Death After Death PLUS 303-305

Ch. 303 - Further Experimentation

Despite Simon’s near miss with the orb, he was undeterred. While it was fun to improve the lives of those in Ordanvale, and that summer he opened up a copper mine after a goblin purge one valley over from the small town, his focus continued to be on his own experiments. Indeed, now that he had more money than he could reasonably spend, he largely left those affairs to others as he worked on his own projects. 

The ladies of the town had largely given up on him. There were even some rumors, with all of his activities in the woods, that he must prefer the company of men or even animals, but the truth was far simpler. He just had no desire to get hung up on anyone else. At best, such a relationship would be a distraction, and at worst, well, the fact that he was still hesitant to return to Ionar a decade from now served as an ample cautionary tale for such things. 

The closest he got to women now was painting them. That had largely become his cover story for the reason his new home was more art studio and workshop than living quarters.  As long as he showed off a new oil painting every few months and cleaned up before he invited anyone over for tea, no one wondered what he was up to in the middle of the night, which worked out perfectly for Simon. He’d much rather people gossip about his sex life than his mines or his magical experiments. 

Those were growing ever more complex. Simon had lived almost fifty lives, but in all that time, he’d never experimented with magic as he had in this one. He wasn’t just trying to create practical objects, but a nuanced understanding. He had equations now. They were often wrong and needed to be revised, but then, that was the point of experimentation. 

More than anything, though, those experiments made one thing very clear, and that was that the reason no one really understood magic, beyond White Cloak meddling, was that it would take far more than a single lifetime to really understand it, based solely on the costs of spell casting. 

“It would be like trying to make electrical appliances if all of the electricity on earth had to be strip-mined from human brains,” he told himself one day while he was etching some symbols into a wooden blank before he embedded it with copper wire to make them extra durable. 

As a metaphor, he thought it was a good one. Blood magic and slavery were definitely linked in the Murani lands to the north, but they would probably be in any industrial society that tried to use magic on such a scale. 

Simon tried to use another mechanism to power various wards, and they worked, but less well. While they were interesting, they were largely only toys compared to fueling them directly with his soul. He could power lesser words with light, though it left the glade where he tested it noticeably dim. He could power words with the heat of a hearth or the lingering death of a graveyard, though he worried what might do to the souls of those who lay in peace. 

Simon had only tried to fuel a magical reaction with pure soul magic once by transforming a dead man’s femur into a stick of dynamite with some carved force magic runes. That had blasted apart a mountainside in a way that was very satisfying, but in doing so, he’d earned himself -2,000 experience immediately. So, effective as it was, he didn’t repeat it. 

Overall, his experience picture was looking quite good; other than that one serious mistake, it was improving by a couple hundred points a week on average. Sometimes it doubled that when he made a particularly engrossing discovery, but on the whole, he was getting ever closer to -60,000. It would still take him years to reach zero, but he had years to accomplish that. 

I wonder what will happen when I’m in the positives? He asked himself. Simon reflected on that often. If one needed a million to get a normal reincarnation, he suspected that number was fairly common. It only took 30 a day for a normal life to reach that level, but what if he got to five million, or ten million? If I didn’t keep torturing myself for decades, I’d already be close to two or three million. How would people react at that level? 

As effective as using souls was, he didn’t really need it. While he didn’t mind using bad people’s lives to fuel his magic, it was no longer necessary. 

During that second summer, after discovering a vein of obsidian, he decided to kill two birds with one stone and fashioned arrows of life-stealing. After several attempts to carve the complicated runes by hand, which were met with failure and more than a few lacerations, he was forced to use lesser words of earth to mark the things. This broke his nearly year-long streak of not using magic directly as he tried to cultivate some of the serenity he’d known during his time in the Oracle’s little cult, but it was worth it. 

With these weapons, he was able to shoot a wolf or a goblin, and then watch it slowly run down like a broken toy as it tried to fight or flee. Simon did timed versions of these experiments and concluded that it would take days for such an object to fully drain a man, but that wouldn’t be possible. An obsidian crystal of that size could only hold a few years at most, but an entire goblin's life wasn’t worth a full human year.

