Death After Death PLUS 297-299

Ch. 297 - A Short Delay

Simon spent the rest of the night hacking the little green monsters to pieces. He was in no hurry, even from the beginning, before the grim work exhausted him. Why should he be in a hurry? With the collapse of the other two tunnels he’d found, he was reasonably sure that the only way out was through him, and he had no plans to let any of these monsters escape. 

“You’ve done enough killing for the rest of your very short lifetimes,” he growled as he kicked one that charged him, sending it rebounding off the tunnel where it bounced off the ceiling before it splattered on the floor. 

In passage after passage and room after room, he faced the green vermin, and though their tactics alternated from time to time, his determination to slaughter them never did. He met them with dagger and shield, keeping his sword on his hip as a backup since he lacked the room to wield it in most places. 

In here, he often found his elbow, knee, or even his boot to be a more valuable weapon than his trusty sword. Even as he did so, though, he allowed himself to feel the whisper of shame. This is how he thought he’d fight the very first day in the Pit when the goblins ripped him to pieces. 

He didn’t remember much of those days, but he remembered his deaths, or at least the worst ones, and he’d come a long way since then. Even without the magic blade that was healing him as he went, he would have fought this way. The only difference was that he would eventually have to retreat. 

Or I could just die, he told himself. Simon rejected that thought as soon as it came to him. He didn’t wish to die. He didn’t have a death wish. Most of the time, life was preferable and even desirable. In this case, though, it wouldn’t get him out of going back to Ionar; it would just reset the clock. 

If Simon ever ran into a vampire, a powerful mage, or someone else capable of controlling his mind, he’d consider punching out right at that moment, but even that was not without its own drawbacks now. If he died and his enemies got their hands on his bones and summoned his spirit, he had no idea what would happen. He didn’t even know how to test it. 

Was he safe from the moment that he woke up in his lumpy bed? Even if they couldn’t affect him, could they summon some alternate version of him or simply learn enough about him to screw with his future plans?

That’s impossible, right? He tried to reassure himself. If I left a soul behind each time, there would be like 40 of me in hell. 

He was pretty sure that wasn’t the case. He’d read through the contract he’d signed more than once now, and it was clear his soul was a singular thing. Still, he allowed himself to wonder about it and think about it as he slaughtered goblins. 

It became almost meditative somewhere around the fiftieth one he killed. Every fight was its own challenge, but slowly, they all bled together. Sometimes, they attempted to ambush him, and other times, they fled until the monsters thought they outnumbered him enough to oppose him. 

They were cowardly enough but always seemed to find another bout of courage as they descended on him in an inhuman tide, but they were never enough to get the better of him. All they made him do was take more frequent rest breaks as the caverns behind him became bloodier and bloodier.

No matter how many he killed or how deeply he pressed into the rank passages of that mountain, there were always more of them. Once, deep in a natural cavern lit only by a dung-fueled fire, he found a shaman who tried to do battle with him with magic, but he knew only the word for fire, not greater fire, and Simon was barely burned as he dodged from stalagmite to stalagmite. 

After three blasts, he was so exhausted that he barely struggled as Simon executed him. He lingered in that room, despite the stench, looking at the foul symbols that had been daubed on the walls in blood and shit. They weren’t words of power or even the runic versions that were inscribed into circuits, but they were very close to the latter. 

He could see the shapes of several almost runes that he knew, as well as the shapes of several runes he didn’t know but had found on other objects. It was very strange. They were halfway between meaningless and profound, and he had no idea what to make of them. He would have taken pictures of them if he hadn’t left his belongings behind in the town. 

“Where are they getting this stuff?” Simon wondered aloud. 

He knew for a fact that they didn’t have speech. He’d listened to the screeching and gibbering for hours. Their cries and shrieks echoed throughout the tunnels, but they were closer to the cries of animals than anything that might inspire sapience.

They could work with stone tools and make simple bows and arrows, but anything they had that was made of metal was stolen from human hands. So, how did they learn anything about magic? Could the shaman actually read any of this garbage, and if not, why draw it?

Simon didn’t get any answers to those questions. 

Ultimately, it was exhaustion that was his true enemy in his fight. That and the darkness. Individually, goblins weren’t really a threat to him anymore. They might occasionally score a flesh wound with a spear or a dagger, and no matter how many arrows his shield took, a few managed to find their mark, but the weapon he was fighting them with made those wounds more a nuisance than anything else. He was only ever a goblin or two away from perfect health. 

