I would have been worried that we would run out of air, but there was a tiny gap between the stone blocks that I had used to close the opening and the logs that formed the coffin, and that was enough. Even laying head to toe, I hadn’t experienced this level of physical intimacy in thirteen years, which sounds pretty pathetic, but it wasn’t like conjugal visits had been an option when I was locked up. After the roof collapsed on us, we listened to the troll shift around the rubble for a while, and then it seemed to shuffle off.

If Esmelda and I were going to be married, even in name only, I figured we should get to know each other. Besides, talking made the situation seem less awkward and uncomfortable than it was.

“Do you have other family in Erihseht?” I asked. “Is it just you and Boffin in that manor?”

Esmelda was quiet for a long moment, and I wondered if I had touched on a difficult subject already. She was still facing the wall. I stared into the patterns of bark a foot above my face, tinted gray by the pale blue light of the System screens, and waited. If she didn’t want to talk anymore, I wasn’t going to push.

“It’s just the two of us,” she said. “My mother passed away when I was young.”

I shut my eyes and inwardly castigated myself. What a terrible thing for me to bring up. I’d visited their home, and her mom hadn’t been there. I should have realized family was a sensitive subject.

“Sorry,” I said. “You don’t have to talk about it.”

“No,” she said. “It’s alright. The memories I have of her are mostly good ones. It was hard growing up without her, but my father was wonderful. We’ve always been a team. I sometimes wished that he would find someone else, for himself, not for me. But I don’t think I suffered much for the lack.”

“Can I ask what happened to her?”

“Bedlam wart. There was an infestation in a hollow near Erihseht. It happens sometimes, though it's difficult to say where it comes from. Tipple says the spores can be carried on the wind for hundreds of miles if the colonies are allowed to mature.”

“Bedlam wart? Is that a fungus?”

“Yes. It’s native to Dargoth, and it cannot thrive in sunlight. But sometimes they take root in dark places even here. And they are very dangerous. I was among the children that found the colony and went to fetch my mother. She got us all away and cleared it out with fire. But then she was sick. We think it was the spores.”

She recited the story tonelessly, like it was a series of facts that had nothing to do with her. It reminded me of something. After that year that I spent in solitary confinement, I’d eventually been shipped to another prison and started talking to a psychiatrist. He also worked at a university, and he was often accompanied by students as a part of their medical training, and they would ask questions to his patients. Once, when I’d gotten done explaining what I did to get locked up and what the sentencing process had been like one of the students commented that I sounded like I was dissociating from those events.

I hadn’t known what he meant in a technical sense, but the statement had struck me. Dissociating is a common response to trauma, and while I hadn’t thought of what I had done or what I had gone through afterward as being particularly traumatic, I had realized that I did tend to mentally separate myself from the world around me, and from myself, if that’s even a coherent idea. Listening to Esmelda, it was hard not to think that she hadn’t packed that part of her life away as a way of dealing with it. I couldn’t imagine the kind of guilt a child would feel if they went to their mother for help, and then she died because of it.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, wishing there was a redo button for this conversation. “That must have been difficult.”

“It was a long time ago,” she said. “What about you? You had a family, didn’t you, in the world you came from?”

“Yeah. Of course. My parents were both teachers. And I have three brothers. They were my best friends.” It was weird talking about them in the past tense when they were all alive, but it wasn’t as if I was ever going to see them again. I was the one who was dead. My chest tightened.

“Do you miss them?”

“I do.” I’d been keeping so busy, that it had been easier to not think about it than to reckon with the fact that we were permanently separated. In some ways, I was used to that. For years, it had been normal for me to go weeks or longer without any contact with my family. Phone calls had been really expensive at first, but the company that provided the phones had eventually lost a lawsuit which forced them to lower the prices, so in the second half of my sentence I’d talked to either my brothers or my parents almost every day.

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There was a world of difference, however, between rare visits and occasional phone calls and no possible contact at all.

“They feel so far away,” I said, “that it’s almost like they aren’t real. That none of it was real. Every time I die, it gets harder to remember them, and Plana feels more like my home. That’s kind of a good thing, I guess, if I’m stuck here. But I’m afraid that if it goes on long enough, it will be like I never knew them at all.”

Esmelda turned over again so she could look at me, though she was doing so from the perspective of my boots. “What do you mean, every time you die? You said the goddess brought you here after your death. Has it happened to you more than once?”