Of course, once charged, those arrowheads could be retrieved and used to fuel any number of small experiments. Such techniques were far more effective than his knife of draining, and eventually he had to make a new one, because the one he’d crafted to discharge continuously as he held it made him look so young after a time that people were starting to notice. 

Physically, he was certainly in his twenties, not his thirties now, thanks to regular hunting trips, but he didn’t need to go any further than that. He’d been young once already, and had no desire to do so again any time soon. 

Using life to fuel magic was a bloody calculus, but it only became more important when he made his plans to contact demons for the first time. For a very long time, Simon had believed that was a boundary he would never cross because the dangers were too great. Now, he knew he would definitely have to one day, if only to better understand the way the world’s rules worked. 

He kept putting it off, of course. There were always more interesting projects to be done. There was his teleport spell that never quite seemed to work. Then, there were more experiments on divination in his never-ending quest to make his pendulum predictions more accurate. He even tried crystal gazing, certain that something along the lines of what he did with his mirror should work, but he couldn’t figure out how to make the magic work. 

One thing he did, though, was figure out his demon summoning circle. It was an elaborate thing, carved into the stone floor of his basement, and cast in bronze, one crucible at a time. If some witch hunter ever started sniffing around, it would be impossible to hide, but Simon didn’t care. No one had even tried to come into his basement since the men he’d hired had finished constructing it. 

It took Simon more than six months to finalize the runes, based on the circle he’d seen in the church so many times, but only six weeks of carving and casting to create them. There were several differences, though, from that original circle. The first was the disconnect he added. While most of the thing was one solid piece that was impossible to accidentally obliterate the way that one might with chalk or blood, he’d built in a little mechanism to pull the plug on the spell and dissipate it, making it all but idiot-proof, which made his second mechanism that much more important. 

In theory, if Simon just copied the original circle and cast it in bronze, he’d open an always open hole in the world that would be very hard to turn off. Worse, it would always summon that same demon. While he didn’t know all the names he’d learned from damnable tomes in the Unspoken’s library, he had more than a few jotted down in the mirror from his various encounters over the years. These, he carved into silver plates that were meant to be fitted into his bronze ring, completing the circuit. 

Unfortunately, Simon could not also use that mechanism for his off switch, because turning it off from a section other than the mark that powered the whole thing risked setting the demon free. Worse, it might unleash hell for a moment, allowing it to consume him, his house, or maybe even the surrounding area before the magic abated. That was the reason that he’d moved so far out of town. If he were to perish in a blaze of fire, all that would be at risk was his herb garden and his chickens. 

Even after all that was done, he still needed a way to kill himself should the worst befall him. Freya had shown him proof of that. So, he created what amounted to an ejection seat. If he activated it, it would certainly throw him away from the portal he was building with enough force to kill him as it drove his corpse through the floorboards above him, and the thatching beyond that. In such an eventuality, he didn’t really care what happened to him as long as he woke up back on his lumpy old bed instead of burning in hell. 

After all that, he still hesitated for months, considering all of the hypothetical consequences. Not only was there the ever present risk that he’d screwed something up, or that he might make a misstep and be dragged into hell. It was also entirely possible that something unforeseen might be let loose. The only demon he’d ever fought before was monstrously powerful, and now that he was just a human and not a supernatural monster, he would stand little chance against it. 

Still, there were so many insights to be gained that, eventually, one stormy night, nearly two years into this life, he finally summoned his first demon. There was no chant or offering, which the books he’d read nearly always argued in favor of. There was only a single candle to show him the room, and a few clicks of metal as the circle came to life.

All at once, the runes flared with light, glowing in the dark room as the stone floor between them began to collapse into a singularity that expanded outward to the edge of his circle to reveal the fiery circle of hell beyond.

It was a terrible sight. Simon could see bodies, or perhaps souls, raining from the ashen sky. There were a few scattered portals like this one, sprinkled throughout the scene, which was otherwise consumed with a sea of burning tar and a storm of flames. In all of this wicked, inhuman shapes flittered too and fro. It was not one of those small ones that came at his call, though. Instead, it was someone more familiar, Vargarzeleth.

