The death sickness cleared at the four-hour mark exactly, which was one of the few things in this world that behaved precisely as documented.
I was sitting on the bench outside the inn when it happened, not because I had been sitting there the entire time but because I had tried three other locations and kept returning to it, the way you return to the last place things made sense. One moment the world had the particular wrongness of running at reduced capacity, the soft drag of minus three to everything, and then it did not. My thoughts sharpened. The bench stopped feeling provisional.
I sat there for another few minutes, taking stock.
Level 5. The mimic death had cost me a level, the XP penalty stripping back the progress I had made before Whisperfall and leaving me at the lower edge o
