Author's Note: Merry Christmas! Have a bonus chapter!

  Moments ter, the monster’s head rolled free of its body and troubled down the sandy slope, leaving a smeared trail of purple blood behind it. Exhausted, Simon stabbed his fming sword into the creature’s corpse one final time and shouted, “Hedes!”

  He paused for breath a moment, then started walking back toward the front of the temple where most of the other statues were. He thought he’d made it through the fight pletely unscathed, but after a few steps, he discovered the truth. The basilisk had almost gotten him on his st run, and his left leg from the calf down had been turo stone.

  Simon paused partway to his destination and shouted again, “Hedes! I’m on level twenty, and you owe me my question!” Then, before he kept moving, he tried a couple of middle-powered spells to see what could be done about his foot. Healing did nothing, but g retur to flesh, though he noticed that he’d lost all feeling, which made it worse than before. As a stone limb, it had been like walking with a peg leg, but now it was like walking with a dead piece of flesh.

  “Which it probably is,” he muttered to himself as he staggered on and tried not to think of the leg rotting while it was still attached to him.

  It was fine. He’d rest and then use a greater heal or something in a few hours. As he limped up the slope, he wondered if it might be smarter to cut the possibly dead limb off and create a new oh greater heal. He wasn’t sure. He’d reattached a finger on one of his men with lesser heal once, and that had worked well enough, but he’d ried to grow a new limb before.

  Simon shrugged. There was a first time for everything.

  When he reached the first statue, he toppled it over with a shove, shattering the thing. He took the head and threw it further up the slope towards the ter of the group and then staggered on to the one. “Hedes! You told me I could ask a question, and st time I was here, you did all the talking!”

  Simon looked around to see if she’d appeared, and when she was still o be found, he tinued breaking statues. God, he was exhausted. In the movies, they always said things like, ‘I’m getting too old for this shit.’ He’d always thought that was dumb, but right now, he felt literally too old for this shit.

  Still, the exhaustion of the fight wasn’t enough to stop him, and slowly but surely, he made a pile of heads. When he had almost two dozen of them there on the fgstones of the temple’s stairs, he finally took cover behind a pilr and whispered, “O???o???n???b???e???t???i???t???,” imagining them being crushed downward like a vibsp;

  In the immediate aftermath, he heard stone shrapnel spray out, and he felt himself go dizzy, but when he looked up, he could see that most of the heads were still rgely intact. It hadn’t been enough.

  “O???o???n???b???e???t???i???t???.” he said again, grinding the bigger parts down into smaller ks and noting that not all of them were destroyed yet.

  He couldn’t save these people’s lives, but he could save their souls. He could get them out of the hell that they were stu. He might be the only one who ever would.

  Simon knew he should rest. He knew he shouldn’t push himself much further, but he still yelled. “O???o???n???b???e???t???i???t???!” again. Simon’s vision greyed briefly as he poured out his power to destroy the stone. He his. He o vent his rage because of all the other things he should have been able to do but hadn’t.

  He felt the tears well up in his eyes as he thought about all the things he hadn’t been able to do, but wiped them away so he could get a good look at the pile of gravel in front of him. One more hit would almost certainly be enough to reduce them to sand and dust. Hopefully, then he’d be able to—

  “Enough,” Hedes called out from further up the slope, standing in the shadow of the temple.

  Simon looked up, with his mouth still open, and sighed. Saying anything without carefully sidering his words might be strued as a question. He hadn’t actually thought he’d get this far. He hadn’t actually thought he’d kill the basilisk, and if he did, he hadn’t expected that she would actually appear to talk to him, so Simon hadn’t actually picked a question to talk to her about. So, he took the opportunity as he slowly strode up the wide, shallow staircase to sider that.

  “You know, this used to be a temple dedicated to me, in its way,” she said nostalgically before she turned and started walking into the half-colpsed thing, leaving Simon to catch up. “That was a long time ago, though.”

  Simon ighat. The st thing he cared about was Hedes. There were so many other questions to explore, including the ohat mattered most to him. Was she faithful? Could I have saved her? Did Varten… They were unthinkable questions that were enough to make him tear up all ain, and he wiped his face with his sleeve even as he tried to focus.

  He khat this was a valuable opportunity, and he shouldn’t waste it trying to make himself feel better, but he couldn’t help it. Asking about the aura some people could see, and their strange rea would be a better choice. Likewise, there were so many questions he wao ask about the devil on level 13 or the nature of magic items and the frozen orb he’d found on level 17. Then there were the missing floors. The pit had a thousand mysteries he needed ao.

  No matter how much he wanted any of those things, though, Freya kept returning to the top of the pile, and he knew he was going to ask about her, even if it wasn’t the optimal thing. He had to. He o know, and by the time he made it to the doorway of the temple, he’d made up his mind.

