Death After Death PLUS 345-347

Ch. 345 - A Familiar Bed

The first clue that Simon was waking up in Rivenwood and not his cabin was the pain. It was worst in his head, but as soon as he shifted slightly, the pain that came from his arm consumed all of that and more, making the breath catch in his throat. For a moment, he willed his heart to stop beating so that the lack of motion would quell the pain that blazed brightly in his arm. 

He instantly brought the word of healing to his lips but dismissed it almost as quickly. Not happening, he admonished himself. That’s what whiskey is for. 

Very careful not to jostle his arm, Simon opened his eyes to find a room he’d been in before. Well, his eye at least. His left eye was swollen shut, so that he could only barely see some blurred light from it. His other eye worked just fine, letting him see that he wasn’t the only one in bad shape. 

He was in one of the beds, but there were many others lying on pallets or rugs on the floor. Some had bloody bandages wrapped around stab wounds or nasty burns, while others were cradling the bandaged stumps of missing hands or limbs. 

It was an ugly scene, and the fact that he’d seen similar moments across a dozen lives didn’t make those sights or smells any easier to bear. Simon felt a twinge of guilt. He had the magic to heal these people, and he wasn’t going to use it. As a result, people would die. 

He didn’t dwell on it. I’ve done what I can, and I’ll do more when I can, he told himself as he looked around the room. 

As he did so, he was careful not to jostle his arm, which was only being held together by a few sticks and some wrapped bandages. That would make any further motion impossible without a proper cast, he realized, but even if his arm had been whole, he wasn’t sure that he would have been able to stand. The simple act of turning his head a few degrees left the world spinning. 

Skull fracture, probably, he told himself, mentally adding together his injuries. Combined, it would be months before he could do more than putter around or walk. At least it would have been, without his dagger. 

That thing was probably the reason he was still breathing at all, he realized as the woman who was acting as a triage nurse came over to him when she noticed he was moving. His unconscious body had lain beneath that orc for seconds or minutes, drinking in what it could from the dying brute, offsetting who knew what brain bleeds the whole time. 

As soon as I’m strong enough to get out of here, I’ll buy myself a cow and fix the worst of it in an afternoon, he told himself. That was about as close to blood sacrifice as he’d ever planned before, but it was what it was, and pragmatic didn’t mean evil.

“Can you hear me?” the young woman asked. 

He could, but only through one ear. His left ear was just a dull ringing that likely meant a ruptured eardrum. He wasn’t even sure if that was fixable without a word of power, but for now, that didn’t matter. He just nodded slightly as he looked at her familiar smile. It had been about a hundred years too long for him to remember her name, but he knew that this was the second time she was taking care of him in such a bad way. 

“That’s good,” she said, sounding relieved. “Very good. I don’t know who you are, but.. Let’s just say we were lucky you were here last night, and you’re lucky to be here still.”

Last time I was here, I thought it would be dangerous to heal my brain directly, and this time I’m in the same situation because I’m trying not to use magic, he berated himself. How ironic. 

Simon didn’t laugh or even smile at those thoughts because it would hurt too much. Instead, he asked, “What happened here? How bad is it?” His words were croaked more than said, but apparently she didn’t understand what he meant, because she told him about his condition, and not the condition of the town. 

“Well, you were barely breathing when we found you,” she admitted before running down his list of dire injuries. He noted that she missed his broken ribs. “But don’t you worry. Grann is tending to other patients just now, but when she gets here, I’m sure she’ll know just what to do.”

“Not me,” Simon coughed, wracking his body with another wave of agony from the violent motion. “This place. Rivenwood. How bad?”

“Oh,” she said, startled that he seemed to care more about the place than himself. “It’s… well, it’s not fine, but it could have been much worse. Two dozen dead… another two dozen wounded. The count’s men arrived this morning too late to do anything to help, of course, but they should at least make sure there’s no other fighting soon. You can rest easy. You’re safe here.”

She might have said more, but another patient started to thrash violently, and so his nameless nursemaid left him to tend to him. Without anyone to hold his attention, Simon passed back out in minutes. 

