant mountains. There wasn’t a trace of vegetation on their blasted, rocky surfaces.

Simon wondered for a moment what it was he was supposed to be doing here, but as he slowly spun 360 degrees, he found an oasis that was almost directly behind him. It wasn’t much, but there were a handful of palms and a few thorn bushes crowded around brackish-looking waters.

There was even what looked to be a small merchant caravan, too. As Simon walked toward it, down the slope of the dune, he saw that he’d exited through what had once been a door frame… No, that wasn’t right. It had been a stone frame of a window at some point, though there was so little of the building it was attached to sticking above the sand that he wasn’t sure what it was attached to.

He didn’t really care, though. The reason he was here was almost certainly the oasis or the caravan, and since he didn’t see any monsters, that either meant that the monster was a human or that there might not be one at all.

I suppose it could be a crazy plant monster, he thought, suddenly looking at the approaching bushes with suspicion as he got closer, but he didn’t think that was likely.

No monsters jumped out to meet him, though, and no men attacked him. Instead, a few of the sunken-cheeked men looked up from where they were scattered about the meager shade and looked at him with weary eyes.

Still, none of them said anything or tried to bar his way. It wasn’t until he got to the water’s edge that he saw the problem: there were bodies, or at least parts of them, floating in the water.

That was enough to explain why everyone was miserable-looking. From a distance, he’d assumed they were stones, but from here, there was definitely at least a boot, a couple severed heads, and a few other less identifiable pieces bobbing up and down.

“What happened here…” Simon said with a sigh.

“They got you too, huh?” someone said behind him. “What a waste, right? Fight through all that just to end up here at the end of nowhere with nothing to drink but poison.”

“Someone did this on purpose?” Simon asked. “Who?”

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“I don’t think that those bodies chopped themselves up,” the swarthy man laughed. He wore long, sweat-stained robes over his ring mail armor.

To Simon’s eye, he didn't seem like a particularly nice man, but it would seem that the fact that he was about to die had given him a certain dark humor. Simon could completely understand that.

“The Arenni? Raffa’s men? Who can say?” the man said with a shrug. “It's an ugly business, but that’s what happens in war. It lets all the ugliness out, and it’s got to pool up somewhere.”

“Their poison won’t stop me from slaying them in my next life,” another man boasted. “The desert may claim my bones, but my vengeance will be eternal.”

After a few minutes of conversation, Simon figured out what was going on. This wasn’t a caravan. It was three or four different groups who had arrived here over the last week or so. They were either on or near a trade route, or at least, this was one place you could go through normally to avoid some nearby war that was taking place.

He wasn’t a hundred percent sure of the details, in the same way that he wasn’t 100% sure if the water had been tainted merely with the human remains or if it had been poisoned as well; the accounts seemed to vary wildly.

Both of the problems were probably solvable to Simon, but rushing into that with magic without at least trying to understand what was happening was only going to get him killed. So he poked around, quickly discovering that about half of the people he thought were here were dead already.

The small campsite belonged to the people that came here first, but they left behind only tents and cold cookfires along with their belongings. The caravan came after them. It had two carts and a covered wagon filled with goods but not enough water to make their horses go any farther without dying.

Sometime after them, a few mercenaries and deserters made their way here as well, but most of them ended up face down at the water’s edge or lying dead in the distance as they tried and failed to reach the next watering hole.

“And for what?” Torrin asked. “If they poisoned this mud puddle, then they certainly did the same to old well and sweet water. If my maker has decided it is time, I shall return to him well-rested and not sweating like a pig.”

Simon nodded at that, and then he got up and decided to make a water filter to save some of these people before it was too late. He would have just told them to boil the water, but there wasn’t much in the way of wood here, and honestly, he wasn’t sure that would be enough to get all the toxins out.

Either way, it didn’t matter. Sunset was coming, and he had a feeling that not all of them would live to see the next sunrise without his help.

So, the first thing he did was trade the merchants a glass of water from his skin in exchange for an empty barrel. After that, it was pretty straightforward.

Simon wasn’t exactly a survivalist, but he’d seen about a million hours of streaming video on every topic imaginable over the last decade, and he had a good understanding of water filters because of all the cheap sponsorships that flaunted charcoal activation and whatever else.

He took his barrel, and after mounting it on a rock and poking a hole in it, he tore apart the tent of a deadman to line the bottom with a few layers of cloth while everyone watched him in confusion or amusement.

He let them joke. He even laughed at some of them, but he didn’t let that distract him as he picked up rocks to make the bottom layer that took the longest. After that came the charcoal, which he didn’t actually have, but he figured wood ash was close enough.

He seemed to remember that he was somehow involved in making soap or lye, too, but he didn’t think that would matter. He wasn’t going to use too much. By the time he’d gotten that far, the sun was close to setting, and it would be getting dark soon. The oasis had gotten quieter, but only because people were saving their strength.

Simon wasn’t too worried about that. He could probably make that water drinkable with a few words, but when he left, someone might just poison it again. Leaving behind a water filter felt like a better option.

After all, it wasn’t like he could take a heavy oak cask with him. By the time he was finished, the thing was probably going to weigh as much as he did, which was all the motivation in the world he needed to keep losing weight.

Even in the dark, filling the thing with sand wasn’t a problem. He just filled a sack in the desert not far from the oasis and then dumped it in his barrel two dozen times until it was most of the way to the top.

Simon was pretty sure it was supposed to have a gravel layer, too, but he didn’t have any gravel, so he would just have to make do.

I mean, I might be able to use Vosden to turn sand to gravel, he thought to himself, but using magic to avoid using magic would kind of defeat the purpose as far as he was concerned.

When all that was done, the silhouette that was Torrin asked, “Is this the part where you show us how to turn sand to water?”

Everyone laughed at that, but Simon grabbed the helmet of a dead man, and used it to start filling his barrel a gallon at a time. Thanks to how much he was spilling on each trip from the muddy pool, he honestly had no idea how long it would take.

“We aren’t going to drink poison or sand,” Simon corrected them. “We are going to let the sand clean the water. That way, you can quench your thirst, and the desert can keep its poison.”

“That seems… unlikely,” the warrior said.

Simon couldn’t see his face, but he could hear the other man’s skepticism, so he stopped what he was doing and raised his water skin to the crowd of onlookers. “I’d happily trade every drop I have for a lantern and some oil,” he said, “Any takers?”

“What say I just take it from you,” another man said, rising unsteadily to his feet as he pulled out a vicious scimitar. “Since you’re being so generous and all.”

Simon shook his head in despair. “If you want me to kill you literally minutes before there’s enough water for everyone, then—”

Simon’s words were cut off by the man’s unexpected charge. He held up his flimsy water skin as a shield right in the path of the other man’s sword, and when he suddenly pulled back the weapon to avoid wasting the water, Simon grabbed him by the collar and headbutted him so hard that he dropped to his knee, stunned.

Simon stepped back, coping with the sudden sharp pain, but even as he rubbed his forehead to see if he was bleeding, he said, “Can we please all just calm down for like… 20 minutes. There will be plenty of water for everyone, I promise.”

After that, the merchant loaned Simon his oil lamp, and after lighting it, Simon hung it from a tree above his filter. No water had come out yet, but he wasn’t surprised. As dry as the sand was, he imagined it had to soak up quite a bit of water first.

So, for the next ten minutes, he brought load after load of brackish dirty water until the top of the barrels was nothing but a small mud puddle. It was only several minutes after that, that he saw water finally starting to drip into the cup beneath the barrel. At first, it was a trickle, but slowly, it became a tiny stream, and after a couple of minutes, he had a small wooden cup filled with cool, clean water.