Death After Death PLUS 364-366

Ch. 364 - One Last Time

After a couple of days, Simon spent very little time meditating or trying to understand what they needed to do next. The reason for that was very simple. Meditating didn’t burn many calories, and he knew what he needed to do now. He needed to get back in shape. 

So, by day he cut down firewood, and by night he hunted goblins. He didn’t try for any large or daring battles. It was more about stalking or lying in wait than it was about taking on large packs. After the first night, when he’d had a chance to practice with his bow a little, most of his kills didn’t even involve his sword, which was a shame, since he had the most fun with that weapon, but it wasn’t the one he needed to practice with. 

He only needed to look at his newly regenerated gut to see this wasn’t about fun. Still, despite all of that, he promised himself one thing. I’m going to figure out how to fix this soon. If magic powers the loop, then there’s got to be a way to adjust it, at least a little.  

Doing this again to remind himself of how far he’d come wasn’t the worst thing, and a word of greater flesh shaping was a fine stopgap, but he was probably thinking too small. He knew that now. If he could study the souls of strangers and even the weave of fate to a small degree, then what he really needed to do was try to understand Helades’ magic.

He asked the mirror about that a couple of times, but other than showing him the contract he’d signed so long ago without reading it, it wasn’t much help. Still, he examined it several times, searching for some indication that the magic had been woven into the document itself. 

“If the magic continues to function, then it has to exist somewhere,” he insisted. “Spoken magic only lasts for a moment.”

There was always the possibility that he was wrong there. Maybe it only lasted for a moment, but it was always the same moment. There were no rules that said that all magic everywhere had to operate the same. The magic of a Goddess might be entirely different than the magic of mortals. It might even be likely, considering how many different kinds of human magic he’d seen.

There were hardly just spoken and written forms, either. There were gestural forms of magic as well, and considering the fact that the future version of himself seemed to know them, he almost certainly would one day. That was his only real regret that he hadn’t lingered longer in his life with the Magi. They might have hidden the most powerful bits from their recruits, but the level of sophistication and knowledge they had, well, that was hard to beat. 

That’s what I’ll ask her when I get to level 40, he decided. What he would ask her at that critical point was an ever-shifting goal, but surely he knew enough about magic now to have a conversation with her about it. If he didn’t, his best bet was probably to ask the demons, and he already knew those conversations would cost more lives than he was willing to give, making them a nonstarter. 

Even his desire to unravel Helades’ mysteries didn’t stop him from losing weight, though. He spent weeks at the cabin to do just that, subsisting largely off of fish, with only a few roast fowl for variety. The food was tasteless considering he had little in the way of salt, herbs, or even bread to pair it with, but that was fine. The worse it tasted, the less he ate, and the less he ate, the faster his excess pounds melted off. 

Simon found it vaguely ironic that at first he’d thought the goblins were an insurmountable problem that forced him into the Pit when he could deal with them so easily now. He could have stayed here forever, culling them every few nights to keep their predations to a minimum. 

As the weeks passed, he started to glimpse the man that he always should have been instead of the slug he’d been for so long. He was growing tempted to dig into the cabin’s root cellar from one side or the other just to get at the potatoes and turnips he knew to be in there, but he resisted, since he had no idea if that would undo the first floor as it was currently resolved, or not. 

That time wasn’t simply spent hungering or sweating, though. Once the goblins were under control and he had no more energy to exercise, he would run various experiments with his sight or converse with the mirror. 

He studied the portal beneath his bed, noting the lensing effect on the auras of the swamp beyond. It was a subtle thing, but he felt like if he studied it long enough, he might get real insight into the magic that powered the dislocation in time and space. Other times, he lay on the roof at night for a couple of hours and meditated on the road that lay ahead as he stared at the stars. 

He saw no secrets hidden in the constellations, but if he lay there long enough, the future opened up before him, and he saw all the different directions he could continue in. Anything more than a few hours or days in the future existed mostly as a puff of smoke; it lingered for only an instant before resolving into a new shape entirely. Still, most of these ghosts lead to Brin’s Capital, Leipzen. 

That was a city that he’d wanted to return to for a while, but one that he feared, because of how easily it would be to undo any number of timelines. He’d worked hard to provide the King a second lease on life and avoid a succession war, even if the prince didn’t deserve it. 

“Maybe he’ll grow into the role,” Simon told himself, but he didn’t believe it. 