He awoke later as something both alcoholic and medicinal was being poured down his throat by an older woman he also recognized. She can see auras, he recalled vaguely as he remembered how she tried to rush him away from the village on his previous stay. 

Though he didn’t have much to contribute to their conversation, beyond confirming that it hurt pretty much everywhere she touched, he did learn Majoria’s name again, which was something. The older woman looked at him with real concern, though. Despite her words, Simon could tell that she didn’t think he was going to make it. 

Though she’d been more than fair with him last time he’d saved their village, this time she didn’t look at him like a ticking time bomb, which was nice. What a difference a few lifetimes make, he told himself before he drifted back to sleep. 

As bad as he hurt, he was so tired that first day, that it wasn’t so bad. Between the sleep and the booze, he more or less slept it away. Each time he awoke, the only change he noted was that there were fewer people in the room. He realized that almost certainly meant they’d died, but very little sadness made it through the fog of pain and confusion that surrounded him, and knowledge didn’t do much better.

Day two was the day that he learned Grann’s name was Hybissian. He learned that in a conversation where she explained that he probably wasn’t going to make it to her granddaughter, but Simon tuned that out. On some level, not making it would be a blessing, so he was willing to roll the dice.

The second day was much worse. By then, his complaints had solidified in a number of areas. Breathing hurt, moving hurt, thinking hurt, and if he did none of those things, the mild hangover from all the booze he’d downed hurt instead. Worse, he’d slept so much that his body no longer wanted to cooperate with him on that front. 

By the third day, Simon was feeling more open to creative solutions. While he was still unwilling to cast spells, he was more open to the idea of killing himself than he had been in a long time, because this was miserable. Drunkenness could only last for so long, and in the state he was in, he would almost rather not drink anything at all, because that meant he’d have to get up to take a piss eventually.

Still, that was the worst of it. By day five, the swelling had gone down enough that he was no longer in constant pain, and by day six, when Majoria and her grandmother Hybissian replaced his splint with a more durable plaster cast, he could even move around without agony.  

That was an improvement, but only compared to the rock-bottom condition he’d started out in. He got a rude awakening when he saw his own reflection for the first time. That explains why she wasn’t as flirty with me this time, he decided. While he’d probably be fine eventually, he looked more like the orc who had practically caved in his skull than the man he’d been the week before from certain angles, and that resemblance only increased as his bruises faded from black and blue to gray-green. 

When he was given his equipment back and a room at the local inn to aid in his recuperation, he noted just how close he'd come to death. His helmet wasn't just bent, it was dented in by more than an inch all along one side of the rim. It was garbage now, but it had saved his life without a doubt.

Simon never got around to killing a cow with his dagger, though not because it would have been wrong. He was simply too broken to deal with the struggles of a farm animal, and too concerned with what people would think if he got better in a day. Speaking was nearly as hard as it had been a dozen deaths ago, so he could hardly expect to talk himself out of anything complicated.

If he really wanted to stick around and do more gradual experimentation, he needed to blend in with the locals, not alienate them. Simon was fairly certain it would be a long time before he could see anything useful again after all he'd done in Charia.

So, he tried his vampiric dagger on trees near the village with mixed results. Stabbed into the bark and outer woody layers, it did almost nothing. However, if he took the time to probe deeper, he could kill a tree dead in a couple of hours by stabbing deep into its heartwood. 

It was a depressing sight to murder a tree like that. He could watch the branches droop visibly over several hours, and by the following day, the leaves would be brown and curled. Still, one couldn’t argue with the results. Every tree he murdered shortened his months-long healing time by several weeks, and after three of them, he was no longer in constant pain. 

That was enough for him to stop, but it was also enough for him to try to work through some simple equations. If a human contained seventy years of life, and a goblin had something like three to five, then a tree held less than one. They might even be less than six months. He’d have to do more studying to be sure. 

Well, you’ll have time for that if you want, he told himself, because you’re here for as long as you want. The next level is a swamp, and after that the basilisk, and there ain’t no way I’m fighting that thing without lightning bolts. 

