...and I go tumbling into a wooden beam: the Reaper wasn’t there! I look around frantically, trying to get my bearings, and I do spot him. Though he wasn’t interested in me - he was busy fighting another player!

I try to get a closer look and I see a mid-level assassin dodging and weaving between swings of the Reaper’s enormous scythe. It takes me a second to put it all together. I thought I’d be on my own facing the reaper today since no one put their name down for it on the guild register, but that’s so typical. This assassin was clearing the dungeon for this level one, when somehow they must’ve got separated, or he was left behind. He must’ve been too embarrassed to put his name down, that’s why I didn’t know. I can’t exactly blame him, though: walkthroughs are considered hack work by most adventurers, what you do if you’re really desperate, babysitting some noble’s kid. If you were an adventurer with any merit you’d have found a group to partner up with instead of returning to lower-level dungeons constantly.

I watch him fight for a moment and it's almost too sad to watch. He’s obviously got talent, the way he’s leaping and feigning, but he didn’t bother to do his homework before going in. He’s going at the Reaper with a pair of unenchanted daggers, which predictably do just about zilch to him. Then I realize that if he doesn’t know about its physical resistances then he probably doesn’t know about the “Death” attack either! I can’t just leave him there. I sigh and draw my sword.

The Reaper isn’t so quick, and all it takes to put a dent in him is a good overhead slash with a little holy water applied. That stuff’s so great I can hardly believe more people don’t know about it. (That’s kids these days, never listening to a priest). Well it goes right through his cloak and snaps his floating femur in half with a sickening creak. I go in for another attack, this time for the head (I was wasting no time), and I almost feel bad for the poor thing, losing to me again. We’ll never know if monsters keep their memory I don’t think, and a major part of me hopes they don’t. If they did that Reaper must carry some grudge, ‘cause I’ve been in this room more times than I can count, and it always ends worse for him than it does for me, I’ll tell you that much. This round was shaping up to be no different: a hit right to skull, and I’ve cleaved his lower jaw in two. His attention is solidly on me now, it goes without saying, and he isn’t too pleased being smashed to smithereens and all. He takes a swing at me, and I’m all ready to jump out of the way, but just then I see the specter again. The dark, robed figure waits at the balcony, looking down at me. And I look up at it. And the terrible heat comes back, and I want nothing more than to lie down and strip off my armor…

Suddenly the scythe is sweeping towards me, going right for my neck. But right as it’s about to find purchase it’s batted away - the assassin deflected the blow! He gives me a simple nod and helps me back up to my feet. The Reaper is hardly dissuaded and raises again the terrible scythe. I go at him again with a horizontal slash, but it comes out sloppy and is easily dodged. Can you believe it? I was in such a way that the Reaper of all monsters dodged my attack. Well I’m fighting the pit in my chest and trying to get back up again and stumbling, but then I look up and, what a welcome sight! The scythe is stuck! When he dodged my attack with the weapon raised, that must’ve done it! I fall back to the floor in relief. The assassin doesn’t get the memo that the battle’s over, and he’s still wailing on it with his daggers.

“You might as well give it up, there’s no harming him with just physical weapons”. He looks over at me.

“Huh, what am I supposed to do then?”, he says, pausing his assault.

“Just let him be for a moment. He isn’t going anywhere. Not with that scythe stuck the way it is.” I point up at it. “Let me just catch my breath and I’ll kill it with a few Judgements.” I check the balcony again and the specter is still staring at me, standing in place. I freeze up.

Just then I hear the sound of straining, the sound of snapping wooden beams. And it’s all over in a flash. Just when I think I’m through making harebrained, rookie mistakes: the Reaper was readying its malediction with its scythe stuck in the roof, and somehow, I don’t know how, got past the exploit, and brought its scythe down over the assassin. It was the “Death” attack. He had raised his hand to stop the blow, in wonderment as it passed right through him with seemingly no effect. I retaliate. Judgement, sword swings, whatever it took to finish that bastard off. When I*m done there’s just a pile of rags and bone splinters, but it was too late. I’m always just too late.

His puzzlement didn't last long as he was reunited with his dependent. They laugh about it, make up. I want to tell him. I need to tell him. But they look so happy now that they’re back together. There just wasn’t a good moment. Before I knew it the two had left through the exit. The man who might very well have saved my life is going to die a horrible, agonizing death, a way no one should have to die. It’s all my fault. But what could I tell him, I wonder? What could I have said? There’s nothing to say, I tell myself.

-

The feeling of warmth passed, luckily, but the paranoia was here to stay. I kept looking in the corner of my eye, positive that the specter was following me. I went through a crowded market, a smoky backstreet on my way home in the hopes that I could lose it. But whenever I venture a look back, there it is in the periphery of my vision. I don’t dare to sleep, it will most likely strangle me if I do. So I lie awake with a candle lit and my sword unsheathed and drenched in holy water. If it wants me, let it find me.