Amidst the various possible futures he glimpsed, he found flashes of violence there as much as he saw images of himself wearing a white cloak. Those impressions fell in line rather nicely with his future experiences, too. He might have stopped the zombies from spreading across the land in a fairly permanent way, but in doing so, at least according to the Oracle, he’d exacerbated the time it would take that region to unify. That wasn’t the biggest loss since he knew from future lives that those reunifications seemed to be short-lived in the face of Murani armies. 

“God, I wish I’d studied more history,” he sighed. While Simon doubted he would have remembered anything specific from it at this point, he was sure that kingdoms on Earth had gone through some similar period, and any sort of analog would grant him insight. Sadly, other than the name of the occasional country, like France or Germany, or an empire like Rome, all of that was lost to him. He knew there were Mongols because he’d made notes about them in the mirror, but he couldn’t exactly recall why he’d compared them to the centaurs he’d fought in the badlands anymore, and hadn’t thought to explain the context to his future selves. 

Note to self, he reminded himself silently. Always give more context than you think you’ll need.

As if all of that wasn’t confusing enough, sometimes when he looked out to the northeast and tried to decide where the best odds at meeting with the Unspoken in the right way were, he saw other versions of himself. These weren’t the possible futures he might be able to trigger and experience. These were the versions of him that were actively running around level zero right now. 

He hadn’t been sure until he saw himself coming out of the goblin-infested cave in Ordenvale, covered in blood. He didn’t actually remember getting that banged up, but he supposed that he had been. That wasn’t the only him there was, though. Once he started looking around, he realized there were others too, but only if he looked for them in the right spot. 

He could see the version of himself that had raced up to the barrow mounds, too, and he expected that if he looked hard enough, he’d be able to find out more about what his doppelganger was up to. He tried that for a few nights running, but eventually gave up when those efforts got no results. 

If he is me, then he’s been right here and knows exactly where I’ll look, Simon reminded himself. Then, almost as an afterthought, he made notes about all the places he’d looked in case it was relevant later. 

Make more notes than you really need. That became a mantra for him in those days, but eventually, he decided it was time to go. He looked more like a half-starved son of privilege than the Simon he usually was, but that was fine for what was going to happen next. 

The following day, Simon got ready as he always did, with his trusty sword, standard armor, and his crossbow, since he was out of arrows for his shortbow thanks to his goblin hunting efforts. Then, he headed north, out of his valley. This was a way he hadn’t taken on level zero before, though he supposed it wouldn’t matter which way he actually took out into the real world since he’d never lingered here for nearly a month before. The way was going to be clear regardless, but he’d rather be safe than sorry. 

The journey went about as he expected. It was more grueling than he thought it should have been, but his endurance still wasn’t what it should be, so he accepted it. Still, at the edge of his valley, he saw something he hadn’t expected. 

Throughout the hike, he’d expected to see something where Helades’ magic ended and the rest of the world began, but he hadn’t expected it to be quite so dramatic. There was a bright line that separated the soap bubble he’d been inhabiting, and the world beyond. The effect was similar to the portal he’d studied before, only magnified. 

Where he stood now, the colors were more intense and brighter, but just over the line, they dimmed to something he considered more typical. That was where the twisting and snarling began, too. Just over the line, the threads that connected him to the rest of the world became a whirlpool-shaped knot. 

“No wonder I couldn’t find my alter-ego,” he thought as he calmly observed the sight. 

He had ten times the threads connecting him to this region alone as Aranna had to all of Abresse, and she’d spent a decade there. It certainly spoke to the number of places he’d touched the world, and though Simon stood there for an hour trying to comprehend it, he eventually forced himself to move on. 

He might study the sight for a year, but all it would do would inspire future paintings. He could see the Goddess’s hand here, but not well enough to divine her methods. 

“Maybe next time,” he said hopefully as he walked out into the wider world. For a moment, there was a tempest of magic as things shifted, then it was still once more. “If I don't use any magic for a life or two, who knows what I’ll be able to see next time.”

Simon turned around when he was a few steps away, but there was no trace of Helade’s touch any longer. The way behind him was normal, and he was fairly certain that wouldn’t change even if he walked all the way to the cabin. 

Ch. 365 - At Stake

On his way down the mountain, Simon chose his route carefully, and he steered well clear of the goblin cave. While he had to go through the pass that the tiny village of Maritin occupied, he didn’t linger. He doubted they’d remember a single traveler years before he saved them from their famine, but he didn’t want to chance it. This was his more direct route to the capital, but he had no wish to complicate things. What he needed to do in this life was complicated enough. 

