Death After Death PLUS 187-188

Well, enjoy your last update up two chapters a week, because next week, we ramp things up.

Ch. 187 - Hell of a View

Rock climbing was not something that Simon had spent a lot of time doing in any life, but as he got closer to the peak, he spent more and more time doing that instead of hiking. He lacked ropes and pitons, along with the skill to use them, though, so even climbing often required several attempts to find a way that was easy enough that he could do it without feeling like he was taking his life in his hands. 

This high up, the nights were frigid, but at least there were no more attacks. It would seem even the rugged goatmen had no interest in fighting over the barren, craggy slopes. 

The day before Simon finally found the temple carved high into the peak of Mt. Elian, he had convinced himself that he was on a wild goose chase. He’d almost succeeded in convincing himself to turn around, but he’d been on this mountain for a week now, and pure stubbornness won out. 

“There’s no way that I’m leaving without seeing the top of this thing,” he told himself often enough that it became a mantra of sorts. In time, the only thing he was grateful for was that even in the endless cloud cover that kept him from viewing the top of the mountain, there was little in the way of snow or ice. The nights were cold, but the days were still warm enough that such things didn’t last long. 

Still, it felt like a fruitless quest, and then, finally, after six full days, he saw it. The temple was a small thing, but it was larger and more ostentatious than it had any right to be this high up. He had no idea how the stone masons would have worked at such altitudes or how they would have been fed. 

“I don’t even know how someone living there could be fed now,” he grumbled as he admired the sheer, smooth walls, along with the decorative elements like the pillars and the dome. It was an impressive work of art. He just hoped this would become more than a sightseeing trip. 

Even though Simon had been able to see it for a moment, the clouds soon obscured it again, leaving him a difficult hike along a scree-choked ridgeline to get there. Still, by evening, he was scaling the last of the cliffs, and he finally arrived in the mosaic-decorated courtyard. 

A woman in fine gray robes was there to greet him, and even as he gasped for breath, she smiled and said, “Welcome, Simon, the Oracle is expecting you. It is rare to have any guest that does not take the hidden way. You are the first in an age.”

For a moment, Simon almost asked how she knew his name, but the second statement answered the first. If an Oracle really lives here, then knowing your name is practically a cheap party trick, he decided. So, instead, he just breathed heavily while he took it all in. Then he asked, “hidden way?”

She smiled and gestured to the far side of the courtyard, where there was a gate and a narrow path. Wordlessly in disbelief, Simon rose and staggered across the courtyard to look at it, and when he saw it winding its way down the mountain, he despaired a little. That would have been a hell of a lot easier than the way I took, he thought with a sigh.

“How could I have missed that?” he wondered aloud. 

“You could not have seen it,” she answered. “Such ways are invisible to the uninitiated, which is why it is so rare for us to have any visitors at all. Now please, come with me. You must have a meal and a rest. The Oracle will see you tomorrow.”

Simon thought about protesting but instead let himself be led away. He was, truthfully, completely exhausted. I probably smell like one of those goat men, too, he thought, smirking to himself. I’ll, but a bucket of water and some soap would do wonders. 

As if the woman escorting him could read his mind, she said, “After you have eaten, I will show you to the baths so you might refresh yourself.”

Simon boggled at that but said nothing. He didn’t have a chance. He was still trying to decide how a place this high up into the middle of nowhere could have baths, when they walked into the temple, and he saw the view from the far side. It took his breath away. 

The temple, as he’d imagined it from a distance, was a large, two or three-story building carved into the mountainside and crowned by a dome. It had enough room for an altar and perhaps some rooms for the priests and acolytes to stay. He’d been completely wrong. 

What he had seen was merely a gatehouse to a much larger complex. No, complex didn’t do it justice. What he’d found here, far from anywhere, was a town and, in a way, its own little world. It was far from crowded, but here and there, people moved among the narrow streets, and he could see other gray-robed women in the halls of the temple complex as well.

