The grimoire’s cover was burned badly enough to be unrecognizable, but the pages were barely singed at the edges, so the whole thing was readable. Simon breathed a sigh of relief at that, and using the minor word of light, he briefly inspected a few passages to see if anything had changed, but it looked the same as he remembered it. 

Once he was satisfied with that, he investigated the golem’s runes. And found them to be largely readable but not completely comprehensible. The thing seemed to be powered by a large compound word that he didn’t truly understand and couldn’t quite bring himself to pronounce. It was very similar in that respect to the unidentified rune that powered the icy sword on his hip. 

They weren’t the same, though. Simon spent several minutes comparing the two to make sure that was the case. Both of them were several times larger than any of the other runes on either object and resembled a knot that was like a long compound word, but it was hard to say for sure. He just… 

Simon shook his head to clear it. Then he looked through the smaller runes for any words he didn’t already know. There was Zyvon, which was what transferred the power from whatever the large rune was to the spell itself, and these were connecting runes that didn’t have a direct literary meaning. This one he couldn’t say, but he knew it regulated the strength of the mana going through it. It was a mess. He would have thought that something this complicated would use much different pieces than he was used to, but instead, it seemed to use the same parts in a much more complex way. 

The part that he found most interesting was the Hyakk rune, though. It was central to the whole thing, but in his experience, it had always meant healing. Here, though, in the context it was being used, the rune meant life more literally. 

“Just how much are these things open to interpretation?” he asked himself in annoyance. “A circuit board or a line of code doesn’t need to be read in context, but if these things are more like a haiku, then I’m fucked.”

Every time he felt like he was starting to understand the magic system of this place more, he came across some new wrinkle that had put him back on his heels. Now, at least one rune in his collection could be used in multiple ways but were there more lessons to be learned here. 

Apparently so, he decided. After going through the larger chunks of rocks he’d shattered off of the golem’s rune circuit on the floor, he found an entirely new rune he didn’t have in his collection. Vosden, huh? An earth rune? That’s interesting. 

He traced it several times in the dust to be sure he was getting it right from the three chunks of limestone, and it was only then that he whispered, “Aufvarum Vosden,” as he touched his drawing of the rune. It instantly carved itself into the floor like it had been done by a craftsman with finger paints. It wasn’t the cleanest, and he could have probably done a better job with a chisel, but it was interesting, that was for sure. 

What he wanted to do immediately was summon the mirror and record all of this, but his water skin was empty, and there was nothing else that was reflective in there. 

“I could make a pool of my own blood and then heal myself,” he said with obvious distaste. “That’s what a real warlock would do, but fuck that.”

Instead of becoming a ghoulish weirdo, he found some scorched wood and copied the golem’s sigils into a blank page in the warlock’s tome. When he did so, he was careful not to actually connect them all. He didn’t think he could actually bring the book to life by accident, but he wasn’t about to risk it. 

Once that was done, he took a lunch break and reflected on all that he had learned or thought he had learned, and then made his way up the stairs to see what awaited him. 

“Is it going to be a re-do of the swamp or the desert, or will it be something brand new?” he asked as he opened the door and came face to face with a graveyard. 

“Yeah, that’s definitely new.” He tried to imagine how the ice level might look unfrozen or the swamp level might look if someone had drained it and built a city in its place, but neither seemed to be the case. Instead, he was now in a place he’d never been before. “Welcome to level twenty-one!”

He stepped out of the dusty cavern into the chilly night and took it all in. Above him, the sky was partially cloudy, but he could see enough stars to spot a few familiar constellations along with the sliver of a waning moon. It was nice, refreshing even. 

The scenery was less so. In the distance, he could see the silhouettes of some large houses in one direction that suggested that he was in some sort of city, but the ground nearer to him was full of grave markers and mausoleums. These weren’t small tombs, either. Some of them were ornate marble things the size of an SUV. 

He was getting some distinctly New Orleans vibes from the whole place. “Yeah, nothing could go wrong here,” he whispered to himself as he stepped onto the stone path that wound its way through the place and started looking for the way out. 

There were dozens of larger tombs scattered around him, but probably not hundreds and each one of them could just as easily be the reason he was here as it was the exit. Simon was undecided on whether he wanted to solve this one on his first go. His first priority right now was to go deeper. So, he would just have to see how it went. 

He checked out a few of the tombs along the way toward the main gate. Some had beautiful statues or carvings, and all of them had a family name somewhere on them. He saw more than a few ‘loving husbands’ and ‘departed wife and mothers’ along with enough dates that were small enough to suggest an infant or child to last a lifetime, but he saw nothing suspicious. Each of them was locked up tight, and there didn’t seem to be any zombies or vampires lurking about. 

