Death After Death 171-172

Ch. 171 - Not this Run

Simon spent most of that afternoon beating himself up. It wasn’t even about the sword after a while. It was about being fat, the way he’d left things with Elthena, the mystery of his evil twin, starting over again in the Pit, and even the fact that he’d spent 40 lives with so little to show for it. Somehow, despite all the progress he’d made so far, he couldn’t help but feel sorry for himself as he considered how pointless all of this was.  

It’s not like you have a limit, he grumbled at himself as he packed and prepared to do this all again. You can do this a million more times if you have to. 

Though true, those thoughts didn’t help. Living the same life a million more times was not exactly the silver lining he’d hoped it would be when he’d thought of it. It certainly didn’t help with the idea that he was going to have to face down a vampire and a dragon sometime soon. 

Either one was terrifying, and though the dragon would at least end in a quick death with the vampire, he didn’t even have that guarantee. He was going to need more than stakes to fight such a monster. He needed to come up with one hell of a plan for that.

“Not this run, though,” he reassured himself. “First, I'll deal with the mess I left behind last time; then, I'll deal with future levels.”

Those words rang hollow to him as he considered his plan for what he needed to do next. “What I need to do is not fuck up the timeline!” he said to himself glumly as he considered how easy it would be to do just that while he went out for a walk.

“If I fight the wrong guy… hell, if I kill anybody,” Simon sighed. “Even saving people will have some repercussions. What am I supposed to do for half a decade that doesn’t save or kill anyone?” He wasn’t sure, but he needed to think of something. 

Eventually, after a couple of hours, he decided that the best he could do was distance. He could stick to the big cities far from Ionar as he could and just do his best to blend in. “Maybe I’ll become a scribe or a mapmaker or something,” he told himself, trying to find alternatives to the mercenary and healer paths that had been his favorite for so long. 

With that decided, he kept himself busy until sunset. That night, in bed, he tossed and turned rather than getting any real sleep. So, eventually, sometime after midnight, he got up and dressed silently in the dark. He could stay here for days, but there wasn’t any point to that. Not when he knew where he was going next. 

When Simon was ready, he skipped the torch and spoke a word of lesser light, making his flanged mace glow a pale blue-white, not unlike a glow stick. Then he descended through the trapdoor. It used to lead under this house to some point in the future where he would have to deal with the rats, but now that level was gone, and instead, it led to the skeleton crypt. 

This was a place he knew well. There were always some minor variations, but thanks to his struggles with the Blackheart, he had a pretty good idea of where he was in the timeline, and he knew exactly where he was in the wider world. He was about six years before the volcano exploded and about three before the old version of him went to Ionar, directly beneath the graveyard at Kawsburl. 

It wasn’t the nicest place, but that didn’t really matter to Simon. He wasn’t staying long. 

Once he was on the stairs, he closed the trapdoor behind him. Then, once he was satisfied that the portal that had brought him here had dissipated, he tried to reopen it. It was stuck pretty good. For a moment, he thought he would have to blow a word of force on it, even though the very last thing he wanted was to leave the entrance gaping open for anyone to find. That will definitely screw up the timeline, he reminded himself. 

However, after a few tries, it opened in a shower of earth to reveal the short shaft he remembered from his last visit. The house hadn’t yet been built over the top of it, so instead, he gazed out into the sunlit sky. 

He closed it immediately. Not only did he not want to leave until dark to avoid drawing attention, but he also had no money. That meant he needed to gather what gold and silver he could from the baubles and relics in the tomb.

“Cheer up,” he told himself as he turned back around and descended the stairs, “This is what you’re going to have to do every time until you find a better source of cash.”

When Simon started to kill the dead warriors in this room this time, he didn’t try to set a new speed record. He didn’t even do his best to be graceful and efficient. Instead, he just used it as a particularly vicious game of whack-a-mole to work out his frustrations as he turned the lesser skeletons into bone dust and splinters. 

When the death knight finally arose, Simon didn’t even bother to draw his sword like he usually did. Instead, he parried a few of the blows, and then when the knight got a little overextended, he tripped it, pushing the monstrosity down to the floor and crushing his head with his boot. 