Why didn’t I ever think to use healing magic like this before, he wondered, before quickly answering his own question. It’s because by the time I could do this, I mostly just killed everything with spells.

Magic had, in many ways, made Simon lazy. He was reminded of that when he cast another word of light amplification despite his protesting throat. If not for the two major words of earth, he’d be tempted to use lightning to clear the way of these bloodthirsty monsters, but tonight, he was going back to the basics. 

It felt good to kill things with his own two hands. It shouldn’t, but it did. Using a word of force to slice them in two lacked the impact and the effort. It was like using magic to carve runes into his weapons: effective but not nearly as enjoyable as days and weeks spent in meditative crafting. 

As the fighting went on, he hadn’t expected goblins to be the thing he ran out of. He’d expected it to be his own strength that failed him. It wasn’t that, either, though. It was the light. Eventually, he got deep enough in the warren that even amplified light from the moon and stars or the flickering bonfire wouldn’t reach. 

By that point, he’d found the far side of both collapsed entrances and felt certain he'd purged most of the lair. He’d left at least a hundred bodies in his wake. Even then, he didn’t stop, though. He continued on, trusting his instincts to find and purge the vermin. 

One slow step at a time, he descended into a near pitch-black hell, and oftentimes, he simply held his own breath and waited for his next target to give itself away. Somewhere in that final, grasping onslaught, he actually struck his dagger against the wall so hard against the stone that when he missed, it illuminated the room for a brief moment in a shower of sparks. 

That’s when he decided he had to use light, even if it was just a little bit. Sometimes, all he needed was a spark, and after that, whenever he heard a great number of them groping and flailing in the dark, he would summon candle flames into existence and purge them all. 

Even those tiny words of lesser light were enough to tax him, but he did not stop until there was nothing left to kill. Hours later, when he reached the back of the cave, he found a crevice amidst dripping water and stagnant pools that extended down where goblins almost certainly hid, but he was far too large for it. 

That was when he finally retreated, following his trail of tiny floating candle flames out the way he’d come. He’d entered with a cold anger, which had long since been quenched, but even though he left with leaden limbs and a sore throat, he also had a lighter heart.

He always felt better when he helped people. He’d done enough damage today to set the goblins back for years, if not forever, but even as he escaped the cave and saw the stars glowing fiercely in the night sky, he knew he could never kill all the goblins or all the magi. He could fight like that every night forever. He could even inflict vampirism on himself again to become strong enough to rip opponents apart with his bare hands, but it still would not be enough.  

“There’s got to be a better way,” he sighed as he staggered back down the hill to town, utterly spent.

It wasn’t until he noticed how trashed his shield was and tossed it aside that he saw how ravaged his armor was. It had suffered dozens of stabs, cuts, and bites and looked like it had been fed through a meat grinder. 

Even in the dark, he noticed that it was heavily stained with blood, but he didn’t notice he was still bleeding until he got back to Ordanvale and started to take his shredded leathers off. The headman woke at the sounds of Simon’s fumbling and looked like he’d seen a ghost. 

“I… W-when you didn’t return after so long, we sent men with torches, but they said that the lairs had collapsed,” the man said, holding a lantern as he stared at Simon with horror. Simon knew how this must look and tried to play it off. 

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Simon promised as he tried and failed to strip off the layers with fingers that wouldn’t cooperate. “It’s the armor that took the worst of it.”

“Just the same, I think we’ll fetch the healer to be on the safe side,” he said.

Truthfully, he was worried about how the man would react when they peeled off his armor and found no wounds, but he would have aroused plenty of suspicion even trying to shoo the older man away when he looked so terrible. Simon needn’t have bothered. He had half a dozen bleeding wounds. Some of them were quite serious and would need switches.

That sight surprised him far more than it surprised the headman. He made Simon sit down and got some water and a rag to clean things up. While he did that, he asked Simon about what he’d been through. Simon strongly downplayed what he’d spent his night doing and said he’d only killed a couple dozen. 

“Two dozen? Truly?” the headman asked, shocked by his words. “Being by yourself, it's incredible that you survived. No ear is worth that kind of risk despite the bounty!”

Simon nodded. He hadn’t cared about the bounty. Instead, he looked down at his chest and thighs, noting the number of fresh pink scars that dotted his flesh. He might have seven existing wounds, but he had dozens of healed wounds.

