Simon contemplated his culpability a lot of the first few days of the trip. Oh, he still played dice with the crew some, even though he knew enough about the ship to blend in without it. He also spent a little time every day trying to find the source of the plague that was bound to happen.

Mostly, though, he wondered what he could have done differently. Based on the timing of the levels, he was already fairly certain that the purpose wasn’t to stop every tragedy. Sometimes, it was, but most of the time, it seemed to be to mitigate them. He couldn’t say why Helades had chosen the places and the times she did, and he wasn’t going to waste a question asking.

That was because he already knew the answer. The answer was that this was the answer. This was the way it had to be to get to whatever destiny she’d promised that hero from her story. Beyond that, it didn’t have to make sense. That was only frustrating to him, of course. She could presumably see everything, so it made total sense to her no matter how convoluted things got.

For any normal person, though, it was hard to figure out how rescuing a couple of kids on their way to a festival so they could be chewed up and spit out by the world would lead to the correct outcome. He had no idea, but that didn’t stop him from feeling like he’d let them down.

Hell, Kaylee never should have been there. She wasn’t the first time. Before, it had been a different girl accompanying Eddek on that long, dark road. Would this level have turned out better if she’d been the one to survive? These were the sorts of questions that could drive men mad.

After all, for all he knew, those men had gotten the word of fire from her, and she’d gotten it from him. He had no way to know. Had he used it to fight the owlbear when he went through the level last time? He couldn’t recall.

That was why he gambled and drank as much as anything. Because trading raunchy jokes with a bunch of strangers blocked out the questions that resonated in his soul.

He spent some time filling the mirror in on the last level, even though he doubted he’d ever forget Kaylee’s betrayal. He was just trying to build the habit of telling it everything since he was already sure that there was much that he’d forgotten.

When he felt better he used a word of greater cure in an attempt to purge the whole ship of disease. He doubted that would be enough to unravel the mystery, but he could spare the year.

Really, I’m unlikely to figure it out this go around, he decided, but at least I can stay with the ship this whole time, see what happens, and then help with the plague when we reach our destination.

The very last thing that Simon planned to do was to disembark the boat for Ionar, so, one day he was very surprised to see that they were sailing right by it without any intention to stop. He looked closely and thought it looked different, but it wasn’t until he asked one of the sailors about it that he discovered the horrible truth.

“Ionar? What would we go to that twice-cursed hellhole?” he said with a laugh.

“Twice cursed?” he asked. “You mean something happened there besides the volcano erupting?”

“You don’t know?” the man asked, studying Simon to decide if he was stupid or merely foreign. “That volcanic eruption dragged some monstrosity straight from the lowest pit of hell, and it consumed the whole city. Every place where the lava isn’t, it is.”

Simon’s body went cold. He’d spent half the voyages learning about unintended consequences, and now he discovered that he’d inadvertently unleashed a new evil on an old level. It was shocking, but as he looked at the silhouette of the palace high on the clifftop, it was impossible not to see the truth.

Simon sighed. “I guess I’m not going to figure out the plague on this trip, either.”

“What plague?” the sailor asked, but Simon ignored the man. He was already moving away from the prow where they’d been chatting, the the port side of the ship where they kept one of the long boats. With a word of force, he cut the ropes on both hoists that raised and lowered it into the sea before anyone had any idea what he was up to.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

There were looks of shock and dismay, but he ignored them. This run was toast anyway. He’d already fucked it up as far as he was concerned. He could do one thing right, though, and that was to fix this fucking mess. He’d spend decades here if he had to undo what he’d done. There was no other choice.

After the boat splashed into the water, he vaulted over the rail like some guy in a pirate movie and used a word of lesser force to cushion his landing. Then he picked up a pair of oars and did his best to start rowing to shore. It only took a few minutes for the news of what he’d done to spread on the Sea Seraph. Though they didn’t have cannons, they had plenty of crossbows, and he was well inside their range.

So, once he saw the first one take a shot at him, he used a word of lesser force with every pull of the oars. That little bit of magic pushed him along ten times faster than rowing alone, and he quickly outpaced the ship.