And that’s even if they accept me, Simon reminded himself. He might have had to do what came next several times in several different places across a number of lives. 

That wasn’t hard, of course. He just needed to be a hero and catch someone’s eye, but every Simon running around the world at the same time complicated things. Even now, by himself, he could see what that Unspoken knight had been talking about when he confronted Simon years before. The way that the colors of the world warped around him was a little disorienting if he fixated on it for too long. 

“Maybe that will be so suspicious they’ll steer clear of me regardless,” Simon told himself, but those were just his worries. Everything he’d glimpsed led him to believe it was just the opposite. The strangeness of his aura is what would draw them to him; he just needed to seem like a hero to be recruited instead of a monster to be slain, and everything else would take care of itself. 

That’s why he had no plans to engrave any sort of words on his sword or anything else for the foreseeable future. They’d done their research on his previous persona, too, which was what shaped his current plan. He was going to save who he could, and when he found someone he couldn’t save, he’d take over their identity and hope for the best. 

Without being able to glimpse the skein of fate, he actually rated the chances of this plan working as very low. Fortunately, he’d spent several nights studying the maps of the region, and he had an excellent idea of where disasters were going to befall people that he might or might not be a part of. While Simon didn’t know the day or the hour that these things would happen, he found that if he was in the area, he started to get a feeling for these things. 

Still, for at least the first week, this strategy was hit or miss, for a couple of reasons. The first was that he had no coin, so he couldn’t easily stay at an inn, or linger near civilization, and the second was that what he wanted to fight evil, he didn’t want to do it in a way no one saw. 

So, he lingered near a village where he’d seen a vision of a building burning to the ground, but only until the people who lived there grew suspicious of the stranger hunting in the nearby woods. After that, he found the bandits that he’d known were in the area, but he’d been forced to lie in wait for days while they in turn waited for the right caravan to rob. 

That did eventually happen, thankfully. Three days after he started his lonely gnat-bitten vigil, a merchant with more money than guards finally arrived, and the bandits finally struck. Simon let the situation play out just long enough that his arrival wouldn’t be too suspicious, but by the time swords were out, he was already entering the fray. 

He took care not to kill those he didn’t have to, and shattered two bows, sending their wielders running before he made the ring leader flee with more superficial wounds. The merchant and his tough were less careful and left two corpses on the ground. It wasn’t Simon’s place to judge that, though. In another life, he would have done exactly the same thing. 

When the violence was done, the two of them eyed Simon suspiciously, but once they decided that he meant them no harm at least, they grudgingly thanked him, and after some small talk about where each of them was going, the merchant said, “You know I could use a good man with a sword. You aren’t him yet, of course, but you’re brave enough. With some proper tutelage, it might be that you could make something of yourself.”

Simon found the offer amusing and pretended to consider it, but the man had just dark enough of an aura for him to be certain that he wasn’t an especially good person. He wasn’t wicked enough to strike down, but he wouldn’t take Simon to the places where he wanted to go either, so he thanked the man and declined.

The merchant didn’t even offer a reward past dinner, which was really all he needed to know. Fortunately, the bandits had a small treasure of copper and silver coins from their past victims, and Simon used that to continue on his way.  

After almost two weeks of hunting for his opportunity, it was hard for Simon not to feel a little frustrated. “I can see the future, but I still can’t find the right opportunity,” he sighed one night around his small campfire. He was losing weight, but otherwise, he was making little progress. Still, he vowed to stay positive. 

That positivity was tested a few days later when he found a community burning a witch, though. That pained him to watch, especially when he noticed how bright her aura burned, outshining even the fire that engulfed her lower body.

Even though he knew it was exactly to the contrary of what he needed to do, he still wanted to do nothing more than free her from the cheering crowd who watched her burn. He would have to, if there was a chance of saving her, but it was too late. At this point, even multiple words of major healing might not have been enough. 

The most he could do was note the date and the location of the small village to attempt to rectify the incident in a future life after he spent some time saying the right things about the incident to a few of the more suspicious locals.

“A witch? That’s one thing no community should have to tolerate.”

“I’m sure your harvest will be much better with her out of the way.” 

Silently, though, he berated himself for every word. You should get used to this, he tried to tell himself that night over a couple of pints of ale. The White Cloaks will do this much and more. They might make you be the one to set the blaze. How are you going to cope with that?