The temple was built into a volcanic caldera. At the bottom of it was a small steaming lake, which explained the constant cloud cover he’d been dealing with as he got higher. More interesting, though, were the structures and fields that ringed that lake. Around the temple entrance he’d just walked through was a tiny city clustered together. Most of the rest of the ring, though, was reserved for endless terraced fields. It was only the people working in the fields that gave the whole place a proper sense of scale. 

Every one of those barely visible dots is a person, which meant they’re at least half a mile away, he thought as he leaned on the stone rail, awestruck by the view. 

The priestess said nothing. Instead, she waited patiently for him to take it in before she cleared her throat and said, “Right this way. Our guest quarters are through here.”

Simon spent the rest of their short walk turning those images over in his mind. How is this not a myth they tell in Iona? Why wasn’t this in the Broken Tower’s Forbidden Library? Simon was quite sure he would have read about a tiny little paradise high up in the mountains if he’d read about it anywhere. 

Eventually, even after his guide left him in an undecorated cell and told him that dinner would be brought to him shortly, one question overrode all of the others. If I didn’t know about this, then what other secrets are still hiding out there, waiting to be found?

This time, he didn’t even mean things he knew about, even if he didn’t know anything about them, like vampires or dragons. What mysteries lay beyond all of those places. Even after they brought him a simple meal of couscous and chicken skewers along with a jug of strong white wine, he spent a lot of time pondering that. The spiced meat was better than any of the tough roasted meat that he’d had in days, but even that was not enough to make him think about the wider world. 

He knew of five countries and only two or three of them in detail, but there was a whole world out there that he didn’t know anything about, and if something like this could exist smack-dab in one of the places he thought he knew best, then he really knew nothing about this world. It was a humbling thought but an exciting one, too, and he was drunk on both when the woman came back and took his tray before escorting him to take a bath. 

Simon tried a few questions on the way, but most of them were rebuffed. “What’s this place called exactly?” and “How come no one knows about this place?” were met with cryptic lines like “The best secrets are always the most well-kept.” Likewise, when he asked about Ionia or the curse, she answered more directly. “I’m afraid that those are questions for the oracle, not for me.” 

Simon was satisfied with neither, but it was clear that she wasn’t going to tell him much of anything, and he felt no need to force the issue yet. So far, he’d been here for only a couple of hours, and he’d been well-fed and well-treated. He hadn’t even seen a guard, but he was sure that a place like this had a way to deal with unwelcome guests, and he had no desire to find out what that was. The last thing he wanted to do was find himself blacklisted from Shangri-la or whatever this place was. 

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting from a bath in a place that was a strange mixture of spartan and luxury, but it certainly wasn’t this.  The baths were an open-air set of steaming pools that hugged the edges of the cliff they were on in a way that made them look both elegant and precarious. The priestess made no move to leave and instead stripped and entered the water before he’d even gotten his armor off. 

“You dress very strangely,” she told him when he finally submerged up to his chest in the warm bathwater of the place. 

“I like the togas, but they aren’t so good for mountain climbing,” he quipped, trying not to pay attention to the other knots of people scattered throughout the expansive pools. Ignoring her beauty was hard when so much of her bronze skin was on display, but he did his best. She wouldn’t answer questions about the place they were, but in time, Simon figured out that she would answer questions about herself, which seemed like a roundabout loophole to find out more about the place. 

The priestess’s name was Diara, and she had never left her mountain peak. “I dream of doing so sometimes, but I know that my place is here.” He learned about what she ate and a bit about how she lived her life. She wasn’t entirely incurious either, so when she asked him questions, Simon happily told her about his life, though she mostly stuck to questions about boats and beaches. 

“I have seen the sea many times,” she explained, “but it is a place I will never touch, and I find it strange that people can live on it for most of their lives.”

Simon learned that they had little in the way of fish here because the volcanic lake was too hot for such things. Instead, they made do with chicken, goat, and several grain crops. Honestly, it seemed like a nice life to him. It was certainly nicer than the Broken Tower, even if it had a similarly culty vibe about it. He was sure there was a library here somewhere that he would have loved to devour, but he knew asking about it would get him nowhere, so he didn’t try. Instead, he enjoyed the nighttime view of the stars above the caldera while he tried not to enjoy the other nighttime view sitting in the water so near him. 