It didn’t take the cocky man he’d fought as a vampire long to appear. He soared to the ring with four copies of himself, who spent the first half minute ignoring their summoner as they strutted around their cage, checking for weaknesses. When they found none, one of the copies turned to Simon without a hint of recognition in his gaze and said, “Who summons the great legion of Vargarzeleth?” The handsome demon asked with a smile. “Tell me your reason for intruding on my decadence, and I may spare you after I finish doing whatever task it is you may require.”

Ch. 304 - A Glimpse Beyond

When Simon didn’t find even a glimmer of recognition in the demon Vargarzeleth’s dead eyes, it surprised him. Is it because I’m no longer a vampire, because this happened before our first meeting, or because our meeting happened in the future? Simon wondered. While he had no way of knowing for sure and no intention of revealing his hand on the subject, it was still worth speculating on. 

While he certainly didn’t hope that demons were omnipotent, there was every indication that they were more aware of things than a regular human. So, it would be good to understand their limits.

Really, the way this demon carried himself, Simon wouldn’t have suspected the terrible threat that he was unless he’d fought him before and seen what the man was capable of. Even the fact that there were three identical clones of him didn’t really hammer home the threat that was Vargarzeleth. He was very literally a one-man army.

Simon sat on his cushion, slow to respond as he took in the scene and studied the man’s golden armor. Of everything about him, that was what he’d like to study the most. The devil had been summoned into the world by the Murani just like he was now, appearing almost normal save for his red skin and pointed horns, only to sprout wings and double in height, all without damaging his very expensive outfit. 

Simon didn’t say any of that, though, because he was unwilling to barter his soul for the details. Instead, he asked, “How many Vargarzeleth’s are there in your legion? A hundred? A thousand?”

The main demon he addressed laughed, but the other two smirked. “As many as your task requires, so long as you can pay my toll.”

“You toll?” Simon asked. “What would you require in exchange for committing a murder for me?”

“A murder? The prey had better be worth my time. I can’t remember the last time that even one of myselves faced real hardship,” the demon answered with boredom. 

“A slaughter, then,” Simon asked, pulling random details from the air to see if this devil could detect his lies. “There’s a keep not far from here with—”

“A keep? A slaughter?” the demon sneered, lashing out at his cage with newly grown claws on the hands of all three copies, making the runes that bound them grow that much brighter. “I demand armies to feast on! Who is it you think you’ve summoned, warlock? I am no lesser demon. I am a member of the elect! An archdemon of—”

“I just wanted to get a look at you up close,” Simon interrupted. “But it would be a mistake to make a bargain with you. You’re insufficient to the task.”

“Insufficient?!” the demon raged through all three mouths, as his duplicates joined it, lending his voice a strange echoing effect. While they spoke, their horns began to lengthen and burn as their veneer of humanity fell away. “If you do not offer me a groveling apology and the blood of at least one of your apprentices, I shall rip your still beating heart out of your chest and eat it in front of you.”

“By all means,” Simon said with a gesture. “I think you’ll find your cage is quite secure, but by all means, prove me wrong.”

Part of him whispered that taunting someone who could survive an avalanche was a bad idea, but this had been an information gathering exercise from its first moments, and finding out just how much his binding ring could take was part of that, and he didn’t have to wait long to see that. 

Enraged, all three arch demons continued to roar and rage, ripping and tearing at the invisible barrier, leaving behind only fiery claw marks. As they did so, Simon observed his ring glowing brighter and brighter, but still it held. He could feel the heat now, too. It wasn’t coming from hell. That was trapped behind the barrier that held back the raging demons. The heat wafting off of his bronze ring, though, was enough to start warming his chilly basement. 

Simon let them carry on for several minutes. He even endured insults and epithets, and egged him on hoping the devil would try using some new word of power that he hadn’t heard before, but when Vargarzeleth opened his mouth to roar out some inhuman sound that might actually wake up someone else in town, Simon decided he’d had enough, and pulled the plug on him. 

“If we can’t even agree on a price, then how can we negotiate?” Simon asked as the portal began to collapse, and the demons within it became strangely muted before they stretched and started to fall away. 

“I will have my revenge for this disrespect!” Vargarzeleth roared in a chorus of voices barely above a whisper. Then he was gone. 

Simon didn’t move to touch the ring or enter the circle. More than anything, he wondered what the thing looked like to someone with the sight. It had been a lifetime since he’d had a vision like that, but he hoped one day to see for himself. He was certain the results would be illuminating, and if nothing else, make for a good painting. 