This wasn’t the first time that Simon had experienced such a thought, but now it was no longer safely hypothetical. Now it was a real concern. He’d brought the pyramid down on the Magi to save the life of one child. Was he really going to start sacrificing people now to learn secrets when he couldn’t do it before? 

Simon didn’t know. He wanted to believe that for the right cause, he could sacrifice lives, but that logic smacked of Helades, or worse, his doppelganger, and he resisted it. 

To add insult to injury, there hadn’t even been one of the witch hunters there. Maybe he could have justified her death if it had advanced his agenda, cold though that might have been, but it had been a complete waste. 

He was still ruminating on those thoughts when the real witch walked in through the door to join the rest of the celebration. She wasn’t an herbalist, or even an ugly old crone, as the crowd had been led to believe. She was a beautiful young priestess, actually. Simon hadn’t seen her at the burning, though she’d probably been there. It would have been hard to tell her aura apart from the foul black smoke coming from the pyre. 

The woman’s soul was as ugly as her face was pretty, and somehow, he knew that she was responsible for what had happened here today. Simon made a point not to meet her eye, or even express any interest in her for the rest of the night. Still, despite his inebriation, his attention never left her, and when she finished her blessings and thanked those in attendance for what they’d done, she left the building, and Simon followed close behind. 

Despite his ungraceful body, he didn’t have any trouble staying hidden. That was as much because he’d gotten better at stalking thanks to his recent refresher as because she wasn’t paying attention. Why would she? She was safe in a position of power and had just won some victory that he didn’t fully understand.

She won’t survive the night, though, he promised himself as he watched the woman enter a modest home. 

Simon didn’t follow her in. Not immediately. Instead, he skulked in the shadows and then stared intently at the walls, relaxing his mind in an effort to gaze right through to the woman beyond. 

That wasn’t something that Simon had tried before, but it came fairly easily once he did. A layer at a time, the layers of reed and clay in the daub and wattle cottage peeled away to reveal his quarry as she got ready for bed. He couldn’t see her nudity, though he wouldn’t have looked away if he could have. The image wasn’t detailed enough for that. It was just a dark cloud shaped like a woman as she stripped and readied herself for bed. 

As she did so, Simon used his newfound X-ray vision to search for any other secrets she might have. Nonliving objects and places rarely had any auras of their own, but he could at least see the shapes, so he searched for hollows beneath the floorboards or anything that might appear to be a book or a weapon under the bed, but he found neither. 

Still, it passed the time, and when she blew out the candle and tucked herself into bed, he waited another half hour before he used his knife to lift the bar on the shutters and sneak in through the back window. In that time, plenty of people passed by his hiding place, but he didn’t detect any more suspicion from them than he did from the sleeping woman. 

For a moment, Simon stood there in the dark trying to decide if he should try to talk to her. There were definitely things to be learned here. What she knew… Why had she gotten the other woman burned as a witch instead of her… It was a tantalizing situation, but above and beyond his curiosity, there was an important reason why he couldn’t.

As much as he wanted to know, he couldn’t do anything to stop her if the first words out of her mouth when she woke up were soul destruction, or something equally nasty, and as dark and oily as her skin looked while she lay peacefully in her bed, there was a non-zero chance that was the case. 

So, he pinned her to her mattress with a sword through the throat. She died almost immediately from that wound and only had the time to fix him with a hateful, accusatory gaze. Even after she died, though, he left his weapon embedded in the witch’s corpse for several minutes as he quietly searched her home for evidence of her misdeeds; he had no intention of letting her rise a second time, and waited for her aura to fade completely before he retrieved his weapon. 

His search turned up nothing definitive, though he did find a few poppets that looked disturbingly like voodoo dolls. He searched them for any magical markings, but found none, which left Simon feeling disappointed. He’d done a good deed, but come away with no more knowledge than when he’d started. 

“Next time I’ll make an amulet of nullification so I can try to interrogate them before I kill them,” he told himself as he left the way he came and sealed the shutter shut behind him, and went back to the inn. 

There was no telling if that would work very well, since cutting a witch of any power off from her marks would kill her in minutes, but it would still be a useful tool to have in his tool belt, and he lay in bed in his room thinking about it. Part of him wanted to get back on the road tonight. He stayed, but only because it would have appeared more suspicious if he’d just left. Someone would have remembered timing like that. 