Ch. 346 - A Quiet Time

Months passed that way, and little was done. Simon didn’t even attempt to help anyone rebuild anything until he’d gotten his cast removed, but that was okay. For once, Simon’s to-do list was a short one. All he had to do was relax and think happy thoughts until his sight returned, and then join up with the White Cloaks for more ideas on how to handle wicked witches and the like. 

Unfortunately, despite a steady increase in his experience points, it was hard to think any thoughts at all, let alone happy ones, with a lingering traumatic brain injury. Eventually, he carved himself an icon of healing just to leech off the hearth fires of the inn and the common room below him, just to try to clear up the fog that shrouded his brain. 

That, at least, didn’t harm anyone. It just made the owner of the Merry Maiden chop a bit more firewood each day, and he promised himself that he would pay the man back just as soon as he felt a little better. 

Fortunately, no one expected much from a man who had gotten the side of his head caved in fighting for the town. It wasn’t the heroic thanks he’d experienced so recently in Olvens, but it was fine. Majoria visited him almost every day, and other than that, he was left to his own devices. 

Over the course of that winter, his body wasted away to some degree, but his mind grew ever sharper, and by spring, he wished that he had the materials to paint properly, because his mind was as sharply honed as it had been in many lifetimes. 

Still, he could sketch, and he used up whatever scraps of paper he could scavenge, drawing little portraits and scenes of village life. Those fascinated the elderly herbalist, who took full credit for his staggering recovery, and she asked to see his latest creations whenever he visited her for tea. Though her knowledge of healing was hardly encyclopedic, he did learn, or at least remember things he’d once known, when he visited her for tea.

“When are you leaving? Where will you go?”

One or both of those questions usually found their way into those conversations as well. They were not spoken with the same insistent tone as he’d heard them before. No one tried to boot him from the town; if anything, she seemed sorry that one day he’d be leaving.

“When I feel like m-myself again,” he told her. It was an honest answer, but an indefinite one. Indefinite was good; the vaguer he was, the less often she asked her third favorite question.

“Why not simply stay and make an honest woman of my granddaughter. She’s quite taken with you.”

The first time she’d asked him that question, he’d choked on his tea. While he’d been more than aware that the dark-eyed Majoria was fond of him, she’d never even approached the lines that her grandmother crossed so brazenly. 

“Neither of you are getting any younger,” she insisted. “Take it from me, age and wisdom go together. Enjoy yourself while you can.”

It was good advice, and Simon should have taken it, but he wasn’t really in the right headspace for that. Instead, he said, “Maybe after I figure out where those orcs come from, and make sure they aren’t a threat to this place ever again.”

The healer frowned at that answer, but didn’t tell him not to. The most she said was, “You go looking for death often enough, and you’re likely to find it.”

She wasn’t wrong there, but then, Hybissian rarely was. She was a smart lady.

Simon didn’t even try to do any of that until the weather warmed up, and his verbal tics had vanished. Well before that, though, he’d mapped out the area through conversations with traders that passed through. His initial theory had been completely wrong. He’d thought that the town would be close enough to Crowvar to be related, but they were over a hundred miles apart, and though they shared a mountain range that was lousy with orcs, he didn’t imagine there was much travel through the arid portion that cut through the desert. 

Truthfully, he’d need an army and a campaign to root out such monsters over an area that large, but he was sure he could still do some good while he lived here. He just wanted an excuse to travel into the woods for long stretches of time by himself, and an orc hunt in a town that had been so recently traumatized by the beasts was a good one. 

That spring and summer, Simon made many trips through the woods to the mountains in the east. Each was a little longer than the one before, and while he mostly hunted goblins, he did find an orc camp on occasion. None of these were large enough or well-ordered enough for him to worry.

If the hulking green menaces were alone, he’d strike them down, but if they were in a group, he would hide until they’d passed. While it was a sad thing to come to grips with, he was not a one-man army in this life, and he needed to act that way. 