It must be a specter from the past, some sin left unatoned for that menaces me now with incorporeal form. Which sin could it be? There are so many to choose from, but I think for a second that I recognize this phantom. Yes, I know now his ungainly gait, his sorry stoop. His sad cow eyes. It must be Percival who haunts me.

-

We go way back, me and Percival. He was properly educated at some august institution, could order a beer in Ancient tongue, write his name in fancy curly-cues. He wasn’t exactly the animated sort, and was in fact a little sickly, but if you asked him a question about literature, the Ancients, politics, just watch how his eyes lit up. He rambled and expatiated like there was no tomorrow, there was no stopping him then. And why would I? Everything he said was as engrossing as it was edifying. Who but him could cook up those inimitable theories on Ancient magic? He’d swear up and down that prehistoric peoples could close wounds with magic, and hell, you’d come away believing it yourself. I’ve never met his like since.

He was never a happy sort, sorry to say. Had a few hang ups with women. He was always agonizing about his hair, like that’s the great decider. I never cared a lick about the way I looked, and I’ve done ok for myself. But no, since his hair was starting to go no woman could ever love him. It was sad to see, all the big wizard hats he’d wear to cover up his head, the sweet-smelling pomades he’d attack his forelock with. He was a nervous wreck around them. If only girls could see the Percy I saw, the one had a love for all things academic, who talked and talked relentlessly about what he valued most until he keeled over in exhaustion. But he never learned how to love himself. He hit the bottle a little too much, and kept worrying about all the little things, never taking the time to look around him at what he really had. Of course, I’m not one to talk when it comes to stuff like that.

Now I’d been banged up before, and been party to a few dungeon runs gone awry, but I think the loss of Percival was the first great brush with death as an adventurer. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt close to death, but this experience was the first to really rub my face in it.

Word gets out at the adventurer’s guild - a new dungeon has been excavated and an enormous treasure chest has been sighted in one of its subterranean chambers. The expedition team was just there long enough to catch sight of it, they were quickly repelled by approaching high level monsters and forced to escape. They figured anything could be in that chest, considering how deep and far-flung this dungeon was. To think, all of it was lying unclaimed, just waiting for enterprising adventurer groups to snap it up. It got people talking, and my party was no exception.

Back then it was me, Percival, Roy, and Sheena. Two warriors, a mage, and a ranger. We’d made quite a name for ourselves by then, taking on some of the more perilous early-level dungeons without incident. The Ogre Den, the Pirate Ship, the Desert Tower, all of it went smoothly. And what riches we’d accrued - it was the first time in my life that I’d really had money, and I made the most of that fact. I ate fatted roasts, drank fine champagne until all my riches were spent, and I didn’t regret it for a second. At least, I wouldn’t until the dungeons started getting tougher, and I realized that every roast I ordered was another Agaric, Telaria, or Shock Array that I couldn’t buy. (People start out adventuring in order to be comfortable when they get back to town, but with enough time your life is centered less and less on time spent in taverns, living it up. More often than not civilian life becomes just a transient period in between dungeon runs, which gradually establish themselves as the new center of an adventurer’s existence. You start to live FOR the dungeon, and every thought, feeling, and emotion stems from that. An afflicted way to live).

So we figure it's a hole in the ground half a world away, but that’s no big deal, right? We talk big on the airship ride over, but once we’re there it's a different story. Percival starts getting cold feet when we’re at the entrance. Sheena kind of agrees with him. Me and Roy, though, we dissuade them. We say it's nothing we haven’t seen before, we’ll be fine, as long as we stick together, keep our wits about us, etc. And that wins them over. I wish it didn’t. Truth is me and Roy were just as scared as them, just too chickenshit to show it, is all.

We walk inside, and what a place! The walls and floor are covered completely in breathtaking crystal formations colored violet and teal. Among them were subterranean springs of the clearest water, you could see right through them to the bottom. It was everything and more than what the spelunkers had reported. We had a job to do, though, and we couldn’t stand there all day taking in the sights. Making our way over the staircases, the blooms of crystal wasn’t exactly easy: they shattered into sharp splinters if you put too much weight on them, and they couldn’t be avoided if you wanted to make any headway in a reasonable amount of time. This really killed our enthusiasm, and what we all thought but didn’t want to say, was, it wouldn’t be easy fighting monsters in this kind of terrain.

One chamber after another and we’re still stomping through these crystals. Still no sign of any encounters, and we’re just starting to wonder if maybe they hadn’t respawned yet, when we spot our first real obstacle.