Eventually, when he went to get redressed, he found that his clothes had been taken and replaced with a robe not so dissimilar from hers, though it was brown instead of gray. Does brown mean male or outsider, he wondered. 

“Your clothes have been taken to be washed,” Diara explained. “They will be returned to you tomorrow.”

He nodded, not even caring that they’d taken his weapon and armor with them. If this was a trap, this was exactly how they’d lull him into a false sense of security, but if it wasn’t, well, he knew as well as they did that his clothes were rancid, and he would certainly appreciate a laundry service. He’d only really expected a lone hermit or something at the top of the peak, so as far as he was concerned, all of this was above and beyond. 

When they reached his cell, the priestess lingered a moment and then asked, “Do you wish for me to stay?” she asked, nodding to the bed. “The mountain can be a very cold place at night.”

“I’ll be fine, thank you,” he said, trying not to be rude as he rebuffed her offer. Temple prostitution wasn’t his thing, no matter how good the dark-haired beauty looked naked. The only woman he had an interest in sharing his bed with right now was Elthena, and that moment was still years away, if it ever came at all.

She smiled at that, then nodded and left, leaving him to wonder if whatever just happened was a test or not. “If it was, did I pass or fail,” he wondered aloud as he lay there and stared up at his dark ceiling.

Ch. 188 - Questions from on High

Simon was awoken in the middle of the night by two men wearing white robes, clay masks, and a lantern. Though he was startled at first and almost lashed out in anger at the thought that the Whitecloaks had somehow found him. He restrained himself when he realized that all of this was part of some elaborate ceremony. He donned his brown robes and then followed them down another hallway that led in the opposite of the one he’d traveled in previously. 

The hallway led past a long colonnade of dark volcanic pillars on one side before it ended at a winding stairwell that led further up. It had no lights, and they made no move to climb it. Instead, one of them thrust the glassed lantern into his hand, and the other gestured to continue on without them.

Simon did just that, and as the stairs looped at random through what was probably a lava tube, he wondered exactly where this oracle might be since he didn’t think this passage could continue for very long. As it turned out, it continued for longer than he would have thought, becoming a passageway that dipped down again before becoming stairs once more. Halfway down the passageway, there was a rent in one side large enough for him to see the volcanic lake far below him. He was definitely moving along the rim of the crater. Somehow, knowing that made the whole thing seem that much more precarious despite being surrounded by stone.

After a few minutes, he finally reached the end of the stygian maze. There, in a steaming crag, was another smaller temple. Three large pillars held up a small roof, making the whole thing feel almost cave-like, and the delicately mosaiced floor was rent in half by a crack that glowed angrily from somewhere far below. Besides his lantern, it was the only light in the room, which was empty save for the veiled woman who sat Indian style, just on the far side of the crack. 

He approached her, then sat down on the nearside, opposite her. Only the thin layer of sulfurous fumes and the thin glowing line separated them.

“Greetings to you, Simon. That was once such a rare name in the world but now, if the stories are to be believed, it is becoming quite common,” she said smoothly. “It has been a long journey for you to reach me, but I knew that one day you would sit here beside me.” Her outfit showed him little of her body, though he could see her mouth as she spoke.

One thing was for sure, though. She didn’t look nearly old enough to have advised Elthena’s grandfather about anything. The woman that sat across from him was not a wizened old crone; she was a woman in her twenties or thirties.

“It’s an honor,” he said, meaning it. “Though truthfully, I didn’t expect all of this. ” 

“They never do,” she smiled sardonically. “And that is why the number of my visitors is so few. It is a necessary evil, I am afraid.”

“If you see the future, then why not share your gift with the world to make it a better place?” he asked. 

As soon as he realized he probably shouldn’t have done that so flippantly, she said, “This is not the question you have come here to ask me, Simon, but because you and I are so similar in this one regard, I will tell you about it while you think of a better question.”