Simon had no idea what rumors would spread about this moment, but he was sure that they would. He beached the boat, and then drug it slightly higher, even though he never really intended to use it again. This was a desolate place, but he wasn’t leaving until he’d purged every last trace of his stupid mistake.

“I should never have opened that damn thing,” he told himself as he started looking around for evidence that the plants had infested this far.

Fortunately, it seemed that they hadn’t. Looking, he thought he could see some evidence that there were a few on the trail near the top, but the infestation seemed to be almost completely contained in the area around the main square and the palace. “Because that’s where I buried that fucking thing,” he growled, kicking a rock.

The more he thought about it, the angrier he got. “I fucking boiled it in lava,” he yelled, screaming so loudly that it echoed off the cliff face back at him. “What the hell else was I supposed to do!”

Leave it in its fucking container, his mind volunteered instantly.

Yeah, that would have been the best choice. It wasn’t like the golden cylinder he’d found it in had any magical runes on it, though. He’d thought it was just a superstition, but it clearly wasn’t.

Simon spent the rest of the day building a shelter and doing a little spearfishing off the now-abandoned jetty. Honestly, it wasn’t bad. He’d never been a seafood guy, but flame-roasted fish and crab that had been buried in the hot ashes of his fire turned out pretty great.

There wasn’t much variety here, of course. He didn’t seen see much in the way of seabirds, so he was sure he’d get tired of it eventually, but for now, he ate like a king.

The well still had drinkable water in it, even if the place was abandoned, and the tavern he’d gotten drunk at last time had never been built. If he was going to be here for a while, then he wanted to get the rhythm of life down pat.

That meant making a gorget so this thing wouldn’t kill him twice the same way. It also meant being methodical and thorough so the damn thing didn’t sneak up on him.

After only two days of that, he was ready to start making his way up the path. He went a little at a time, and he used fire so things wouldn’t grow back. It wasn’t bad, especially early on. That low, there was really only the occasional creeper vine or orange blossom to mark this thing’s slow, creeping path of destruction.

It didn’t get bad until he could actually see where the lava had dripped down from the highest level and ruined the few buildings that had been built along the windy road. There, he found that the real infestation had started. The vines actually didn’t seem to like something besides his fire, so he spent several days experimenting as he slowly burned them away to nothing. In the process, he ruled out wind and sun, as well as poor soil, and was forced to conclude it was seawater.

The first time he poured salt water on a cluster of them, they wilted and died in minutes, and when he checked on that spot two days later, they still hadn’t started to regrow. That was the good news. The bad news was that he didn’t have so much as a bucket to his name.

Thankfully, the well was shallow, but up until now, he’s used a rope made from spliced-together rope ends he’d cut off the ship’s tackle to lower his helmet in the well a couple times at the end of every day to stay hydrated. That might work fine for drinking, but there was no way that he was going to stop this infestation with a helmet full of seawater a day and the odds that he would make the mile-and-a-half walk up and down the cliffside road more than once or twice each day were equally small.

So, he did the next best thing and set to work making a large pot for himself. Finding enough clay for that took a week of digging, and he cracked the first one from the heat when he tried to fire it.

Still, his second try was a success, after he let it bake in the sun for a few days before he baked it over a flame. It was an ugly thing, and though he didn’t think he’d ever be able to balance it on his head, he used leather thongs and a bit of the canvas from his shelter to make a backpack of sorts. Now each day, he could go up, burn away the parts that were likely to attack him, and then drench the soil of a couple dozen weed beds with sea water and watch them die in almost real-time.

That was when he started to make real progress. Relying on just the words of minor fire, it was liable to take him literally forever to clear this infestation, but with enough sea water, things were finally starting to look up.

When Simon started this task, he'd thought of it as Sisyphean. He was going to push this boulder up the hill, not because it was possible, but because it was the only fair punishment in a just world since it was his fuck up.

Now that he was making actual progress, though, he was starting to think it might be possible.