Somewhere in the city that lay beyond the cemetery, he heard the sound of a bell tolling, and he stopped to count the chimes. “Midnight, huh? That should be just about the time…”

Simon’s words trailed off as the fog started to boil up right on cue. If this was the witching hour, and he was in an evil graveyard, then he would have expected something like this to happen pretty much exactly. When the fog grew thick enough for groping limbs and haunted faces to become visible, though, he took a step back and drew his sword. 

Stepping back didn’t do any good, of course. The fog was boiling up from every grave, and he was surrounded by it. It stayed mostly clear of the path, and he continued to back slowly toward the gate, but as it got thicker, it began to spill over, and soon, there were tendrils of mist in the shape of groping hands that he found himself stepping carefully over as he turned and moved more quickly. The gate was in sight now, and with luck, he could escape this before whatever this was noticed him. 

That only worked for a few more minutes, though. The longer he walked, the slower he was forced to go as he stepped between the grasping, vaporous limbs. However, it was only when his foot disrupted one that everything changed. The hand he accidentally stepped on disappeared in a puff of vapor like it had never been.

He saw the change in the surrounding fog almost instantly, though. Until now, the eyes had simply been staring blindly as the faces appeared and disappeared in the ebb and flow of the mist. Now those blind eyes were searching, and the hands pulled back into the fog banks on either side of the path. When they returned, though, they were larger grasping limbs that looked somehow more substantial, and they were reaching toward him. 

Simon lashed out with his icy blade, but the limbs that he dissipated only vanished for a moment before more extended out from the growing fog banks that nearly surrounded him. The roiling grey mist was almost to his chest now, and it was clear that it was drawn to life somehow.

“Meiren,” he barked, sending a broad wave of fire at the nearest wall to him. It had been slowly coalescing into a giant, hideous skull, and Simon wasn’t at all interested in seeing what would happen after that. 

The fire temporarily worked wonders. Everything that had been about to assault him from that side of the path vanished as though it had never been. However, seconds later new fog was already boiling up to replace it. As he watched that in real concern, he never even noticed the blow from behind that struck at his right arm. 

The cold sensation that traveled through his bones then was painful, and his arm went so numb that the strike caused him to drop his blade as he cried out in pain. 

“Barom!” he yelled, surrounding himself in a bright white light. This was enough to force the limb that had grabbed onto him to let go, but not much more than that. 

The mist didn’t try to touch him through the fog, but it also didn’t stay nearly as far away as it should have, and worse, Simon noticed as he examined his arm and flexed his fingers that the light was fading a lot faster than it should have. A word of light should have lasted for the better part of an hour, but this one would be gone in less than a minute at the rate it was dimming. 

That was when he decided to run. Neither fire nor light worked on this thing, and the forms that were surfacing in the sea of mist that surrounded him were only becoming more terrifying. He needed to bounce until he had a better plan of attack than ‘get my soul ripped out of my body and die in terror.’

So he left his sword where it lay, and he ran. He used fire twice more on his way to the gate to give himself some breathing room, but each time he dissipated the mist, it came back faster than before. 

It’s probably feeding on the magic itself, he realized, but there was nothing for it. If he used no magic, he would die. If he used magic, he would die later. That was as complicated as it needed to be. 

Simon ran toward the main gate and the small temple that adjoined that, still carrying his grimoire, and reached the gate ahead of a growing tide of evil that was swelling behind him and rattled the locked bars. Part of him wanted to knock the thing down or cut through the chain with a word of force, but another part of him said that unleashing this thing into the city where people were sleeping was incredibly dangerous. 

Instead, with another blast of fire to open the path, he darted toward the side gate that connected to the temple. Getting off the main path was an obviously bad idea, but it was his hope that at least at the temple, there would be some sort of holy effect, or maybe some hallowed ground that would hold back the tide of ghosts or evil, or whatever it was that was assaulting him. 

He was in luck. Around the temple, there were indeed a dozen or so feet of grassy earth that was almost completely vapor-free, and he leaped for it even as the mist tried to grasp his feet. When Simon landed, he darted for the door. He’d been prepared to body slam it open if need be, but it wasn’t locked, and the heavy wooden thing opened into a dark room with a loud creak. 

He ran inside and slammed it shut without looking back, and then, after looking around to make sure that nothing else was going to eat him, he slumped to the ground with his back to the door, and with great heaving breaths, he forced himself to calm down. 

It was only after he’d done that for several minutes that he noticed something strange. Faintly, in the distance, he could hear a sound he hadn’t heard in a long time: music.