“The world is in flux. Everything is always changing,” she began. “But a still pond is no different, and so long as no one with knowledge from outside of that pond does anything, then all of that chaos will reach its preordained conclusion. It is the natural order of things.”

Simon had no problem following any of that, so he stayed silent as she continued. “Each time you or I touch that pond, though, we leave a ripple, don’t we? If I tell a queen the answer on how to break a curse or give a king advice on how to wage war, then that will ripple out until the whole world is changed, and I must wait for the waters to still before I can again be sure of what is true. It is a slow process. To change things every day would render the picture muddy and incomplete. It is better to make one certain change than a dozen guesses, don’t you find?”

Simon found himself flabbergasted by the Oracle’s words. This was a conversation that he never thought it would even be possible to have with anyone except for Helades, but this strange woman was laying things bare in a way that was practically impossible. 

“I think we both know that my mere existence makes those waters ripple,” he answered, uncertainly. 

“This is true,” she agreed. “Sometimes you make large waves, and other times you make small ones, but you are always an element of uncertainty that changes things. I would be the same way if I were to descend from this mountain and try to save the world as you suggested, and that would do no one any good. It is far better if I do nothing at all and wait for the world to come to me when they feel like it is necessary.”

Simon wanted to say a million things there, but he ruthlessly suppressed all of them. The last thing he needed was to accidentally ask another stupid question. Are you saying I should do nothing at all? What do you think I should do then? How would you handle this? Are you a Goddess? 

All of those were questions that might waste this opportunity, and he had no wish to do that. Truthfully, he hadn’t expected to find a true oracle, and if he did, he’d planned to ask them about Iona’s supposed curse, but that seemed like almost a waste now. He needed to think bigger. 

“What can I do to save the most people?” he asked finally. “How can I make the world a better place?”

“That is as noble a goal as it is impossible,” she answered with another smile. “The Gods tried, but where are they now? If another leader sat in front of me, I might tell them the only way was magic, but I think you would take that somewhat too literally. Let us try another answer instead. Most are too fragile for an approach like this, but you’ve been through much and might appreciate a new perspective.”

The Oracle reached across the line that divided them and took his head in both of her hands. Then she whispered, “Breathe deeply, and know that no matter how frightening it gets, I will catch you when you fall.”

Simon wondered what any of that meant, but as she pulled his face down into the hot volcanic gases, he did as she instructed. The result was overwhelming. No, overwhelming was the wrong word. One second, Simon felt like he was breathing poison, and the next, he was melting. His mind was gone. It slipped free of the mysterious woman’s fingertips, and it plummeted down through the crack into the glowing hellscapes beyond. 

One second, he was alive in the real world, but now he was on fire, descending lower and lower. First, those fires were merely literal flames and fountains of magma, but somewhere past that, he slipped into literal hell. There, he fell past legions of souls being tormented and consumed in an infinite variety of depravity that was somehow appropriate to the terrible lives the victims have lived. 

“The whole universe is powered by pain,” A familiar-looking demon assured him as Simon fell by. “Sooner or later, we all burn. We have to, or all the stars would go out.”

“He’s right, you know,” Helades said, appearing beside him. “That’s why I have to keep shoveling garbage like you into the Pit.”

“The Pit!” as soon as Simon’s dissolved mind heard those words, things started to restructure. “I can’t be in hell; I'm still in the Pit.”

“Only until you burn like all the rest,” she quipped, fading away just as the demon he’d left somewhere far above. 

He wasn’t falling past wicked hellscapes anymore. Instead, he was falling past each level, one by one, as if they were all connected in a winding staircase. The goblins, the zombies, the bandits, and the plagues. Every one of them was laid out together like an old-school game, complete with 8-bit fonts and basic animation loops. 

On the zombie level he locked eyes with Freya for a moment. She looked at him with fear and love, and in that single moment he saw a thousand futures together with her. In some he was a better husband to her, and they even had a happy family. In others, things ended worse than they already had. She died because he could save her from a dozen different fates. Sometimes she even killed him; he even saw her rip out his throat on one occasion. All of the slipped away as he fell past her, though, leaving only regret on both their faces.