He tried to remember how many times he’d been bitten and stabbed, but he didn’t think it was quite so many. Unfortunately, before he could find any clarity on the issue, the healer arrived to try to keep him from passing away. Simon had to force himself not to smile at that. He could heal all of this with a word, but if they wanted to save him, he supposed that was only fair. He’d spent the night saving them, after all. 

Ch. 298 - Fresh Scars

Until Simon’s armor was taken off, he truly believed that he was just exhausted from his ill-advised bloodsport. Now he could see it for what it really was: blood loss. He wasn’t concerned, of course. If anything, he was concerned by just how little he cared. If he died, he would have lost a week at most. Hell, if I’d died, I could just come back faster and kill the goblins before they attack, he told himself. For a moment, he almost even allowed himself to believe it, but that seemed like a dangerous and slippery slope to fall down. 

Fortunately, before he could dissect the exact moment that martyrdom became masochism, the healer arrived. She was a pretty redhead nearing thirty, if he had to guess. Something about the way she looked and her soft curves made him think she was a mother. That was confirmed a moment later when she looked at him like she wanted to scold him for what he’d done. 

“Haven’t we already had enough goblin wounds for one week?” she snapped, as she set down her bag and started taking out herbs as well as needle and thread. 

“You must be Mari,” he said. “The people I helped yesterday mentioned you were busy helping more desperate cases.”

“And you must be the miracle worker,” she said, a touch defensively. “I’d rather you stuck to healing instead of fighting, though. You don’t seem very good at the latter.”

That made Simon laugh enough for it to hurt, earning him a second scolding, but the woman’s sharp tongue didn’t stop her from getting to work. She quizzed him on some of the more ghastly wounds, but he couldn’t really tell her what had gotten him in every case. The teeth marks made the bites obvious enough, but in some places, he wasn’t sure if he’d been stabbed by a spear, a claw, or a rusty blade. 

“Don’t they feel different?” she asked him, “Because if they all start to blend together after a while, maybe that’s your cue to stop.”

Simon smirked, toasting her with the jug of whisky the headman had brought him. “Truer words were never spoken,” he agreed, though for entirely different reasons than what she meant. 

Mari did a pretty good job. It wasn’t perfect. He might have chosen slightly different herbal compresses for a couple of wounds, but then he didn’t know exactly what grew in the area. It didn’t matter. He’d be fine, regardless.

The healer spent half the time sewing and half the time bemoaning the bullheaded nature of men, and when she was gone and the sun was rising, the headman helped him to one of his children’s beds, and he promptly passed out. 

Simon slept dreamlessly until past noon, and when he woke up, he used a word of lesser healing on his worst-looking wound. He didn’t want to be a miracle patient, but the way it throbbed told him that the stab wound on his leg was infected, and he didn’t want to be miserable, either. 

Still, even after that was done, and he was whole, more or less, he wondered what had happened. “Did I use the runes too much and burn them out?” he wondered aloud. He instantly realized he shouldn’t have said something like that where people could hear, but he only shrugged. He was no longer being tracked by Magi secret police, so it hardly mattered. 

The problem was an interesting one. He would have been tempted to say that the magic hadn’t worked as he’d intended or perhaps as well as he’d intended, but it clearly had, or he would have died five times over. All the reflection in the world couldn’t beat an actual examination of his weapon, though, as soon as Simon looked at his dagger, he realized what had happened. 

I fucked up the runes, he realized as he looked at the scraped upside of the blade. The damage didn’t look like it had come from deflecting or parrying anything. It seemed far more likely that it had happened when he’d showered the cavern in sparks. He’d assumed that was just metal on stone, but in retrospect, they’d been too extreme for that. It had been the genie escaping the bottle. 

He rubbed the abraded section, noting where the runes had been damaged. It wasn’t even that bad, but it was a reminder of his time in the black forges of the white cloaks. Small problems could make magical items fail completely and often catastrophically. Imagine what would have happened if you’d tried to use a greater word instead, he reflected for a moment before deciding that was probably a bad idea. 

When Simon finally moved to get dressed, he noticed that his bloodstained clothes had been removed and replaced with simpler garments, like the headman wore. They weren’t exactly his size, but he cinched a piece of rope around the waste of his baggy pants and made do. Then, he went out to face the day and was subjected almost immediately to a hero’s welcome. 

It started out simple enough, with a hearty breakfast of eggs and ham. Almost as soon as Simon was in the man’s kitchen, though, and listening to him alternate between praising Simon for the peace they’d had last night and telling him about the current condition of the town, they started to attract guests. 