“Thanks for the sword,” Simon taunted as the thing ceased moving. “It worked great.”

For a moment, he really wanted to rip open the thing’s breastplate and crush the Blackheart, too, but he didn’t. At a minimum, that would reset a couple of levels. It might reset half of them. It was something that he needed to do eventually, but not until he’d resolved things in Ionar. 

None of this was the hard part of the level, though. He’d beaten these guys dozens of times now. Now, he needed to use lesser words of earth to scrape off the thin lairs of gilding on the grave goods of the men he’d just killed for the second time. 

That wasn’t hard. It only took a few minutes of searching before he had a handful of coin-looking objects, even if they lacked the details. The only problem was that those weren’t going to be enough.

Simon didn’t have to find enough cash to live the rest of his life on down here, but he needed enough to travel and establish himself. That wasn’t just going to happen on its own. I’m going to need more, he eventually decided as he looked at the locked gate. He knew exactly where he was going to get it; he just didn’t know how he was going to get there. 

He stood there for several moments contemplating how best to do that. His first option was to use a word of greater earth to try to dig around it. It seemed straightforward. It might require several spells, though, and I don’t want to sleep here to recover if I don’t have to, he argued. 

Instead, after examining the rusted wrought iron bars, he decided that simply knocking the gate over might work. “The portal is in the doorway itself,” he reasoned. “So if I push that aside, along with the partition it's attached to… well, that’s not going through the portal, now is it.”

Simon smiled at that, feeling like he’d outsmarted something. Then, he gave it a shot. “Gervuul Oonbetit!” he shouted, visualizing the force focused around the edge of the thing, where it was anchored into the stone of the cavern. The whole thing gave like crumpled tinfoil and landed in a heap on the dusty stone with a terrible racket. 

Simon paused a moment to see if that triggered any further dead to rise, or worse, for human watchmen to see what had happened, but only silence lingered. While he stood there, he realized that he had what was effectively a working gate that he could transfer anywhere now if he so desired. For a moment, Simon thought about taking it with him but laughed when he imagined dragging the thing around the world. 

“What would I even use it for?” he chuckled as he stepped over it. 

Simon descended into the lower level, curious if the men that were buried here would rise to fight him as well. They hadn’t last time, but then, when he’d discovered this last time, the Blackheart had been long gone. 

He didn’t have to wait long for the answer. As soon as he pulled a gold chain off the body of a dead man, he started to rise. Simon responded in kind and put him right back down with his mace. He then spent the next few minutes doing the same with everybody in there. 

None of them had a tenth of the strength of the knight upstairs, and he moved to put all of them down without a second thought. Unfortunately, his endurance was no longer what it had been a few days ago. Even as an old man, he had more steel in his spine than the original version of Simon, and as the fight went on, he started to slow down visibly. 

I should have rested, first, he cursed himself as his swings became more desperate, and his few remaining enemies started to close in. 

Eventually, it was only his shield that was keeping his head on his shoulders since blocking required much less effort than dodging with his current weight. For a minute there, he thought these guys might take him out. It was only the embarrassment at the idea that allowed him to power through the last few enemies. Afterward, though, when he all but collapsed onto a sarcophagus to sit and rest, his chest was heaving from the effort. After that, he began to gather more of the spoils. 

Simon felt a little bad robbing the graves of brave warriors, but he knew they weren’t going to be doing anything with it. He had a much better idea of how the afterlife worked than most, and these souls had long since moved on to what he hoped was a better place. 

Simon spent hours in the crypt, but only because he didn’t have anything better to do. He’d already searched this whole place for secrets, so he wasn’t too concerned with those. He just wanted to make sure he didn’t leave behind anything that was useful. 

When he checked on his situation hours later, it was night, so he rose up from the crypt as quietly as he could and covered up the entrance with soil to hide it. Then he headed off south. He’d originally been planning to head off north, but after remembering what poor shape he was in, Darndelle seemed to be the better option for now. He was much closer to it. He could spend some time there, at the city on the crossroads, and then go north once he’d finished searching their libraries for useful information.

