Death After Death Ch. 143-144

Ch. 143 - A Miracle

Simon wasn’t sure how this would work exactly, but there was no time left to deliberate. Any minute now, Freya’s heart was going to stop, her body was going to spasm as her organs shut down, and she’d be replaced by an abomination that could only ever be a mockery of the woman she’d been, and there was no way he could let that happen. 

So, he pulled the trigger. In this case, for once, that didn’t involve saying anything at all. Instead, he moved forward and stood in the gap that he’d drawn to render the runes useless, completing the circuit with his own body. 

For a moment, nothing happened, but only for just long enough to make him wonder if he’d screwed something up. That was quickly followed by a tingling that started in his feet and slowly moved up his body as the precisely carved symbols in the ground began to glow with an unearthly light.

“What… what is this?” Freya asked. “What are you doing to me?”

She seemed very uncomfortable about what was happening, but Simon had no way of knowing if that was superstition, or something deeper. At this point, all he could do was watch and wait. He was both the conductor of the circuit and also the off switch. If he stepped out of this spot it would cease working, and all this effort would be wasted. 

He didn’t do that. Instead, he ignored her growing fear and his own trepidation, and watched as the light grew and pulsed, and the magic took hold of Freya. 

“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “Just half a minute of this, maybe a little more.” He didn’t know how long this would take, though, he was just trying to put Freya at ease as her body started to glow. 

The truth was he was in unexplored territory here, and even if he wasn’t, the atmosphere was so charged and dangerous that things felt like they might end badly for him too, and he had some idea of what was going on. 

It wasn’t possible to explain any of that to Freya. Instead, he prayed silently as the light of his brute forced magic filled her with forces she would never understand. 

If one took away the binding circle and the power circuits, the magic here was remarkably simple. It was built to take a ton of power and flood every aspect of his one time wife’s body with cure and life magic. He literally wanted to purge everything from her, down to the tiniest spec of darkness that might have wormed its way into her soul or her bone marrow. Wherever it was hiding, he would eliminate it. 

The light show aside, it seemed to be working too. Her only obvious wound healed in seconds, barely leaving behind a crescent shaped scar. Simon didn’t rush things, though. After that, he gave it another half minute before he finally stepped back and ended the spell.  

The runes dimmed immediately, but it took Freya a little longer to stop resembling a fey creature instead of the beautiful woman she was once she stopped sparkling with the powers of creation.  While she took in what happened Simon used his mirror to make sure he hadn’t accidentally drained decades of his life and ended up with white hair, but it seemed fine. 

He might have burned a year or two, but honestly he didn’t even think it was that much because he felt fine. Letting the rest of the world take some of the burden had definitely been the right answer, and he’d make sure he did that more in the future. 

“Are you okay?” he asked finally, once she met his eyes. 

“You tell me,” she said. “I-I, feel strange… Better but… different.”

“I’m sure all of that will fade in time,” Simon said. “The important thing is that… you survived.” As he spoke, he decided to leave out all the descriptors that might have filled that space. Probably. Against the odds. Impossibly. 

The important part wasn’t that she knew how impossible this was. It was that she hadn’t died, and that she didn’t freak out.

Freya didn’t freak out, though. Instead, she laughed and said, “which part? The zombie bite or the warlock’s spell?”

Simon smiled at that, but said nothing. Instead, he just let the moment wash over him. For a moment she wasn’t Frey, the mercenary warrior; she was Freya, with the easy smile and the clever quip. More importantly, she was his Freya, almost, for as long as that moment lasted. 

“How did you know my name, anyway?” she asked, suddenly, once she stopped looking at her now healed hand.

Then it was gone. She was a stranger, again, and he was the suspicious warlock that knew how to heal the sick and consort with the dead. 

“I stayed at the same tavern as you guys back in Schwarzenbruck a couple of weeks back,” Simon lied smoothly. 

“I see,” she answered skeptically. “And why are you up here, alone, in the middle of a horde of zombies?”

“I’m investigating the same problem you are, in my own way,” Simon answered cryptically, hoping to leave it at that. However, when Freya opened up her mouth to ask another question he spoke over her. “I believe the phrase you are looking for is thank you.”

“Thank you?” she said, suddenly glaring at him. “For what? You saved me so I could live with the loss of the man I love. That’s a special kind of torture. That’s all. If you could have saved me, then you could have saved Kell too.”

Simon didn’t even try to explain that the man was already dead. Instead he just shook his head and said, “If I were you I would put your bandage back on and tell your friends that I used wood ash and salt to purify your wound. It’s a lot better than the alternative. They’re waiting for you down the road.”

She thought about it for a moment and then instead of saying anything at all, she stormed out of the building, leaving him standing alone in the barn. He sighed. “That’s what you get for trying Simon. You should have just stayed out of it.”

Simon didn’t even follow to watch her walk away. Instead, he grabbed a shovel and started destroying his circle. The very last thing he wanted was for someone to find this by accident. He had no idea what would happen then, but he was pretty sure it would unsolve a level or three, which was exactly what he would deserve for trying to help those who so clearly wanted to hate him.

