“The fuck is this?” Hawthorne asked as we stared at the strange scene in front of us.

I walk forward a few steps to get a closer look at the skeleton. The skull looks abnormally larger than it should be and the left leg bone is noticeably shorter than the right leg. “The skeleton has a bunch of deformities like the Savior does. Do you think they could be related to each other? What was the last part of the story you told me a while ago? Something about the Savior’s wife dying?”

“I said that was how the Savior awakened his magic, his wife died during childbirth. Or at least those are the rumors I heard.” Hawthorne walks up next to me and points his finger towards the skeleton, saying in a melancholic tone, “Take a closer look at the skeleton’s arms. There’s more than one.”

He was right. The skeleton had its arms wrapped around another, much smaller skeleton. What a sorrowful image of a family reuniting in death. Even now I’m not too sure what to think about all this.

At the beginning, I fucking despised this place from the bottom of my heart for making me suffer through the hellhole that is The Pit. I wanted nothing more than to see this place burned to the ground and looking around at all the burnt down buildings, my wish came true. When we were making our way over to the Savior’s longhouse, we saw innumerable dead cultists. Most of them died fighting each other in their drugged out stupor, some inexplicably caught on fire and burned to death, and the live ones that we did come across were quickly put down.

While it looks like my revenge was thoroughly carried out, I can’t help but feel a bit empty inside. I thought I’d be feeling nothing but pure elation seeing the destruction all around me and knowing I was the root cause of it all. However, that didn’t happen. I demonized all these cultists as intrinsically evil bastards beyond redemption but they’re not.

Every single one of them is just a person living out their lives the only way they know how. Most of them were born into the fold and didn’t even have a real choice to leave. They were taught from birth that the Savior is an infallible god and with this place being their entire lives, could I really call them evil? Just like how Millson and his village had to resort to banditry because that was the only way they could maintain their lifestyle, The Fold only knows how to live this way.

It doesn’t feel right for me to hate these people for the way they live. Maybe for the things they’ve done to me but that’s the extent. All the anger, the vitriol, the bloodthirst that fueled me to this point has deteriorated into nothingness. There’s no grand sense of accomplishment, there’s no overwhelming sense of joy, and there’s no feeling that I’ve avenged myself.

The only reason we had conflict is because we came across each other. If they never captured me and tossed me into their pit, I doubt I’d bat an eye at their activities. Hell, I’ve seen worse things happening in Midriver. If anything, I’m just glad everything’s over and I can move on with my life. What an awful four months that I can finally lay to rest. Now what to do with these bodies…

Glancing back at the brothers behind me, I shout, “Give me a hand with these.”

As they scramble to their feet, Hawthorne raises his eyebrow at me and asks, “What are you planning to do with them?”

“Laying them to rest once and for all.”

Crouching down next to the Savior’s body, I toss the corpse onto my right shoulder while the brothers carefully cradle both of the skeletons in their arms. Once we’re ready, we walk towards The Pit directly behind us. At The Pit’s edge, I put down the Savior’s body before flinging it into The Pit’s dark chasm. Seeing me, the brothers shrug at each other before tossing in the skeletons as well. They were born inside The Pit and it should also serve as their final resting place.

With that finished, we started heading towards the northside of the citadel. Although most of the southern part of the citadel burned down, the northside came out relatively unscathed. I guess even with how many fires I started, it wasn’t enough to completely burn this place to the ground. Which works out for us because it’s pretty late and all of us are exhausted.

With the Savior dead, The Fold is gone regardless of how much of the Rebirth Haven remains intact. Even if they try to revive The Fold, there’s still a decent amount of Vipers out there somewhere who will definitely check this place out in the next few days to see what happened. With the eastern wall wide open, there isn’t much anyone can do to stop them. We’ll need to get out of here by tomorrow if we want to avoid them as well. I wonder what plans Hawthorne has for the future.

When we arrive at my wooden shack, we decide to stop for the night. I’m surprised to see it still standing but I suppose it is pretty separated from the rest of the residences. I feel like I’m forgetting someth- Oh gods, Bella. While everyone else is busy settling down and building a small campfire, I take a peek into my tent and sigh in relief when I see my bed empty. Hopefully she got out in one piece.

Looking over, I see Gavin’s shack is still standing as well. I know he’s someone who passed the trial and had a lower status compared to the Savior’s offspring, but it was still odd seeing him living in such a shitty shack considering he was a hunting party captain. Unable to curb my curiosity, I head into his shack to take a look around. It’s at least a lot neater and cleaner than mine.

Opening up a leather pack I found in a corner, I found a small leather coin purse with around 20 gold coins inside. Adding that to the five gold coins I came here with, I have a tidy little sum that should get me back to Midriver in luxury. Other than that, I don’t find anything else really interesting until I get to the bottom of Gavin’s pack. At the very bottom, I find a gold adventurers’ guild plate.