A displacer beast comes loping into the room, though it appears to be about five at once. We enter our battle stances immediately. We weren't total novices, let’s put it that way. Sheena knocks back an arrow, me and Roy establish a choke point while Percival speaks his incantation. The beast, or what I think to be the beast, lunges at me but when I swing to repel it the image flickers and disappears, my sword goes crashing into a cluster of crystals. Another one raises its claw at me and I strike, but that too is an illusion. Then I look up for a second and I see displacer beasts all around the room, appearing and disappearing, flickering like candles at a midnight mass. The beast was taking advantage of something about the room’s singular lighting conditions to make this many mock images, I was sure of it.

The others are picking up on this too, though already it’s too late. One illusion attacking Sheena proves to be the real thing, and she’s knocked sprawling onto a layer of crystals which shatter under her. The blood, the screaming was terrible. Microscopic splinters in pastel colors dig right through her leather armor and into the skin. Her back’s all cut up, and filled with sharp, excoriating fragments that only work themselves deeper the more she contorts her body in agony. The beast is about to go for the killing blow when Percival’s fire magic knocks it into the air, whereupon it falls back down into a mound of crystals shooting out in diagonal formations. It’s body is beyond recognition. All burned and cut up, there was no sense in checking if it was dead.

Sheena would be ok in the end, after a long night spent in an emergency ward having shards picked out of her back. She got back on her feet with time (I met her a little while ago, and she said she still felt a couple left over in her shoulder. That would be just typical of the doctor-barbers, a regular bunch of sawbones they are). Of course in the moment it was terrible, the crying, the screaming, the apologies. The expedition only reported seeing a Gelatinous Cube in this room, certainly not something as threatening as a Displacer Beast. That’s what happens when you’re one of the first ones in, I guess. Never leave anything up to chance.

We’re down one party member, and we leave Roy behind too to look after Sheena, so really it was just me and Percy at that point. Lord knows we should’ve all turned back at that point, but we’d travelled too far already to up and turn tail at the first obstacle. We delve deeper, room after room until there’s so little light that we travel by the tremulous illumination of a half-casted fire spell in Percy’s hand. We had a few encounters, and those were all reported on, some Tunneling Squids, Crystal Golems, difficult stuff but manageable if you’re prepared for them. Percy would spam high-impact fire spells until the enemy was knocked down, then it was up to me to stick my longsword in between their armor plates to finish them off. It worked just like a charm, but going through all that mana really did a number on old Percival. He was panting and dry heaving, constantly resting his head against the cold rock walls. Typical signs of mana deficiency. Not that that would stop us.

Eventually we reach it - the treasure room. The chest is sitting at the room’s opposite end, nestled among the pillars of an Ancient ruin. The pillars stretched out into arches which linked with a set of barriers, forming a kind of carved pavilion over the loose dirt floor. The crystals were long gone now, probably cleared by an Ancient architect to make way for his own designs: the room stretched upwards into the dark as rounded, smooth stone walls adorned with intricate bas-reliefs.

We make our approach, endlessly careful. I had recently started to put points into Rogue to help round off our party, and I had just enough skill points in it to learn Detect Traps. I scanned the room and it came out clean.

Then, in an instant I’m lifted off my feet. Our vigilance was all for nothing. I feel a sickening sort of weightlessness as I go spinning in the air - time seems to stand still, yet before I know it I’m lying supine on the stone floor, looking up at the reliefs absently. Pain is tearing through my back. I turn my head and see Percival flinging gouts of flame at an obscure figure. I’m back on my feet immediately, (how spry I was back then), and charge towards my target. I raise my sword and in the firelight I see what it is: a Lashtail Monitor. A terrible reptilian creature with a killer whip attack in the form of a long, spined tail. It was way above our level, in fact it was higher than both our levels put together.

I stab into it with all the force I could muster: it doesn’t even flinch, not even when I push my sword in up to the hilt. It turns one of its narrow, jet black eyes toward me and flicks its tail, and I just barely manage to fling myself out of the way. It flicks it again and I leap back - now I’m too far away to retrieve my sword. The lizard is still biting at Percival, he’s just barely fending it off with his fire magic, and I know he can’t keep it up for very long. I reach into my bag and root around, Agarics, Talaria, and finally I grab it. A Shock Array: a handy little single-use consumable that generates a paralyzing electric field. Unfortunately outlawed now, ever since the Cravat Riots, (I got a lot of use out of them back in the day). The recipe was leaked to the public way back when, and the crown’s peacekeepers got a nasty surprise trying to charge the factory workers’ blockade, finding themselves suddenly writhing on the ground in agony. Now you can only find them at jacked-up black market prices.