“Oh, yeah. Not the transmigration thing, but since I’ve been here, I’ve been eaten by zombies a couple of times.”

“Will!” Esmelda punched my shin.

“What?”

“You died, were reborn, and didn’t say anything?”

“It didn’t come up. Plus, it happened before I met you, and you guys didn’t know what I was, and it wasn’t like I could prove that it happened. Anyway, you know more about heroes than I do. Is that not normal?”

She thought about it. “The heroes survived impossible things. And they lived long lives. Lord Umber could bring someone back from the brink of death, but there is no record in the Shui of the heroes dying and returning. The Dark Lord is immortal. I don’t know if he can die. But maybe he can, and he returns, like you.”

If that was true, it was evidence that respawning was an extension of the “Minecraft powers” thing. That would certainly explain why it was called the Survivor System. But it also meant that the other heroes were probably really gone. Whoever had left a message on the stone by my spawn point was long dead, unless that person had also shared my System.

“Do you think it’s just the two of us?” I asked. “Are Kevin and I the only heroes left?”

“I don’t believe that,” Esmelda said. “Mizu would not leave Plana unguarded for so long. But I think she sends her heroes only when and where they are needed. There may be others, but the world is wide.”

“The Free Kingdoms,” I said, “and Dargoth. What else is there?”

“The Free Kingdoms stretch to the sea. But there are other lands beyond Dargoth. I do not know their names. Plana is larger than what I or anyone in Erihseht could tell you.``

A phantom screamed. Even through the coffin and the other intervening materials, it was so loud that it felt like the monster was in there with us. We both fell silent and listened to the dull moans of shamblers outside. There was an occasional impact as if they were dropping into the basement to get closer to us. Planks shifted, and the moans grew closer.

“Who were you?” Esmelda asked, distracting me from what was going on outside. “In your other life.”

“I was nobody,” I said.

“That can’t be true.”

“I was just a person. I didn’t accomplish anything great. I screwed things up more than I fixed them. Mizu should have picked a better hero.”

“This is ridiculous,” Esmelda said.

“What?” But she was already turning herself around. She curled, and then crawled over my legs, avoiding the sword as she repositioned herself so that we were facing the same direction. I turned onto my side to make room, and the sword dropped between us. Her face was inches from mine, her wide gray eyes, her lips.

“You weren’t nobody,” she said.

“I really was. I worked a nobody job, and lived a nobody life.”

Her eyes softened. “You didn’t dream of anything more?”

“I did, but I’d screwed things up.”

“What does that mean?”

Well, she’d already agreed to marry me, so it probably wouldn’t change anything if I told her. It wasn’t like I was shy about my past. Everyone I’d worked with had known I’d done time. It would have been incredibly awkward to try and dance around the subject because any life experience that I talked about would have either involved referring back to when I was a teenager, or to when I was in prison. It had been easier to just be honest with people. But this felt different.

“When I was young, I made a series of increasingly bad choices. I committed crimes, and I was caught, and I was imprisoned for a long time.”

She didn’t flinch. If anything, she looked interested. “What did you do?”

“Some robberies.”

“Why?” It was a simple question, and it was one I’d been trying to answer my entire adult life.

“I was stupid, but I thought I was smarter than everybody. I got frustrated with my job, and I quit and ran out of money. But I lied to my family and pretended I was still working. Then I just did it. There isn’t anything I can say that would make it make sense.”

“Did you hurt people?”

“Not physically. I scared them. Then they gave me the money and I left. It was banks. They had rules that if someone tried to do that, they were supposed to just hand over the money and call the police, so I knew I wouldn’t have to do anything to them.”

She was quiet for a while.

“Banks? Like river banks?”

Oh, yeah. Medieval economics.

“It’s a place where people keep their money, sort of. It’s complicated. Money lending. It’s a big business, anyway.”

“I suppose the goddess could have chosen a better hero.” There was something in her eyes that told me she wasn’t saying that as a judgment. She was almost smiling.

“You aren’t reconsidering the whole marriage thing?”

She shook her head. “Mizu chose you. She does not make mistakes. Whoever you were, whatever you did, it was a part of who you became, and a part of why she decided to bring you here to help us.”

“You have more faith than I do.”

Now she truly did smile. “Then that is something you can learn from me.”