  “Hedes, How—” he started to ask, but she cut him off.

  “It used to be beautiful once here, you know,” she said, gesturing broadly at the wall behind him. “Not just this temple, but the city too, and the region. Now, it is just an oasis that is critical to certais that have to happen iure. Trade is key for both knowledge and prosperity.”

  As she spoke, he gnced over his shoulder toward where she ointing and noticed a rge mural of what the city must have looked like o was overwhelmingly Greek or maybe Roman. He wasn’t sure, but it was lovely enough to make him wonder what had befallen this pbsp;

  He was about to turn back toward Hedes and finish his question wheiced the ke that someone had painted with a silver gze so that it was just reflective enough to be a distorted mirror. That was enough to give him pause, though, and he approached it for a closer look.

  What he found wasn’t his father staring back at him, but his grandfather. His hair had gone almost pletely white, and his skin had wrinkled. He looked down at his hands and began to pull off his leather gloves with shaking hands, finding nothing but liver spots and wrinkles underh.

  “H-how did I get so old…” he asked.

  Simon knew he’d screwed up as soon as he asked, but there was nothing for it. Even as he was turning to Hedes, she was already smiling sadly.

  “Don’t worry,” she reassured him as she took him by the hand and led him over to the closest piece of rubble rge enough to fun as a bench before sitting them both down on it. “You’ll have time for your other questions too. You’ll be to level thirty and forty before you know it, Simon. You’re doing wonderfully.”

  “But Freya and…” he trailed off as he tried to take her words in. Now that he’d seen how old he’d gotten somehow, he felt like his mind had started to slow down, or maybe it had been doing that ever sihe fight with the monster outside. He holy couldn’t say for sure.

  “Shhhh,” Hedes soothed him, “Your wife was a good girl, and she’s in a much better pce. We aren’t here to talk about her today. We’re here to talk about you and how time flies.”

  “How could this have happened?” he demanded piteously. “Only a day or two ago, I was fine, with just a touch of gray, and before that…”

  “Well, you have used an awful lot of magi the st couple of days,” she chided him gently. “Like it was going out of style, so to speak.”

  “Well, I’ve been casting spells the whole time I was i,” he said, “and it’s never mattered before.”

  “More specifically, you’ve always died violently before it’s gotten around to mattering,” she corrected him gently. “But this time, you lived for… well, almost a year. That’s a lot of soldiers to mend and a lot of moo sy, and then there’s the sword…”

  “What about the sword?” he asked, feeling like she’d mentioned something important.

  “Well, Simon, when you copied those runes, you tied it to the only source of power you had avaible: you.” Hedes saw his look of shock, she added. “Where did you think all of that fire was ing from exactly? Nothing is free in this world, not even magic.”

  “I… ” Simon started to speak, but he fot what he was going to say, and for a moment, he felt like he was going to faint.

  “It’s fine,” she said, pulling him down into her p. “Spells themselves aren’t so bad. They take perhaps a month, but—”

  “A month?!” he gasped. “Each? That’s worse than smoking!”

  “Well, the minor and throttles the life force. They’re more like a day,” she said with a shrug. “It’s not a thing.”

  “What about the greater spells then?” Simon asked, not sure that he wao know the answer.

  “A year,” she answered without hesitation. “That’s a lot for a you. With magic items, most of the evil mages throughout history will use the life force of less-than-willing victims or other clever tricks, but between your sword and your armor, you’re bleeding more than a week a minute from your sht now. That’s why you’ve gotten so much older. Magi be very dangerous.”

  “Like the orb and the hellgate,” Simon said, feeling exhausted. He felt more at peaow that he uood what had happened.

  “Yes,” she agreed, reag up to stroke his hair softly. “No matter how much the good men of the world try te the magic of the past, there will always be someo there that discovers some old secret. Nothing stay buried forever.”

  Simon wao ask her about that, but he was too weak to do so. He was all used up. All he could do was y there and appreciate the cool stoh him as he looked up at the beautiful Goddess.

  “You’ll figure out all of that eventually, Simon,” she whispered. “I have faith in you. You’ve bee what you always wao be - A hero.”

  He closed his eyes then, imagining that Freya was the one who was holding him and telling him these things. He’d often wao die i, but never more so than he did right now. If he were to die right this moment, he was sure that he’d be reunited with his Freya ierlife, and then he’d finally have his answers. Instead, he was going to have to do all of this all ain.

  Simon reached up and clutched the ring around his neck as he felt himself start to slip away. This wouldn’t stop him, he decided, as he imagihat fming sword burning down like a dle somewhere outside. No matter how many times he died, he was ing back to finish this thing. He’d go as deep as he o until all of his questions were answered.

  His hand gripped the small piece of jewelry around his neck, and then it sed… ao the floor as he experienced airely new death i: old age.