No one found her body that night, though, and the next day Simon left town at sunrise without a backward glance. He felt guilty for not saving the life of the herbalist, but at least he’d avenged her by lopping off the head of the snake. He hadn’t gotten any interesting grimoires or artifacts out of the deal, unfortunately, but in this case, the good deed was its own reward. 

Ch. 366 - A Different Opportunity

No new witches crossed his path in the weeks that followed, though he did find other small acts of heroism to help out with here and there. He managed to avoid killing anyone else, too, which was good, because his murder of that single witch had dulled his sight considerably. He could still see auras, and some colors, of course, but the subtle threads of life and destiny were lost to him again, at least for the moment. 

It will only take a few months to fix that, he told himself, but he was skeptical that it would happen. Running around saving lives often resulted in deaths, and Simon wasn’t particularly willing to spare evil-doers just so he could keep his vision sharp.

Still, he wasn’t above letting other people do the killing to help him there, as he did with the merchant the week before. Still, everywhere he went, things didn’t quite work out the way he hoped. He heard rumors of something that the locals called a ghast in one small farming community. Simon thought it sounded like a vampire, but it turned out to be nothing but a cattle thief hiding in the cemetery and using superstition as a shield. 

“I should have guessed it would be something like this when I found out his victims were cows and sheep, not people,” Simon told himself after he turned the desperate man in to the town’s headman so he could decide his fate. “What kind of vampire only eats farm animals?”

That statement reminded Simon of just how bad beasts tasted for a moment, which brought a number of related memories to the surface, but he quickly suppressed them.

Eventually, for lack of funds, Simon ended up helping out farmers in need of a hand as he crisscrossed the land trying to be noticed. So, it was completely by accident when he ran across his first white cloak. 

That night, a merchant named Barnabas was treating him to dinner at some nameless roadhouse when he noticed the witchhunter at the bar getting drunk. The rest of the establishment, including Barnabas, seemed to be pretending that the man didn’t exist, though given the shades of gray that some people glowed, that made sense. Still, Simon had nothing to fear, so after giving it enough time to come up organically, he blurted out, “Isn’t that a witchhunter?” as if he’d just noticed. 

The farmer gave him a meaningful look, but Simon acted as if he didn’t understand the problem. He seemed to be about to whisper something to Simon, but before he could, the drunken whitecloak turned around and regarded the two of them. 

“Witch hunter? You sssay that like it's a bad thing,” he slurred as he looked at them with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity. 

“Oh n-not at all,” Simon answered, feigning fear as the man across from him began to study the dregs of his bowl with great care. “I think you do wonderful work, I just haven’t seen one before in p-person. That’s all.”

Those were both lies. With sharp enough sight, the man would probably be able to see right through them, but between the man's drinking and his well-worn hilt, Simon was betting that he lacked the clarity for such details. 

The white cloak squinted at him, but said nothing either way. Instead, he got up from the bar, then came over to their table and sat down. Barinbus froze at that, like he was about to face the inquisition, but Simon saw nothing to be afraid of. He didn’t need any magical vision to see that the man was merely lonely. 

“And what is it you’ve heard about us exactly?” the knight asked. While not quite broken down, he’d certainly seen better days, and his hair and mustache both contained more gray than brown. He wasn’t ideal for Simon’s purposes, but he might work. 

“Well, there are loads of stories…” Simon started, rattling off a few from the ancient past which were obvious veiled allusions to the order of the Unspoken, along with a few that weren’t. He didn’t want to hit too close to the mark. When that didn’t seem to impress the man, he followed up with “and there was a witch burned at the stake in Brythian a few weeks ago. You heard about that, didn’t you, Barnibus?”

The farmer nodded, reluctantly, obviously displeased to be drawn into the conversation. “Aye,” he agreed. “She got what was cominn’ to her. No doubt in that.”

“That was you, right?” Simon said, turning back to the bleary-eyed witch hunter. “You did that, right? Tracked her down? Rooted her out?”

Simon hated having to act excited at the death of a woman who was almost certainly innocent, but in this case, there was nothing else he could do. She was the designated bad guy, and trying to relitigate her death wouldn’t bring her back. 

Simon expected the man to take all of the credit, but surprisingly, he shook his head. Then he said something that made Simon’s blood run cold. “No, not me. The brave people of that town rooted that evil out all on their own, but even so, the witch still managed to get her revenge somehow; she used dark magics from beyond the grave to strike down the priestess who pointed the finger. I spent a week looking into that death.”