He waited for several minutes to let things cool and make sure that there was no trickery afoot. Then Simon removed Vargarzeleth’s name plate and made notes about the encounter in a small hand mirror, noticing that he’d lost several hundred experience since this morning. Since the only thing he’d done all day that might have cost him was this, he was sure about it. 

Still, it vexed him. He didn’t feel the least bit bad about what he’d done. In fact, he’d been planning to summon Anthroditen next, the demon he’d run into more than a dozen times now, in the chapel, but this was enough to make him hesitate. 

“Summoning demons is definitely evil,” Simon agreed, “But I don’t feel bad about it. It was just a test, so normally accomplishing something like this would get me points, not take them away.”

Despite carving the name plates for several other demons, he decided to pause for the night to make sure there weren’t any other side effects he hadn’t yet noticed. That was a shame, but it wouldn’t hurt anything. Better to be safe than sorry, he reminded himself. Especially where demons are concerned.

Still, despite Simon’s caution, the rest of the week came and went. There was a rumor about some animal dying near town that seemed to be related to Vargarzeleth’s scream, but that was it. No one shied away from Simon, and milk didn’t curdle in his presence. 

No one even seemed the slightest bit uncomfortable when he held a dinner party a few days later at his home. When he led them into the basement, they admired his latest painting with no knowledge that the rug they stood upon covered a summoning circle. 

His experience started going back up just like normal, immediately, and he had no strange nightmares or compulsions. It would seem that the world judged tapping into hell to be evil, but beyond that, everything else was his mistake to make. 

Simon had not transcribed whole books into his mirror, and he regretted that now. He was sure that he’d read something on this topic before, but he could not remember what or where. Still, eventually, a couple of weeks later, when his experience had recovered back above where it had been, and he tired of working on an improved wand, or a tighter power cluster rune, he again went into his cellar in the dead of night, and summoned the second demon. 

This time, the portal that opened was every bit as hellish and intense, but the demon that stepped through was both familiar and more gracious. He bowed as he entered the circle and summoned himself a chair to sit in after making his introductions. “If you possess the wherewithal to summon me into your world, then you already know my name,”  he said politely, showing only the faintest spark of something in his eyes as he squinted at Simon slightly. “Though I would welcome yours if you’d provide it.”

It was hard to say if he recognized Simon, and he was inclined toward it, maybe. This one is much more canny than Vargarzeleth, though, he reminded himself. If he knew who I was, he wouldn’t necessarily reveal himself. 

“Call me Ennis,” Simon said, trying to be more polite. 

“Ennis, then,” the demon nodded. “Very good. Tell me, what can I do for you tonight? I see you’re well-prepared for my arrival.”

Simon could see reality straining at the edge, clearly trying to push beyond as it did in the chapel he walked through so frequently, but in his case, there was nowhere for it to leak, so it existed as nothing more than a heat shimmer at the edges of his circle. Clearly, that meant that it was a property associated specifically with Anthroditen’s powers, and not with demons in general. 

“That depends,” Simon answered. “What would you say your focus is? I confess I only found a partial manuscript with your name in it, and I’m not sure you are the right demon for the job.”

“Oh?” the demon asked, raising an eyebrow. “Well then, allow me to introduce myself after all. I am Anthroditen, opener of ways, knower of secrets, and poisoner of souls. If you wish to know something lost and forgotten or you wish to bring an implacable enemy to your cause, I can help you with those things, for a very small price.”

“Oh?” Simon paused. “What price is that? My soul?”

“For some things,” the demon smiled, “But for some things, my price is much lower. For instance, I’d offer a tasty secret or two to know who you are really. You’re one of hers, aren’t you?”

Then again, perhaps he does recognize me, Simon corrected himself, though he kept his face expressionless at the accusation. 

Really, almost anything he said, or didn’t say, would answer the question, so Simon responded with “You’ll have to elaborate on why you think that, and who she is if you want an answer. I don’t understand the question.”

“Don’t you?” Anthroditen asked. “Very well. By hers, I mean you are a puppet of Helades, doomed to run in circles until your little heart gives out. As to how I can tell, well, you and your kind just don’t quite fit into the painting. The color scheme is a little off. Try as she might, she always leaves a few fingerprints.”