Eventually, he didn’t even murder monsters; he just explored the wider world and tried to find that sense of serenity that he’d left behind in the Oracle’s temple city so long ago. Still, Simon made an effort to look for it again anywhere that struck his fancy. He hiked to the top of the tallest mountain he could see one week, just because it felt right, and he stayed up there until he was out of food and he was too hungry to meditate properly. The crisp air did his lungs good, but there were no secrets of the universe to be found. Just a frozen lake and a view worth dying for. 

That wasn’t the only high point that Simon visited, either. He built a crude tree house two days' walk from Rivenwood and spent many weeks there off and on. Though it was little more than a hunter’s blind with climbing pegs carved into the trunk, it was far enough away from anywhere that no one civilized bothered him, and no monsters that lurked in the woods below could reach him. 

There, Simon contemplated the view less and a mirror more. It was an ugly thing of hammered, polished silver with a distortion to it that was far more exaggerated than what he could have made with magic, but it did the job. While he couldn’t, or at least wouldn’t, use the spell his other self had used to examine his past lives, he asked it frequent questions in an effort to better understand what other powers it might have. 

He was convinced that was part of the secret message his doppelganger had left him. He’d left Simon just enough dried fish to get through that first life when he was too weak to take care of himself properly, and he’d shown him just how little he understood the mirror to kick his ass into delving further into it. However, no matter how long Simon delved into the thing, he only ever found dead ends. 

It wouldn’t even admit to watching his soul directly, even though he knew that it did, thanks to recent experience. The most it would say was, ‘I observe you, directly, as much and as often as circumstances allow. That is my purpose.’

“Yes, but who are you? Are you a person? Do you have to watch me like I have to defeat the Pit?” Simon asked. 

‘I am not human,’ the mirror said after a long pause. ‘I don’t believe that I even have a soul of my own. All that I am is what is reflected upon me.’

Simon wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but he was fairly sure the thing was slowly becoming more helpful over time, or at least slightly smarter. It was no longer infuriatingly obtuse; it was just kind of dumb. 

He asked it about that on one dreary overcast day. The two of them had a long conversation about it, but the most it could say was that it wasn’t sure. ‘It is possible that the more information you give me, the smarter I become, but I am not the right person to judge that.’

Those looping, circular conversations were frustrating as always, but they made the perfect counterpoint for his endless reflections on life. He could only contemplate the way that various historical events were linked to each other, and the way that changing them would change other things, before he went mad. Contemplating the way things fit together at a lower level for too long wasn’t any easier. 

Still, as he sat in his tree gazing out on the endless forest spread out before him, it was easy to imagine the intricate web that wove every life could see with every life he couldn’t, from the smallest ant, to the largest troll. In that context, it was harder to argue that most monsters were evil. Grizzly bears weren’t evil; they were just natural eating machines, and trolls, griffons, and ogres were just a little further up that hierarchy of apex eating machines. 

Such thoughts were dangerous, of course, because they admitted that goblins weren’t really evil either. In a sense, he supposed that they weren’t, but they were still a pestilence that deserved to be eradicated, like locusts or malaria-carrying mosquitoes. 

“Just because something isn’t evil doesn’t mean we have to tolerate its existence,” he said aloud as he made a mental note to investigate the black swarmers more thoroughly.

The last two times Simon had done so little, he’d at least experimented with magic and art. By contrast, this time he did almost nothing at all, but it still felt like time well spent. Sometimes he even toyed with the idea of having a family again and living a normal life, but he always decided against it. Opening that door again would mean nothing but pain, and he’d have to find someone really special to be that honest with them. 

No matter how far afield he traveled and which frigid mountain lakes he plunged himself into, Simon never found the auras he was looking for. That was okay, though. It had taken years the last time, and he hadn’t gotten his hopes up. It was enough to be whole in body and soul for the first time in a very long time. 

As the winter closed in that year, he spent most afternoons chopping wood to make up his secret debt to the innkeeper. Then, on whim, he decided to take up a new hobby for those long, cold months: weaving. It was repetitive and not particularly glamorous. It took forever to see the patterns develop, too, but it was very much in line with what he was feeling these last few months. Patterns that were already well along before you understood them seemed exactly his speed right now. 