“So this is our hero?” one woman asked after she’d finished letting the headman know how the flocks were doing. She introduced herself as Kedra, the town baker, and offered to bake him a pie just as soon as he was well enough to get his appetite back. 

She was a large woman, and as she thanked him, she hugged him hard enough for it to hurt, but she was far from the first. After her came a veritable parade of grateful men and women. 

Ordanvale was a town of somewhat less than two thousand people. Still, somehow, like a magnet today, half of them seemed drawn to him, and though Simon appreciated their gratitude, he was eventually overwhelmed by it. While he’d saved plenty of people before, this was the first time in a long time they’d felt the need to thank him individually for it.

On its own, that wasn’t so surprising. Simon was staying at the home of one of the most important people in town, in a community that had just undergone a terrible emergency. However, the fact that Simon was there for them to thank and fawn over gave them a reason to linger, and soon, it was halfway to a party before the headman finally dispersed everyone. 

“Out, you vultures, out!” the headman said with humor more than anger. “There will be plenty of time to thank this man for all he’s done after he’s recovered.”

Simon thought that sentiment would buy him a couple days of peace, but that celebration turned out to be the following evening. In that time, Simon recuperated and considered when he might start traveling again. Mari checked on him twice more before pronouncing him “Fit enough to get into more trouble.”

Of course, by then, Simon was fine. The bigger problem was his shredded armor. It was beyond his skill to repair it. While he didn’t really need it, he was long past the point where he thought it was a good idea to fight without some protection, and if he was going to travel hundreds of miles across open roads without leather or a shield, he would use a lot of magic. 

That was a depressing thought. He needed to wait nearly two decades to fight the lava titan, and he’d already blown almost three years of his life in the first week. He was definitely going to have to inscribe his sword with words of power to drain life. However, after his brush with death, he was suddenly possessed of the urge to do the work the old-fashioned way.

While he didn’t have tools, when the village chief handed him a purse of silver, that solved his most expensive material problem. He could make everything else himself if he had to.  

“Don’t you go thinking we’re trying to get rid of you now,” the man cautioned him as he gave Simon the money with a firm handshake. “This is just recognition for the good turn you did us. Nothing more. You’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

Simon definitely got the feeling that people wanted him to stay. He could see it in their fearful expressions. No matter how many times he told them the goblins had been handled, he could see that they expected the monsters to come screaming out of the forest any time now, and there were few men with any fighting experience.

Still, despite all of that, he was hesitant to put down roots. The longer he stayed somewhere, the more painful it was to leave when the time came. Even that trepidation wouldn’t stand in the way of a good party. While Simon wasn’t feeling well enough to help people rebuild the buildings that had burned, he was more than happy to help them celebrate a new beginning. 

His celebration tended to revolve more around beer than dancing because he still had a few tender spots, but the people of Ordanvale were good-natured, and truthfully, Simon thought that showing weakness rather than strength after what he’d been through was a good choice. He still had a swirling gray to his aura, but he showed no signs that might tempt anyone to call him a warlock. 

Well, except for the two fortuitous cave-ins of the other sections of the goblin lair, but those he lied about and explained that he set fires in the mouths of those caves, causing the collapse. As an explanation, it was convenient and believable, and no one doubted it. Some asked why he didn’t do the same to all three, and Simon answered, “If I cut off everywhere they might escape from, they could have found some fourth or fifth tunnel. I wanted to control one exit and herd them to me for the slaughter.”

Over the course of the night, he met almost anyone who was anyone in the small town. Fortunately, when the townspeople were using his goblin purge as an excuse to get drunk, he was introduced to a local leather worker. The man had hands stained by his trade and would have been easy enough to pick out. He offered to help Simon make a new set. 

“I’d like that. I’ve worked with lots of wood, and some metal, but never leather,” he confessed.

“Working the leather is the easy part,” the man laughed. “It’s the convincin’ the animals to give it up that’s somewhat harder.”

Simon laughed at that and toasted tankards with the man. After that, he met with the smith too, and asked if he might help him at his forge. The man agreed but was very upfront with the fact that he couldn’t pay Simon much for his time, which made Simon laugh. He’d been prepared to offer the man money to borrow his tools, not get paid for the privilege.

The night had started out as a somber affair, which was more than understandable given that perhaps one resident in ten had died in the small town in the raids over the last month, but now that they could see hope, it was becoming more like a wake. It was a celebration of life in death, and he could probably do a better job of learning that particular skill himself, so he threw himself into the night wholeheartedly, determined to enjoy himself. 