“I see,” Simon answered, wishing he’d been told more. Still, it was something. “Well, then, I suppose it does no harm in admitting she sent me to the Pit.”

The demon smiled widely enough to reveal his bright white teeth against his red skin. “And how are you enjoying your new world? Is it everything she warned you it would be?”

“With the exception of a few early mistakes, it’s not so bad,” Simon answered casually.

“And do you yet see her solution?” the demon asked. “I don’t recall if we’ve met along the path or not, there are so many of you, but the interesting bits of her plan are closer to the end than the beginning.”

“I find the best way through a knot is simply to cleave it,” Simon said. He didn’t really believe that, but it was the easiest way to dodge the question without giving anything away. 

“Ah, I believe I’ve heard this story. The Gordian Knot, right? Alexander, was it?” the demon smiled. “You are a child of Earth then, originally, are you not?”

Simon’s blood froze at that question, shocked that the demon had picked that up. Simon had forgotten it himself. He didn’t consciously remember the reference or even the name, Alexander the Great, until Anthroditen spoke them. 

“And with a memory like that, I don’t think you’ve forgotten a face as long as you’ve lived,” Simon countered. 

Anthroditen laughed politely at that. “I wasn’t sure if you’d catch that, Ennis. It’s been a long time since I’ve laid eyes on you. Centuries, perhaps. Have you been enjoying your time since our last meeting?”

“I took up painting,” Simon said, nodding to the canvas on an easel near the far wall. "To pass the time." He was grateful that he’d thought to cover it before this meeting. Who knew what details this monster might have gleaned from his painting of his granddaughter in the gardens of Ionar’s palace. 

“Oh, that is splendid,” the devil said, rubbing his hands together. “It’s always better to get a hobby than get lost in a fate worse than death for a century or two.”

Simon stiffened at the words, even though he assumed the demon was guessing. The two chatted for a while after that, but the only topic he even followed up on in any great detail, was the fact that hell seemed to be shared between the two worlds. At that, the demon volunteered that hell was shared between all worlds. 

“There might be many you’s, and many worlds,” the demon explained. “But there’s only one Anthroditen, and only one hell to connect them all. This is where you come when there’s nothing left for you in the schemes of the planners.”

Simon nodded at that, and they chatted about it for a while, though he made sure to give up nothing else before dismissing the creature. 

“It was lovely to meet you again, Ennis, and to finally get your name,” Anthroditen said, standing as the portal collapsed around him. “It's so rare that one of her pets actually calls out for me of their own free will, but do be sure to have something worth my time when you next beckon, or I’ll be inclined to take it very personally.”

Simon nodded at that, but wasn’t too concerned. The man was powerful, but trapped beyond time and space unless he seriously screwed up. That night, after he closed the portal, Simon slept poorly. It wasn’t because he feared the consequences of his actions, or even Anthroditen, specifically. It was because even in situations where he felt like he knew plenty, he always found some way to discover just how ignorant he truly was, and it was growing apparent that there were some truly dangerous enemies out there. 

Ch. 305 - Patience and Time

Though his second visit with a demon set his experience back by nearly a thousand experience, nothing else happened. Even without that cost, Simon wouldn’t have been tempted to summon him again immediately. As many answers as Anthroditen undoubtedly had, Simon feared what the cost they'd incur. Still, his mind raced enough at the possibilities that not a week went by that he wasn’t tempted to pay the karmic price to try again.

How could he not? He’d just been told there was a way to get back to Earth from here if he wanted it. It was impossible, of course. One would have to journey into hell, and then find a way back out of it. Still, as a sort of universal jumping ground that connected all things, the idea fascinated him. He just wished he could see it with the same vision he’d once viewed that volcanic lake.

Originally, he’d planned to summon every demon he had the name for over the course of a season, but for now, those plans were set aside and focused on small things. Glimpsing hell was enough to force Simon from his house and back into the real world that he’d slowly been retreating from. He still worked on small art or magic projects every night, but he spent more time living and moving among the good people of Ordanvale. 