“Leave the past in the past, man,” he chided himself as he worked. It was good advice, and he would try to follow it. 

That only took a few minutes to leave the earth disturbed, and when it was done he finally walked outside. There, he noticed a little more death than he remembered before. A chicken that had been hunting and pecking here and there around the village up until now was laying dead near the barn. It was just one more corpse amongst the dismembered zombies and their victims that were scattered around, so normally his eyes would have glossed right over it. 

That said, he’d just performed magic that had drawn on the life of nearby things, so it was almost certainly his fault. Some of the wilted plants there were nearby might be too. It was hard to say. Still, it was probably better than turning himself into an old man. 

After he checked the area for any other anomalies, Simon walked to the road and saw that Freya was most of the way to her friends, then turned his back on her what he hoped was the last time, and went to finish what it was he’d been working on before she’d managed to appear in his life. 

No matter how hot he stoked the forges, and no matter how hard he pounded with his hammer, though, Simon couldn’t get her off his mind. It was infuriating. It wasn’t even about love or lust, either. It was about the ingratitude of it all. He’d done something impossible and saved her life, and then, just like that she’d thrown it in his face, for her current loser boyfriend?

“Fucking Kell,” he grumbled. Every time Simon went through this level he was losing reasons not to track that kid down while he was still in diapers and throw him off a cliff somewhere. Not that it mattered now. The man was dead. Freya might still pine for him, but no amount of tears would bring him back to life. 

His anger kept him focused at least, and he made great progress that day. Later that night he tracked down one of the few remaining chickens, and after spending half an hour getting and plucking it, he slow-roasted it on a spit for an hour, and then had one of the most delicious campfire meals of his life. 

In the morning, Simon packed up his armor project the day after the survivors of the Butcher’s Bill continued south. That was both because he didn’t trust them not to come back with a lynch mob, and because all the heavy work was done. Everything else could be done on a workbench with smaller tools, and he could find one of those far from here. 

He didn’t have any time pressure now, after all, he wasn’t going to use the door at the inn to go to Ionar. He was going to take the long way, and follow the trade roads south. In the best case he’d get there in plenty of time to explore the locale and understand what had caused everything to happen, and in the worst case, he’d miss it, and have to do it over again.

Well, he would do all of that after he made one more stop. There was no point in coming this far to give up on checking out the barrow mound first.

Ch. 144 - A Trail Gone Cold

Simon thought about leaving the plate mail behind under a pile of branches in the woods because of how heavy and bulky it was, but he decided against it and instead loaded it along with the rest of his meager supplies. He might not come back this way, depending on what he found. The last time, Freya had painted him as the villain, and there was no guarantee that this time would be any different, so there could be a lynch mob waiting for him in a few days, or maybe even something worse.

He would have honestly preferred to skip Schwarzenbruck on the way back. That, however, would have been difficult. It might even be impossible. The entire reason it was an important city was because the large stone bridge that the town was named for was one of the few good crossing points for quite a ways. He would be crossing there or not at all. Those were all later problems, though, and right now, he needed to focus on the now since the forest was still crawling with the dead in places. 

Simon wasn’t worried. Fresh zombies could be frighteningly vicious. Older ones that started to dry out and decay, though, you didn’t even have to outrun those. You could just out-walk them. The only reason that he bothered to put them down when he found them was because he knew what a mercy it was.

Freya had no idea how much she was tormenting the man she loved by tying him down to the cart for half a day instead of putting him immediately out of his misery, but Simon remembered it all too well. He'd never forget it. She could never comprehend that hunger and he hoped that she would never have to, despite the fact that with this many lives, countless versions of her had ended up as zombies by now. 

That thought saddened him, but at least this one was saved, probably. It was possible that in a day or two, she could still turn. He knew that; he just tried not to think about it. Her remaining friends seemed to have the right amount of wariness. They’d put her down if it came to it, and if they didn’t - well, he could save Schwarzenbruck again. It wouldn’t be the first time.

The trip to the barrows was easy enough now that he knew about where it was. The only problem was finding relatively safe places to sleep at night without someone to stand watch. There were just enough dead wandering around that if he did nothing about it, he was likely to wake up teeth in his throat. 

So, he slept in trees both nights and thankfully, as much as the sound his mule made attracted them, the zombies made no attempt to attack the thing. The same couldn’t be said about the reverse, though. Both mornings, Simon woke up to find one or two zombies on the ground with their head or their skulls caved in by a good hard kick. 

“Yeah, I’ve been there,” he nodded, remembering the cranky donkey that had taken him out like that. 

He was very mindful of where he was standing in relation to pack animals and horses now. Getting killed that way once was a little amusing, but dying like that repeatedly would just be sloppy. 

If I’m going to get killed again, it's going to be by something new, he promised himself. That meant no zombie bites, no donkey kicks, and most certainly, no getting crushed to death by the barrow again. 

So, when he found it, he approached it very carefully. First, he checked around outside and on the grassy slope on top. 