Ch. 347 - Building the Pattern

As Simon wove cloth that winter, he reflected often that he’d been building a larger pattern for a long, long time. That much was true, but it was an ugly thing, without any real planning. He was saving where he could, regardless of the harm or confusion that it caused, and though he didn’t regret it, as his hands moved the shuttle back and forth across the loom he was working on, he did wish he’d done a better job with it. 

That was why he welcomed the idle chatter of the women he was weaving with. It wasn’t really man’s work, making him an outsider in the feminine space. However, since he’d done the village such a service, and had been injured so brutally in the process, no one was too inclined to turn him away when he’d expressed an interest. Instead, day by day he became the background noise to their winter routine. 

The pattern he was creating with the colored yard was the same way. The weave was complicated, but he devoted very little thought to it as he concentrated silently on the wider questions that plagued him. Ostensibly, he was creating a long bolt of fabric with three shades of beige, along with a few bundles of black yarn to make fabric that would someday be a tent so that he could journey further afield into the mountains the following summer if he wanted to hunt more orcs. 

To the casual observer, the pattern he was making looked random, but he was slowly weaving the mundane colors together in a way that would create camouflage, letting him camp in a way where the eyes of a casual observer might slide right off his tent. If he was able to make enough cloth, he might make a poncho too. Time would tell. 

In many ways, it was just the opposite of the pattern he’d been weaving through time with his actions. There, his colors had been bold, but the lines his actions blazed were almost random, and the second-order effects of those actions were even more unpredictable.

Who am I kidding, Simon complained silently, I haven’t been weaving a pattern, I’ve been painting modern art. Some red here, some blue there, and plenty of green over there. 

He cringed a bit as he thought about the idea of wasting blue paint, given how expensive it was. Were his lives really any cheaper, though? He was on life sixty-nine now, and all he’d really done was save as many lives as he could in Brin and the surrounding kingdoms. But where would that lead? If you save ten thousand people, how big is the baby boom in a hundred years? Would the famine that resulted from that kill more people than he’d saved in the interim? How would the scales even out? 

Those weren’t just hard questions to answer; they were impossible, at least for now. When you get your sight back, though, you can try to connect those dots a bit more, he reassured himself. That didn’t really ease his restlessness any more than it sped up his progress on the loom. 

Something about being cooped up indoors while the snow piled up outside made him antsy after so many weeks spent alone in the woods, and he could only take so much gossip about whoever wasn’t there that day. The women of Rivenwood were kind, but they could certainly be a catty bunch, and the longer he stayed in their weaving room, the less they noticed him, and the more they talked. 

Sometimes they even talked about him, but that was only an effort to apply more peer pressure to the idea that he should get married, and preferably to Majoria. While her grandmother had eventually taken the hint and stopped pushing the issue, her one-woman campaign had merely become a guerrilla war that threaded its way through all of the other women of the village. Almost every day, someone found a way to bring it up, and while it wasn’t enough to make him want to flee the place, it was sometimes enough to throw him off his game. 

“When will some lucky guy make an honest woman out of her?” one of the weavers might say one day, or “You’d have to be blind not to notice how beautiful she is,” the woman working the spinning wheel would volunteer a few days later. The statements were never said to him, in the same way that they were always directed at him. 

Simon wasn’t blind. He knew how pretty she was. He just didn’t feel romantically inclined toward anyone anymore. Even his tryst with Elthena or reminiscences on Freya barely produced a dull ache anymore. It wasn’t even that he feared the idea of bringing a second child into this world, either.

Part of him would certainly feel obligated to raise them right and become a lifelong guardian angel for whatever village he ended up raising his family in. That wouldn’t be so bad, though; not unless he repeated the experiment two or three times and ended up with a hundred grandchildren spread across the face of the world. That would make things difficult. 

He could use an excuse to do something for a lifetime or two, and building such a family could be an interesting multigenerational project. Children led to grandchildren, and all those extra hands would let him think bigger. Eventually, with enough acres under cultivation, they might build a mill, or even a village. 