When the weather was good, he would sketch pictures of people in the square and give away the best one, likely giving families what amounted to the only piece of art that they owned. Even then, he imagined what strange sources of power he might use to fuel his experiments next. 

Even after he set aside the idea of summoning more Machiavellian demons, he thought about ways he might use hell to power other things. It seemed like a potent, or perhaps even unlimited, source of power. He’d been told on more than one occasion now that the smoldering souls being tortured in hell were what powered all of creation, and while he was inclined to believe that, he was hesitant to test it. After all, it was still sure that graffiti on walls that implicated Helades notwithstanding, the most likely way that goblins, orcas, and even humans got their hands on words of power was through demons. 

That’s the question I really should ask Anthroditen, he told himself. He didn’t, though, because while he couldn’t be sure that answer would be the truth, he could be fairly sure that it was more than Simon was willing to pay, and right now, he didn’t hate anyone enough to sacrifice them to demons, though he’d consider making an exception for Kell or Varten Raithwaite.

Simon’s good spirits and equanimity lasted for months before he found someone he considered throwing into hell. Still, he resisted. 

Gordel Brilten was their liege lord’s tax man, and as the town of Ordanvale became wealthier, he became an ever larger thorn in Simon's side, always snooping around and looking for reasons the town flourished, so that he might take more coin, as if the Earl of Greyden needed more wealth. The man already had the most elaborate Manor in a hundred miles, and several nobles who paid him on behalf of the crown. He was drowning in wealth, but still somehow saw the need to siphon more out of the pockets of men and women who were just trying to live their lives. 

Helping them avoid this tyranny became Simon’s hobby for the next year, or so. Each time the man came into town, Simon would set down whatever project he’d been working diligently on to keep an eye on the man. At first, glad handing the man and misdirecting him worked well enough. Eventually, though, that proceeded to bribery. It wasn’t much. Simon could certainly afford it. 

He’d taken to burying ever-increasing sums of silver near crossroads in the area in case he needed wealth in future lives, but despite making dozens of pounds of coins vanish into caches, which he carefully marked both physically and on his mirror map, he still had more than he could spend. 

Still, month by month, and visit by visit, the rotund man became something like a stray dog because of this behavior, and came to town more and more often, just so that Simon could shoo him away again. He didn’t know exactly what his silence was being bought for, but he knew there were reasons; with a nose that big, the man could practically smell the coins he sought so diligently. 

Once, after another round of drinking with the odious fellow, the town’s headman asked, “Why do you spend so much time with the tax collector? People will eventually talk.”

“Yeah, to him,” Simon agreed. “I just keep him away so that everyone else can go about their lives without worrying about him.”

That was true, but as the man’s greed grew, Simon’s contempt strengthened in equal measure, and eventually, he began to debate whether or not he should simply kill him and be done with it. Murder was wrong, of course, but Simon had better things to do with his time, and he hated enriching parasites. 

Unfortunately, Mr. Brilten refused to cooperate. While awful in his treatment of commoners and greedy to a fault, he never quite did anything that pushed Simon over the edge and gave him the pretext to end his existence. 

So one day, while Simon sat on his porch working on a new set of armor that would protect him from fire without giving him freezer burn like last time, he decided to try a new tactic. He’d had Dnarth for a long time, and while he’d used it almost exclusively for its distant properties, he decided that it had come time to try its command powers as well. 

This word, more than almost any other he wished he had the gesture for, because it was obnoxious to use with words. First, he had to whisper the words of lesser command, and then he had to issue the command itself. He tested it on birds and dogs first, but eventually started on children when he got good results. 

The commands he could issue weren’t nearly as powerful as those he’d been able to issue with his vampiric gaze. With a lesser word, even a wild animal might be rendered temporarily obedient and docile, but even a normal word wouldn’t convince a child to do something that they thought was dangerous or wrong. 

Simon’s first trial of the spell with an adult as its target was used on the town drunk. He learned that while he couldn’t command the man to be sober, he would give his best impression of it for a few minutes. He also learned that he could use the word of power to make people forget things in this way, but only things that had recently happened. The major word might be capable of more than that, but Simon was hesitant to use something so powerful, because he didn’t know what the side effects would be.