There was nothing there, but then, he didn’t expect there to be. So, he tethered Daisy to one of the closest trees and went inside for a closer look. 

The place was very nearly undisturbed, with the exception of the rubble at the entrance and deeper in some zombies that had been killed and lay strewn around the floor. Other than making sure he didn’t see anything that looked like a magical trap, though, he ignored all of those. He was here for a handful of reasons, and all of them were in the central chamber. 

There, in the central sarcophagus, was a single zombie struggling to rip free of the blade that was pinning him down like a bug. On the thing's head was the crown made of folded paper that he’d come for. Still, he knew better than to go take it. He’d already seen this roof collapse twice, and once was already one too many.

For now, he ignored both the paper and the zombie and studied the sword before moving to the candles. Someone had stabbed this guy hard enough that it had embedded in the stone. That told Simon that magic was involved, but that was nothing new since he already knew magic was involved with the cave-in. 

The sword was a plain, long sword that was a little on the short side. It was about the same size as the blades he preferred, but there were no signs that the magic was in the blade. It was just plain steel with a cheap hilt that had seen a fair bit of use. 

That meant someone had cast a spell, using the words for force, earth, or something new he hadn’t yet discovered. If he moved the zombie out of the way, he would definitely get a better idea, but for now, that was chancy. 

Instead, he moved to the candles, and a clumsy circle traced in the ground around them. It was only on a second look he saw that the circle extended all the way around the central sarcophagus. It was an ugly, rushed sort of job that Simon would not feel comfortable trying, but it seemed to be fairly straightforward based on the way he read the runes. There was nothing new there. 

If its boundary was violated, it used the energy of the person that violated it to trigger an earth rune that channeled power to the near wall and brought the whole dome down. It was a controlled demolition of a sort. The only complicated part about disarming it was that it was only at the last minute, when he reached for the transfer rune to strike it out, that he realized that if he did it with his hand, it would likely trigger it as he did so. 

Instead, Simon searched the dead warriors that had already been slaughtered in life and death, and then when he found a broken spear, he wiped the whole thing out from a distance in case he needed to run for it. The moment was anticlimactic, and when the runes were obliterated, nothing happened. Leaving him free to explore the rest of the place. 

The first thing he did was put the poor bastard that the tomb belonged to out of his misery. All it took was a couple hard bashes against the stone to brain him, and he stopped moving once and for all. Simon picked up the paper and, noting that the message was identical, pocketed it.

 Sorry, I needed to borrow this. Maybe we can meet again in your next life and discuss why. Even taking a moment to consider the words. 

“Well, I’m here, buddy; where in the hell are you?” he murmured to himself as he searched the tomb. 

There wasn’t much here, though. The warlord or King or whoever it was that was buried here had a golden torc on his arm and a few golden rings. Simon pocketed those, only feeling a little bad. Call it a put you out of your misery fee, he thought to himself. Grave robbing was wrong, but it was a victimless crime, and he was low on cash. This would be enough to tide him over nicely for what he needed to do.

What it didn’t do was offer him any answers. He’d figured out the trap but not who left it or why. He didn’t even know who this dude was or why he was important enough to be buried in a tomb like this. 

Simon sighed. He almost didn’t want to cut this dude in half to look at the sword, and it was only when he was procrastinating about that and studying the leathery, decayed visage of the tomb's occupant that he noticed something. 

The rings he’d removed had left marks from where they’d been on this man’s half-mummified skin for decades or centuries. The same sort of marks were visible on the man’s head and the wispy remains of his matted hair. It didn’t match the paper crown that Simon had taken, either. Whatever had made it, it was thinner… like a diadem, as opposed to the chunkier crown that came to mind when he pictured the word. 

“So it’s what isn’t here, huh?” he said to himself as he realized the shape of the note had been the clue and not its contents. That made him feel pretty stupid. 

“Why didn’t I figure that out the first time,” he asked rhetorically. “Oh, that’s right, I was crushed to death by the ceiling.” 

He still didn’t have an answer, of course, but now, at least, he had a question. Who was this guy, and why would his crown be worth stealing? That might be enough to point him at whoever had done this, which in turn might be enough for Simon to figure out who was taunting him. It was a tenuous plan, but it was a plan. There would be libraries or monasteries around here that would know the answer, and if they didn’t, there would be bards or drunks in taverns that would. He could figure it out, but not today. 

“I didn’t spend all this time working on that armor to bail,” he sighed. Simon used a word of earth on a silver coin in his pouch to make a mirror and spent several minutes explaining all that he’d learned to it just in case something bizarre and awful should happen.

I need to get in the habit of using save points, just in case, he thought to himself with a smile as he walked out into the sunlight to fetch his mule. 

As he left the barrow, he considered looting or at least searching some of the other ones just in case for clues but decided against it. If the zombie plague started from this one, and whoever had done it hadn’t broken them open as well, then they probably weren’t too important. Besides, he’d had enough of the dead and was heading south. Solved or not, he was done with the place for a while.