I press the button, wait a second, then throw it at the lizard. A crackling lattice of blue-white electricity bursts from the array, enveloping its target. The lizard is caught in a violent paroxysm, its whole body shaking something fierce. Only thing is, I can’t get my sword back. It’s stuck in there behind the Array’s matrix. It’s all wasted now, since I can’t get the drop on the lizard in the vulnerable instant that the Array disappears, and the monster is still picking itself off the ground. I would have to waste that opportunity extricating my longsword. I call out to Percy but he’s lying on the floor, those fireballs had just about emptied him of mana. At that point, of course, I should have left my sword, dragged Percy right out of the dungeon, got back on that airship and never gone back here again. But instead I get this stupid idea: I take out the Talaria and approach the monster. In two quick motions I strap them to my feet, and pick up a jagged piece of stone knocked loose by one of the lizard’s lash attacks. The second the Array is down I leap toward it, and plunge the stone dagger right through one of its jet-black eyes. It’s none too pleased about that and gets me right in the solar plexus with another blow from its tail. I vomit up a glob of blood and stumble to the ground.

I think it's over for me, none of my attacks seemed to have the slightest effect on the thing. It’s ambling towards me, mouth open baring a set of razor-keen incisors. I thought I was going to die, panic washes over me in bone-chilling waves. Then - I’m not sure how he managed it after slinging all those fireballs - an enormous green tornado goes whirling towards the lizard, picking it up and bringing it hard down on the ground. The wind blew with such intensity that it cut skin, the impact with which it sent the Monitor flying caused an audible cracking sound when it flew to the floor. Fractured bones stuck out of its sides as jagged white knives: it’s still one of the most singularly spectacular feats of magic I’ve ever seen performed. That must have taken everything out of poor Percival, who was already at his limit.

Leaning on a pillar for support I get up, limp over to him and pat him on the shoulder.

“Not bad, Percy!” Those would be my last words to him. We’d been through thick and thin, laughed and cried over mugs of ale, and those would be my parting words. “Not bad!”, like I was some kind of action hero. So stupid.

I didn’t even know how to read before I met him, you know? I was just some roughneck from the slums, you ask me about the Ancients and my eyes glaze over. Percy taught me all of that. The philosophy of Thales, the romance of Daphnis and Chloe. Suddenly I was locking myself in the library every free moment I had poring through those old books. Long afternoons spent reading about times gone past and the great men of old. I did everything I could to enter into that world that Percy traversed so effortlessly. I wanted to get his references, laugh as he laughed when cracking wise about some theory he thought ill-conceived. He was the first one to show me that there was a life beyond all this - gold, ale, monsters, bloodshed. I had never even looked at the stars before, you know that? Of course I’d seen them, but I’d never looked at them. He knew all the names of all the constellations, that’s Taurus the bull, that’s the princess Andromeda. He taught them all to me like it wasn’t a bother at all. He loved to teach just as he loved to learn, he lived for knowledge and wasn’t shy about sharing it. For him all this was stuff anyone could get the hang of, not some rarified, arcane material for the chosen few. There wasn’t an elitist bone in him, unlike so many other scholars now.

The world is so cruel. It doesn’t leave enough room for people like him.

The lizard got back up; a blow to the back of the neck took Percy away from me. Those verdant worlds and spinning galaxies in his head were forever put to rest. He falls to the ground, and I leap to attack. I don’t remember what exactly I did, I took blow after blow but still was standing. At that moment I didn’t care if I died. My sword found its way back to my hand and made sure that lizard wouldn’t get back up. I went at it again and again, slicing it up until it was just a heap of red. I couldn’t fix a thing. I didn’t grab him and leave like I should’ve, now the world is one good man poorer. Stupid, so stupid.

Of course, he didn’t die just then. The impact of the whip attack wasn’t lethal. It severed something in his spine, made sure he’d never walk, talk, do anything on his own ever again. He was alive only in name. I took care of him the best I could, washing and shaving him. Feeding him soup. Every now and then I’d see a glimmer in his eyes - like those old times when he’d talk about the ancients, but then it would vanish just as soon as it had appeared. Maybe it's bad to say, but I hope he’s all empty up there. I’d hate it more than anything for such a mind to be trapped inside a husk like that. That must be what hell is like, I figure.

I failed him, like I failed so many others. I’m the only one from my old adventuring days that’s still up and going. I don’t know how I managed it when other warriors twice my mettle got crushed, fatally wounded, driven insane by some curse. I must have some quality they didn’t I guess. I’m a survivor. I’ve wanted to die so many times but death never finds me.

Now I hope I can live just long enough to finish this journal. It’s time I gave something to the world instead of just taking. When I’m done I think I’ll go back to that dungeon where it all started, in the foothills of Albion, and let the Tunneling Squids devour me.