Adventurers’ guild plates are given to adventurers who complete a request at their respective rank. Since Wraine and I never completed our quest a year ago, we got our licenses but we never got our copper plates. It looks like Gavin was a gold level adventurer before he ended up in The Fold. Which is surprising because from everything I’ve heard as we traveled to Ocean’s Rest, gold rank adventurers were pretty well respected because it showed not only were they competent, but they were skilled as well. Speaking of which, the adventurer ranks are copper, silver, gold, platinum, and finally diamond. If copper ranks handled goblins and other small creatures, diamond ranks could handle dragons though I’ve only ever heard of one adventurer team killing a dragon.

I don’t know what the team’s name was before they killed the dragon but afterwards, they were renamed The Dragonslayers. I wonder if I’ll ever reach those heights. Pocketing the gold adventurers plate as a sort of keepsake, I find some equipment in the opposite corner. There’s an iron shoulder guard that I’ve never seen Gavin wear. Every time I’ve ever seen him, he was always garbed in hard leather armor. I also find a crossbow and a bow along with both of their respective quivers that hang off the waist.

The bow I can’t really use but the crossbow could be useful. Grabbing all of Gavin’s belongings which are now my belongings, I head back outside only to find Hawthorne sitting at the campfire with Sylvia sleeping on his lap. Taking a seat next to him and putting all my things down, I ask, “Where is everyone?”

Hawthorne chuckles and replies, “When they saw you looting, they thought they should loot too. It’ll be a long journey wherever we go from here and we’ll need everything we can get.”

“Alright, I wasn’t looting. I was claiming my spoils of war. I killed that shack’s owner fair and square for all his stuff.”

“Looting, claiming, same thing.”

“What are you planning on doing anyways?”

“Me?” Hawthorne sighs and looks down at the sleeping Sylvia in silence before saying, “Well, I’ve been thinking about it the second I got up here. I was inside The Pit for a looooong time. Too long, actually. Everything that I had is long gone and I didn’t really have all that much in the first place. I’m not sure.”

Seeing his forlorn expression, I try to change the topic, “You never told me how you ended up getting caught by The Fold. Why were you in these woods in the first place?”

Hawthorne smirks at me before looking into the fire, seemingly reminiscing. After a moment, he says, “I came here following up on a story. There were murmurings of something strange happening in these woods and I had to see for myself whether there was any truth to it. You see, I was a writer for Everview’s newspaper. Have you ever heard of a newspaper?”

Shaking my head at him, he explains, “A newspaper is like a piece of paper that informs you of all the happenings in the city you’re living in, the kingdom you’re a citizen of, and the world at large. It was first created by King Oswald during his reign because he grew sick and tired of the nobles in his court talking about current events at the time and how he could never chime in because he wasn’t up to date on them. As a response, he invented the newspaper and founded the Everview Editorial, the kingdom and probably the world’s, first ever newspaper publication. From then on, the publication would release biweekly newspapers that everyone could purchase, whether they were of common blood or noble blood.

“I was a writer for the Everview Editorial. I mainly wrote war correspondence for the paper which means I’d travel back and forth between Everview and our border with the Ribier Kingdom pretty regularly. But during our little period of peace, I didn’t have much to write about aside from the frequent border skirmishes and was looking for more interesting stories. I ran across a rumor of a long forgotten slave pit back from the time of the War of Liberation that still existed and lied somewhere between our kingdom’s capital and Ocean’s Rest. One thing led to another and well… you know the rest.”

“That’s a very interesting life you’ve led.”

“No, not really. It’s just the story of an old man whose life was robbed from him.”

Seeing the sorrowful smile on his face, I can’t help but pity him. He’s right, The Fold did steal his life. Out of everyone here, he has the right to despise this place. But there’s no anger, no hatred on his face, just defeat. And there’s not a damn thing I can do for him.

“... You know, if you’d like, you could come back to Midriver with me.”

He scoffs back at me and says, “Now why the fuck would I go want to go to there.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’d like a fresh start. You’ve just got your life back and this is basically the start of your second life. If you don’t have anywhere to go, if you don’t have anything you want to do, we could go to Midriver together.”

Hawthorne grins at me and asks, “And what? You want me to become a bandit? At my age?”

“I’ve seen older people in my very own gang. We live by our own set of rules and we’ve carved out a place for ourselves that we could call home. No more getting tied down by the kingdom’s laws, no more living in fear that someone’s going to stab you in a dark alley because we’re the ones doing the stabbing, and a level of freedom you’ll never experience anywhere else.”

Hawthorne soundlessly transitions through moments of shaking his head, pondering, finding it all ridiculous, and serious consideration before he finally says, “... I’ll think about it.”