For a time, that proved enough to keep their fat tax collector at bay. Simon would have lunch or dinner with the man, then use the word of power and tell him, “You’ve collected all you can on this trip,” or “It’s time to move on,” and the man would be on his way. In future visits, he seemed to suspect that something was amiss, but didn’t attribute it to Simon. 

“I feel like I’m losing my mind,” Gordel confessed to him on one occasion. “I ride all this way, and then leave practically empty-handed. Why would I do that?”

“Because you’ve collected all that you can from the people of Ordenvale already?” Simon suggested, making the man laugh. 

“You see those pretty banners, and that man painting the trim of his building over yonder?” the tax collector asked. “As long as the people of this town can afford to do that, or talk about putting in cobblestone streets, there’s money to be had. Mark my words.”

That soured Simon’s mood enough to use  another word of command on the man. It was a shame. With the exception of these encounters, he hadn’t used a word of power in over a year. He was feeling quite at peace with himself, and only this one greedy soul was holding him back from seeing the wider world.

“Where do you keep all the money you’re stealing from Lord Greyden to make sure he doesn’t find it?” Simon asked with the lingering magic, like it was the most normal thing in the world. 

“Why, of course I bury it in my root cellar, under the… Wait a minute!” The man was on his feet in an instant as he resisted the magic, but even as he stood, Simon commanded him not to remember what they’d just discussed. 

That led to an awkward conversation, as Gordel forgot quite why he was upset. Fortunately, after a couple of tankards of ale, the misunderstanding was forgotten about, at least by him. Simon remembered, though, and the next time he was invited to attend a party at Lord Greyden’s, instead of blowing the man off with an excuse, he actually attended.

There, he whispered about it to one of the noble’s gossipy toadies, as if it was a well-established rumor throughout the town. “He takes more than he pays the Earl,” Simon said offhandedly. “I can’t say how much, but there’s no question he grows fat off the difference.” 

Ostensibly, Simon was only there to talk about art so that other nobles might commission him to do their paintings, but once he saw Lord Corwin there, Simon spent the whole evening talking to him. For a moment, he worried that it might have repercussions on his long-completed level where he saved the Baron’s son, even though that was years in the future, but it only took a glance in a mirror to dispel that notion. 

On the day Simon stumbled out of the mountains to work for this man, years from now, he’d be a fat, inexperienced warrior. Today, in his fine cotton tunic, he looked nothing like that version of himself; he doubted his own mother would confuse the two of them. So, instead, he spent the night drinking and chatting, and the only effort he made to hide his identity that much further was to introduce himself as Master Simone. 

While everyone in Ordanvale knew him as Simon, which would make that doubly confusing if the Baron were ever to pay him a visit, the Earl of Greyden only ever referred to him as ‘that artist from Ordanvale,’ so the ruse held up. Simon even agreed to visit Slanny the following spring and do a painting of his whole family at a reasonable price, just for old times' sake. He couldn’t say anything to the man about their shared history, but just being near him made Simon feel better. 

Of course, before he made the trip, he grew out a goatee and had a slightly more ostentatious set of outfits made, just to make the contrast that much starker. Simon spent a month in Slany painting the Baron, his wife, and their son Gregor in a family portrait together, even though he was only four at the time. 

During his stay, the only problems were a report of goblins at the mines that Simon didn’t offer to help with for obvious reasons, and the news that Lord Greyden’s taxman had been executed and replaced after they found pounds of gold and silver tucked away in the man’s house. 

He and the Baron toasted to that news, which only increased Simon’s estimation of the man. Still, when the visit was all but done, and Simon unveiled the painting, he had a serious moment of deja vu. 

“What a wonderful job you did!” the man’s wife exclaimed. “It’s so life-like.”

Simon didn’t care about that, though, or even the painting itself, and only nodded numbly at the praise. He said something thanking her, too, but for the life of him, Simon wouldn’t have been able to say what it was. Instead, he stared at where it had been hung, at the far end of the dining room for the unveiling. 

It had been so long ago that he could no longer be sure, but he was almost positive that there had been a painting showing his three subjects in exactly this spot when Simon had stayed in this town so long ago. Was it this painting? He wondered, or did they merely hire someone else instead of me to make it? He had no idea. Truthfully, he would never know, but the question haunted him all the way back to Ordanvale.