Ch. 299 - Hard Work

That night, Simon had a great time and got more than a little drunk. Fortunately, though, he returned to the headman’s home alone, though there had been offers. He’d been propositioned three different times by a maid, a woman, and a widow for a more private celebration, but Simon had declined. 

Still, even if romance was the furthest thing from his mind, over the next few weeks, his ambitions to keep pushing south slowly dissolved. This was purely for practical reasons. First, he had to make some new armor, which devolved into a series of hunting trips and a lesson in stretching and tanning. These were not easy tasks, and even when the hard work was done, and he scraped the buck hide clean and let it soak in a barrel of tannins before stretching it on a wooden frame, it would be weeks until it was done. 

And just like that, he was no longer in a hurry. Oh, he told himself he’d leave soon. At first, that was as soon as the armor was finished. Then it became a few months. After that, he planned to beat the snows down to Abresse; he even told himself he was looking forward to the more mild temperatures, but that never materialized. Not when he was getting so much done here. 

It started innocently enough. He was just helping the men of the town repair the homes that didn’t need to be torn down. Simon didn’t know a lot about carpentry, but he was eager to learn and helped with a few buildings. The heaviest damage was near the center of town, not the outlying farmsteads, where most people seemed to live in apartment-like flats that were typically one or two units per floor. 

Simon enjoyed such arrangements, even if toilets and running water hadn’t been invented yet. After helping to refurbish a few, just like that, he was gifted one that had belonged to a childless widower on the third floor of a building that overlooked the market square. 

“You’ve been a fine house guest,” the headman explained as he gave it to Simon, “But you can’t do all this work and expect us to just take your charity. We’ve got more dignity than that.”

“But I don’t plan on staying too long,” Simon insisted.  

“Well, then when you leave, someone else will live here,” the man shrugged. “Regardless, it’s yours until then.”

Just like that, Simon was no longer a wandering stranger. He was a new member of a community. At first, he promised himself he’d leave as soon as he could. Unfortunately, by the time he’d finished his armor, though, and had the best fitting leathers he’d ever worn in his life, he started on other projects. A new sword was followed by a replacement shield and a backpack. Then he’d need a better woolen cloak. 

He didn’t learn how to card and spin wool, though. Instead, he traded his services as a hunter for it by hunting down a wolf pack that had been taking more sheep than the community could bear to lose. After that, he spent the coldest part of the winter studying his orb pictures, coming up with interesting magical experiments, and beginning a very tentative plan for how he would handle Ionar’s eruption problem. 

His plan, ironically, was also an orb, though he supposed it could be any shape under the sun, and for a while, he considered making it a spear just because it would look cooler. That was inspired both by what he’d seen his doppelganger do to ignite the volcano and what he’d seen in the frozen village level so long ago. Though he didn’t have that orb or any pictures of it, he was sure that his doppelganger’s weapon was similar, and if two entirely different people could build something that could discharge a huge amount of cold or heat, then he was sure that he could too. 

The real problem wasn’t even the runes to radiate cold. He was pretty sure that a gilded steel orb with clean silver traces could bear a greater greater word for at least an instant. In cold’s case, it might even be able to bear more than that since it removed heat from the equation. 

Simon didn’t plan to start with that, of course. He needed to experiment with greater words on objects first and decide just how much stress steel could take before it failed beneath the weight of magic. 

All of those considerations paled, though, in the face of the most important one. “Where does one get the power to shut off a volcano?” he asked himself every few weeks. For half the winter, this went without an answer. 

As life in Ordenvale ground to a halt and the snows rose, he spent his spare time teaching a group of young men how to fight with wooden swords in a barn near the edge of the town proper. This became almost a social club, and even though it was ostensibly in case anything ugly came down from the mountains looking for something to eat, he did it for the mental break it afforded him. 

Simon could only theorize about what certain patterns might mean or test out simple rune combinations on paper for so many hours a day before he lost focus. Dueling, he could do it on autopilot, and it was almost as good for his soul as it was for his body. 

Well, it was good for more than that. It was good exercise and socialization, more than anything. The last thing he wanted to do was start rumors about what kept his oil lamp burning at all hours.  

Strangely, though, it was in the barn, trading blows with a young farmer, that he finally had his breakthrough. In fact, it was so sudden that he feigned illness and left almost immediately, even though he was wiping the floor with the lad, just because he didn’t want to lose his sudden jolt of inspiration. 