Simon’s horror was unfeigned. For a moment, he expected the man to turn to him and reveal that all of this was a ruse and that he’d finally tracked down her killer. Fortunately, that only played out in his head. Instead, Barinibus, equally aghast, asked for further details, and the witch hunter seemed only too happy to provide them. 

Simon pretended to listen with rapt attention, but he spent most of the time trying to keep his incredulity from his face at just how wrong the knight was. He explained the facts well enough. The priestess had been beheaded while sleeping soundly after the execution. He’d even found the voodoo dolls and other subtle signs of witchcraft in the cottage that should have given him everything he needed to reach the correct verdict. Unfortunately, he’d managed to misinterpret all of them. 

The drunken knight spent the time it took to finish his tankard explaining to both of them how the little tiny poppets had clearly snuck into her home and then beheaded her before their magic expired. Simon wanted to point out that if such a thing had happened, they would have left a bloody murder weapon on the ground, but decided against it. Instead, he let the man talk until he was all talked out, which didn’t take more than an hour. 

Two more ales later, the White Cloak passed out at their table, in the midst of another story about a necromancer. That was a shame. Though Simon suspected his details were just as dubious, he’d enjoyed listening to the tale. As soon as it was clear that Sir Derinholt, which is how he’d eventually introduced himself, was passed out, Barnabas quickly pulled them away from the table like the drunk was a corpse with the plague. 

“What are you doing?” he hissed. “You have a bloomin’ death wish or something?”

“What?” Simon asked. He thought the man was overreacting, but he knew that the white cloaks had a very mixed reputation. “He’s a hero and I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“We’ll ain’t that all just fine and dandy,” the merchant scowled, “But that won’t save you. Not all the time. Men like these see evil in the strangest of places, and real or imagined, they’ll hang you for it, and no one will stop them.”

“Is that any worse than the nobles? Surely a Baron or a Duke who…” Simon’s words trailed off as the man gave one last exasperated sigh and just walked away. That worked for Simon. He was happy to be more trouble than he was worth. It gave him a nice, clean break. 

That night, he slept in the stables to save his last coppers, but he was up and dawn and waiting in the yard, waiting for the Whitecloak to appear. Simon didn’t disagree with his companion's assessment at all. The man was dangerous and a law unto himself. There was every chance that he, or someone like him, could strike Simon down, but he wasn’t afraid of them. 

Even if they killed him, he’d just come back in another life to try again. He needed to learn what they knew, and it was this or kill a few Unspoken and interrogate their souls. While that was an option, it certainly wasn’t the right one. 

So, when Sir Derinholt emerged from the inn and headed for his horse. Simon had to feign his nervousness once more when he approached the man. That nervousness quickly wore thin, though, when it became clear that the white cloak had almost no memory of their conversation last night. 

He’d been hoping to leverage those shreds of familiarity to build a relationship with the man. When that didn’t happen, though, Simon turned the empty spaces in the man’s memory to his advantage instead. he proceeded to lay out a conversation which was mostly true on its face. 

He told the warrior of the necromancer and the witch, and repeated many of the details that he could have heard nowhere else to him. That was enough to mute the white cloak’s hungover sense of impatience long enough for Simon to spring the second half of his trap.

“Does that mean you don’t want to train me anymore?” Simon asked as the man was trying to rebuff him. That was enough to stop the knight in his tracks. 

“What?” he asked. “Did I say that? How much did I have to drink anyway?”

“While you were sitting with us?” Simon answered. “Five tankards, and yeah, you said—”

“Listen, son,” the man answered, talking down to Simon like he was a child. “You have a good heart, and it's in the right spot, too, I think, but you’re a bit soft for hunting the forces of darkness. They’d chew you up and spit you out. Why don’t you go off and find a nice wife, maybe have a kid or two, and—”

“I’ll duel you,” Simon blurted out. He had no idea if it would work. “How about that? We fight, and if I beat you—”

Truthfully, he hadn’t expected the man to shove aside his lie quite so easily. He’d expected a few more questions, but it was clear he’d misjudged Sir Derinholt. The man was no deep thinker.

“You won’t beat me,” the knight said, offended. For a moment, Simon thought he’d fucked it all up. Then the white cloak continued. “But if you put in a good showing, well, I’ll think about it. If you get hurt though… well, that’s your own damn fault.”

Simon beamed at that, but it was only to cover up the feral grin. The knight had better armor, and he might even have a magic blade, but without those advantages, he was sure he could take him apart, even in his current chubby form.