Ch. 172 - Blending In

The way to Darndelle was longer than Simon remembered. He was pretty sure it had taken him five days to get here once upon a time, but it took closer to a week before he sighted the city. He’d forgotten how much he hated this part of his cycle. The only way to really appreciate how soft and weak he’d been in his past life was to be forced to wallow in it after spending years feeling strong and vital. 

This time, it wasn’t even the weight or his severe lack of cardio. It was how prone his feet were to blisters and how much he sweated under the heat of the midday sun. He could use words of lesser healing to address the minor wounds, but only time would take care of everything else. 

“What I need is a word that lets me reshape my body,” he told himself one day while he rested in the shade. “Like a word of greater transformation or something. He’ll, I’d take a word of lesser weight loss.”

Despite his griping about his physical condition, his skills were only slightly dulled by it, and thanks to his bow, he ate well on the trip back. One night, he slow-roasted a rabbit on a handmade rotisserie with sage, and another night, he had fire-roasted fish that he caught in a raging stream he crossed earlier that day. Even at his worst, this was hardly a bad life. 

Simon didn’t encounter any bandits, and though he saw the tracks of a beastman tribe, he never actually saw them, which was just as well since he was trying not to kill everything in sight on this trip. He did walk with a caravan for the last few days once he reached the road. He told them that he was a traveling scholar, which wasn’t so far from the truth. They seemed skeptical, given his leather armor and his skill with a bow, but all he could do about that was lamely offer that the road was a very dangerous place for scholars. 

Still, it was good feedback, and the first thing he did when he reached Darndelle once he’d secured a room at a cheap inn was to visit a tailor and have something more appropriate made. He planned on spending a lot of time at the libraries of the trade city, and the last thing he wanted to do was stand out like a sore thumb. 

The second thing he did, once he’d wasted half of his precious few gold coins on a new outfit, though, was to go visit the graveyard where he’d spent so much time. He didn’t actually enter it, of course. Instead, he leaned on the fence and watched the mist coalesce nearby as it sensed his life force. 

“I’d be careful if I were you, stranger,” a man said in passing as Simon studied the place. “You set foot in there after dark, and your life is forfeit. No one is going to be foolish enough to try to save you.”

Simon nodded and thanked the man, but he kept looking just the same. Fixing this particular problem in the future was one of his biggest accomplishments, and it felt weird to see that it was all undone like this. Part of him wanted to be here to watch when his past self finally burned all this away, but that was decades from now and well after the date he planned to be in Ionar. 

 The disturbing view was beautiful in a way, though it felt silly that it had to be allowed to persist for so long before he could finally just handle it. Still, when he returned to the inn, he found that it had put things into perspective for him. 

Simon’s life in the city continued like that for the better part of a week while he ran various errands. He bought paper, ink, and wax to forge a note of introduction from a Baron in Liepzin. He considered using the Raithwaite name, but the idea of associating himself with that family sickened him. So, instead, he wrote it as if it were from Lord Corwin and hoped that he wouldn’t bring any trouble down on that man’s head while he waited for his clothes to arrive. It was only when all that was done that he finally paid a barber to make him look respectable and visited the city archives. 

Though nominally, they were restricted to the King’s scribes and courtiers. He already knew what to say to get them to ask the least questions possible. Though initially, the archivist was quite unhelpful, when he read the letter and saw that Simon’s fictitious master had heard of the city’s plight and was planning to come down and slay the monstrosity that had beset the city’s graveyard, he softened immediately. 

The people of Darndelle cared about many things. They cared about the roads and trade. They cared about the desert bandits and the centaur tribes. They even cared about their relations and rivalries with Abrese to the south. What the city's rulers cared about more than anything else, though, was the curse that haunted their city each night. 

It was a stain on their rule, and Simon knew that any serious effort to purge it would be granted all the support that was needed. 

“Why exactly does Baron uhm… Corwin? Is it? Why exactly has he taken an interest in our little problem, Mr. Nomis?” the man asked, still a little suspicious, even after reading the letter. “And what does he hope to gain by your presence?”