He’d been going around and around with him for a few minutes before he noticed that the young man’s slightly rigid, unpracticed style reminded him of the skeleton knight he’d beaten so many times on level four. That had been funny, but even as their blades resounded against each other, Simons's thoughts drifted to the strange obsidian artifact that had been the Black Heart. 

That’s when he realized that he knew what powered the thing. He didn’t think he’d known for a long time, but really, he did, and he had the notes to prove it in the mirror. The thing didn’t have batteries, he told himself as he hurried through the calf-deep snow. The thing was the batteries. 

All this time, he’d thought that the greater words on the stone were for the aura it used to power the dead, but Gervuul had two meanings, greater and power. He’d dismissed the latter because he’d never even considered what he was thinking right now. The reason it's carved into crystal is because that’s how you store magical power. 

In retrospect, there were other clues, too, mostly in Magi implements. He’d even seen crystals in the wands a few of the mages carried. He’d always assumed those to be decorative, but that had been a mistake. 

As soon as he reached his home, he took off his ring to experiment with it, but he was already sure his instincts were right. He dug through his pouch and found a good-sized broach with an agate he’d taken off one of the road men months before, then he used a word of lesser earth to melt a couple coins into a tiny ingot that he hammered out into a strip. The families that lived above and below him might wonder what in the hell he was doing, but he didn’t care. 

Instead of worrying about what anyone thought, he berated himself. “Why didn’t I put it all together sooner?” he growled. “I smashed that thing. I knew there was nothing else in it!”

Still, for all his recriminations, he was excited as he used a lesser word of earth to embed both of the stones into the ugly strip of silver. It didn’t look like much, but it gave him plenty of room to work. Then, before he carved in the runes, he brought up his sketches of the Black Heart and reviewed them. 

“So stupid,” he mumbled as he reviewed the runes. “If I'd thought to take pictures of this instead of drawing it, I would have seen it long ago.”

Simon took a moment to study the power runes, then waved the mirror away, returned to the project at hand, and began scratching the runes for lesser life transfer on one side. Once that was done, he connected it to the runes of powering and then to the agate. That was followed by another set of runes, which seemed to complete the battery circuit. 

Simon wasn’t sure about that part, and it might require more experimentation, but it certainly made sense. From there, the rest was easy. It was just a line to the symbols of lesser light and then to the citrine. It might have been the most simple and pointless magical item there ever was, but once he was sure that the lines were right, he burned another week of his life with another lesser word of earth to clean up his work and make the grooves deeper. 

You could have done this with a chisel and a hammer. He chastised himself. That was true; he could have, and next time, he would, but right now, he needed to know. He needed to know if he’d been chasing his tail for decades on this when the answer was right in front of him the whole time because that’s what it felt like. 

For a moment, all the problems that having a life force battery could solve flashed before his eyes. If this worked, he could make a weapon with at least a full word of draining, and if he could manage it, a word of greater draining and use those stones to power his spells instead of his own life force. He could figure out how to cast very large spells like he’d done with his youthful transformation without feeding a growing addiction in himself or despoiling the environment. He would be capable of so much more than he was now. 

All of that caused a great deal of anticipation, and for a moment, that was enough to make him hesitate. While he was eager to, he feared disappointment. He needn’t have, though. 

As he touched the rune of lesser transfer on one side of the strip, he felt the tingle of his life being drained very slightly. That wasn’t unexpected. That was what he felt whenever he used a blade powder with his own life. The citrine sprang to life after less than a second, glowing a warm yellow that wasn’t so different from a sunny day. That wasn’t the exciting part. A circuit like this would always glow the longer he powered it. 

The question was whether it would keep glowing when he released it. Simon counted to ten, letting the thing bleed his life force slowly but surely. Then, when he took his hand away, he held his breath and waited, and to his eternal surprise, it kept glowing!

“Yes!” he cheered, remembering to silence himself just before anything incriminating was shouted out. 

“I’ve done it!” he repeated in a whisper. “Now I can make whatever I want.”

While that wasn’t quite true because he lacked the proper facilities, and he still had no clear idea of how truly complicated circuits such as those that belonged to the magi worked, anything more reasonable was already in his grasp, and he rejoiced at that. It would have been easy to feel stupid about how long it had taken him to figure it out, but instead, he basked in the warm glow of his light as he enjoyed his victory.