On the volcano level, he tried to climb in, to rejoin Elthenna, but his inertia wouldn’t let him. Instead, he was swept by for level after level to whatever awaited him below. The deeper he fell, the faster he went. It would have been frightening, but he was too lost to feel afraid. 

He saw the dragon, but it didn’t attack him. It simply tried to explain the nature of navigating reality as he just kept falling further and faster. There were other levels he’d yet to see, but they flew by before he could do much more than glimpse them. Haunted castles, angry ghosts, wars, and armies of green skins churned and pulsed, making his task ever more complicated, and at the bottom of that, there was a pool of dark water rushing up at him. 

No, not water, he realized just as he struck it. A giant mirror. He expected to dash himself against it like an insect, leaving behind only a bloody smear. Instead, he smashed through it like a rock through a window, and shards of broken glass rained down with him through the darkness. 

“What is going on?!” Simon yelled out into the dark, trying and failing to remember how he’d gotten into such a surreal moment. 

Somewhere far below him, the globe of the world was starting to resolve below him. It was a massive place, with islands and continents he’d never glimpsed before. From here, he could only really make out the distinctive peninsula and cluster of islands that were Ionia, but as he fell, he was able to make out more and more familiar details. Simon ignored them in favor of the unfamiliar ones at the edge of his map until the mirror shards distracted him.

No one answered, but all the different pieces of mirrors suddenly lit up in that familiar glowing blue writing. Each of them tried to answer his question, but every answer was different, and he didn’t know which one was correct. 

‘This is the bottom of the Pit; you have beaten the game. Congratulations!’

‘I’m sorry Simon, you Princess is in another castle.’

‘You have run out of lives, and your game is over. Please press any key to continue…’

‘This is nothing but a bad dream. Simply wake up to end it.’

‘I’m sorry, I do not understand the question.’

It was that last one that was most familiar to Simon, so even as he saw the ground looming at him out of the darkness, he glided toward the honest mirror, and before he fell to his death, he crawled through the shard, not even sure what was on the other side. 

“Oh, would you like to take a turn in here keeping notes while I go outside and play?” the glowing will-o-wisp he hadn’t seen since his first day in the Pit. As it asked, he looked behind it to the mountain of information he’d collected in his time in the Pit. It was a strange assortment. Some sections, like magic and history, were so full they were overflowing, but others had almost nothing. 

Simon walked past all of those. Instead, he went to the section titled, ‘What the Hell am I supposed to do next,’ and opened the only book on the shelf. The book was blank except for one small paragraph. ‘Helades plan is so impossible; no one’s ever done it, so try things your own way, on your own terms, instead and see how that goes.’

Simon found that answer both unsatisfying and undeniable. It was not the great philosophical revelation that he’d come here to find, but when he closed the book, all the lights in the strange, impossible library went dark with it, leaving him to wonder what it was he’d done. 

Then he understood. As he closed the book in his hand, the book that he was also inside of closed on the desk of the mage that was reading it. That book was in turn closed by the mute, Unspoken archivist, who was in turned slammed shut on by the child reading his fairy story for fun. All of those stories ended, and all of those books placed on shelves, and he was buried at the bottom of the smallest one, as little more than a footnote.

That was when his eyes opened tremulously, and he looked past the small roofed enclosure to the light of dawn beyond. That was a hell of a trip, he thought to himself. Hours passed in only a couple of minutes. For a moment, he wanted to believe that this wasn’t real either, but the headache rising behind his eyes as a result of whatever it was he’d breathed in argued persuasively that he was definitely really here. 

It took him that long to realize that he was sitting with his head in the oracle's lap. “I-I didn’t learn anything,” Simon rasped through a dry throat. “There were just a bunch of strange—”

“Shhhh,” she soothed him, stroking his hair. “The lessons of the visions are not always grasped at first, nor are they the most obvious. In time, you will understand, but now you must rest.”

Simon didn’t know about the former, but the latter was definitely true. He stayed awake only a few minutes before he drifted back down into slumber’s irresistible embrace.