It would certainly be a strange feeling to walk into a town decades or centuries after he’d first raised a family on a farm, but it would have made far more sense to his limited mind than some of his attempts to understand the effects he’d had on Brin or Ionia and where they might lead in the future. Charia was only better by comparison, because he’d interacted with it very little. The more you understood something, the more complicated it became, and Simon knew the names of most of the fishermen of a certain generation along one long swath of the sea. At that level of granularity, things quickly became a mess. 

Will I have to learn every piece of the world so well across every time period? Simon asked himself as he wove. While not impossible, it certainly was impractical, and the more Simons there were running around the world, the greater the chance he’d unleash some terrible paradox, making all his efforts collapse like a house of cards. 

Clearly, time travel is possible, he told himself as he frowned at a mistake he’d just made. My duplicate is using it to interact with me, which means I suppose that someday I’ll do it to interact with my earlier selves, but if that’s the case, then why would Helades lie to me and tell me that it wasn’t possible?

Simon spent literal days that winter chasing himself in circles on that point without an answer. It wasn’t very productive, so as a rule, when he got on that topic, he tried to refocus on what he needed to do instead. That, he decided with increasing frequency, was focusing his time on Brin and the surrounding nations, and doing just what he’d done in Charia on a larger scale. 

He couldn’t control who might do what, or how many grandchildren any given couple might have, but if he could do one thing that would do the most good for the most people, it would be making sure that all the great powers of a region were as closely knit as possible. That wouldn’t fix everything, but some kind of alliance or even trade relationships might be enough to keep the Murani at bay and prevent a few wars. 

That should have been enough for anyone, but to Simon, it felt like he should be doing more. More than making peace in a handful of nations and preventing wars, huh? Simon noted, trying not to laugh out loud at his own hubris. He wasn’t sure exactly what a Nobel Prize was anymore, but he was pretty sure that if someone had done such a thing on Earth, they would have won all of them. 

Such things should be impossible, but for him, they were merely difficult. Still, all of that would be easier if he knew what was going to happen, and though in some ways he did, his information was often woefully out of date. “That’s my own fault,” he muttered as he wound the loom and adjusted the tension a little bit. “You move too fast and everything gets tangled.”

“Well then, slow down,” Andrean said, “The snows won't stop any time soon. There’s no rush to it.”

Simon nodded and thanked her. She was a nice lady and a caring mother of three. He spoke with her now and then, but right now he was more grateful that she’d entirely misunderstood what it was he was talking about. His loom was doing just fine; it was his futures that were in doubt. 

He’d broken more futures than he’d saved, and if he ever doubted that, he just needed to think about the Murani to the north, or worse, Freya. He thought about those events that night as he went home. At least, where his one-time wife was concerned, the silver lining was that her forcible time travel had given him an interesting view of the future. 

Seeing what Freya did to the world really doesn’t explain much now that she’s been erased from the future, though, does it? He asked himself as he looked at his rippling reflection in the washbasin. 

He supposed that settled it. While he absolutely didn’t want to mess with the base level anymore until he had a better idea of what he was doing, the only way to get that idea would be to travel into the future, and he could do that two ways: with the portals, or a day at a time, just like everyone else. 

Since the basilisk was coming up fast, though, that ruled out jumping through time since magic wasn’t in the cards for him right now. Resigning himself to a quiet life until things clicked into place felt like giving up to him, but he wasn’t sure what else he was supposed to do. 

As he considered it, the water finally stilled enough for him to study his reflection. Even though the scaring left over from his skull fracture made the left side of his face look a little strange. He wasn’t quite ugly, per se, but he certainly wasn’t as handsome as he used to be. That was one more thing that could be solved with a word that was just out of his reach.

A carved item might heal the wound and keep his brain from bleeding, but it would never have the versatility or the artistry of a mage casting a spell with imagination and purpose. He turned away and tried to tell himself that it didn’t bother him. 

First, a quiet life, then the Unspoken, and once those priorities are handled, and I know how to kill witches, I can push further into the future, take out the basilisk, and see what Helades has planned for all of us, he told himself.