“Well, between you and me, my lord is a bit of a glory hound,” Simon confessed, pretending to sound embarrassed. This was made more difficult by hearing the alias he’d given the man said out loud. He’d reversed his name in case he accidentally did something so that he didn’t litter the history books with any more Simons, but now that he heard it repeated back to him, he decided he should have picked a better name. “This is hardly the first monster he’s fought. I think he’s hoping to create a legend of sorts.”

“A legend, huh? What else has he slain?” the man asked, more curiously. 

Simon listed off a few random beasts inspired by his own adventures, though he gave them more creative names. “Well, after the goblin lord and the centaur chieftain, he turned his attention to larger beasts and struck down the wyvern of Mount Wiggindorf and the Griffon of Matalena,” Simon continued, using his most sincere voice, perfectly aware that not all of these were real places. 

Still, the archivist didn’t seem to know that and, after the conversation, granted him probationary access to the records so that he could begin his research on the Baron’s behalf. As a strategy, this worked splendidly, and the only time that people bothered him was when important personages tracked him down to ask when the Baron was coming or if Simon had discovered the secret to slaying the beast. 

His answer to those annoyances always varied but was generally along the lines of, “I may yet send for him soon. My current line of research is promising, but not yet conclusive,” even though very little of what he read about each day had anything to do, even tangentially, with the Blackheart or the mist. 

Instead, he spent his time trying to learn about the history of the region and the other monsters of the world while he poured through document after document, looking for more information about the Unspoken. True to what Aaric had said, though, they seemed to be a secret society intent on saying that way. 

Very occasionally, he would find oblique references about some problem or another being solved with the assistance of doves, and occasionally, a record about some warlock would end with the phrase, ‘and he was never spoken of again,’ but these were flimsy things that were barely worth mentioning after he spent day after day tracking down these out of the way stories.

For a fantasy world, it seemed a great deal of information in the library was utterly mundane. Fantastical accounts were rare, and almost all of them were flat and undetailed or cut off before he could get a complete picture. To him, it felt almost like someone was sanitizing history, especially where magic and the Unspoken were concerned. 

Unfortunately, after months in the city, his funds started to get low, and he had to switch from doing full-time research to doing part-time map-making to make ends meet. In Simon’s time at the library, he’d noticed that the primary users of the library, beyond city functionaries, were merchants looking for more information about this destination or that one. 

So, Simon set about making reasonably accurate maps of the region that he could sell to these gentlemen. Each would take a few hours to make as he traced them from the large glowing version he had the mirror in his room display, but each would sell for a handful of gold, which was more than enough to see him taken care of for a few months. 

On the rare occasion he was called out on either of these activities, he would make something up on the spot. “Oh, there was once a similar phenomenon in this region…” or “Though that’s true, the Baron told me that I might find a clue as to the thing’s weakness because…”

It was all bullshit, of course, and eventually Simon got to be quite good at it. That was fortunate because the longer he stayed, the more parties of important people he got invited to share what he’d learned. 

By the time he’d been in the city for over a year, he was invited to some event or another on an almost monthly basis, just so that the nobles of the city could ask him about the wider world and the chances that their city’s curse would finally be purged. Some brought up the Blackheart rumor, but he dismissed it. Instead, he focused on extraneous details, like the way that the fog moved and how similar it was to the swamp wraiths that haunted some bogs or how one of the headstones in the cemetery might indeed be cursed. 

Once, at a Viscount’s dinner table, when he was asked how it absorbed the souls of everyone else who was buried there, Simon went on at length about how their souls were trapped and needed to be freed. He even insinuated that someone might be able to communicate with the beast in some dark fashion. He only suggested all of this because the man seemed to have something to hide, and it amused Simon to make him think that whatever secret he was keeping might yet be revealed. 

He knew that he shouldn’t be making waves like that and that even harmless fun might impact the future in unknown ways. What he didn’t expect, though, was for it to rouse the attention of the Unspoken themselves. 

When he returned home the following night, though, that’s exactly who he found waiting for him. There were three men in white cloaks looking through his things, and when he opened the door, they seemed utterly unperturbed. 

“Have a seat, Mr. Nimos,” one of them said, not bothering to pull back his cowl and show his face. “We’ve been expecting you.”