Death After Death PLUS 291-293

Ch. 291 - Experiments 

Simon went hunting that afternoon, but more to practice with his bow than for the food. He was planning to stay for a couple more days to trace runes and dig through the wealth of knowledge he’d collected. A deer would have been too much for that, so he’d been hunting for a rabbit or perhaps even a wild turkey. Still, his tracking was even rustier than his archery, so when a buck crossed his path, a buck was what he took. 

He dragged it back to his cabin after he’d gutted it, but he didn’t bother to skin it. “I’m not going to stay here for weeks just to tan a hide,” he told himself as he built a low fire outside so he could smoke the haunches before he got to work butchering the rest of the thing. He’d pan-fried thin slices to make a sandwich with his bread. After that, he took a quick trip into the woods for more firewood, along with some herbs and tubers, and came back to slow boil whatever he could that night for a hopelessly underseasoned stew.

Maybe I’ll stay for more than a couple of days, he reasoned as he started to lay out his menu. The haunches were food for the road, but even setting those aside, he still had a week's worth of eating to do, and he certainly had more than a week of thinking to do. 

Since he’d wasted so much time, he didn’t actually start on the dreaming orb first, which had been his plan. Instead, he started on his experimental staff and after lunch. He tried to use a lesser word of plant growth on it as well as a lesser word of earth, but neither of them did anything. 

“I guess we’re going to have to do this one the old-fashioned way,” he said, pulling out his dagger. He’d been surprised that he couldn’t use Zyvon to make it grow, but then, it wasn’t really a plant any more than a bone was a person. 

I could always make a tree grow a wand with the right symbols, Simon thought as he carved the thing and checked on his various cooking projects. He didn’t do that, though. It had been a long time since he’d made anything by hand, and he was going to need to get back in the habit if he wanted to try his hand at making anything like the orb of dreaming. 

While it was not his most urgent project, it was an experiment he needed to figure out. He was going to whittle the runes of lesser and distance into them and then see if a spoken spell would channel through those appropriately. Long term, he wanted to make a wand at least as versatile as the one he’d glimpsed on Magi Karala’s lectern, but wands were delicate things, and he didn’t have a good set of carving chisels. He just had a dagger with a decent point, which would be enough to carve his test words. 

Simon didn’t finish that project that night, but he had an excellent lunch, an acceptable dinner, and lots of time to think about what it was he should do. While his hands were busy, his mind was free to consider what the paths down any of the roads that lay before him might look like. 

He had literally unlimited options, but really, it kept coming back to two possibilities. He could go step by step, or he could go as fast as possible, and as much as he wanted new levels to take his mind off the failures of old levels, he knew deep down the right way to handle this was to take care of levels in order. That wasn’t really his dilemma, though; it was that the right way to do that was not simple. 

The right way to save Ionar was to do it before the eruption. That would give him the opportunity to strike down his doppelgänger even if he planned it right, but the idea that he’d have to relive that life sickened him more than the idea of spending another decade as Freya’s unwilling house guest. 

“If you’re going to do everything in the right order, you might as well do it the right way,” he argued with himself, “Otherwise, you’re practically skipping forward in the levels as it is.”

While Simon didn’t deny that his point was a good one, he didn’t fume over it either. Instead, he just allowed himself to think about all the branching ways that the levels affected each other and maintained a meditative mindset as he trusted his subconscious to provide him some flash of insight. 

Halfway through the next day, he finished his staff and went outside to test it. For those tests, Simon opted to use fire because it was the most visible of his attacks. His first attempts were fruitless, and he cast a normal fire spell twice as he tried each rune. He then inspected them and, seeing no error in the shapes, tried to think of how his teacher’s wand had differed. 

Simon didn’t have a photographic memory or anything, but it had only been about a day, so he didn’t have much trouble recalling the details. He had the same runes, and after a little trial and error, he carved lines down to where he held the staff at different points to complete the circuit. Still, it wasn’t until he added a line to the tip of the staff that it finally did what it was supposed to. 

“So that’s what completes the circuit,” Simon said to himself. The first time the distant rune finally interacted with the word of fire, he spoke and sprayed a thirty-foot-long flamethrower instead of a five-foot gout of flame. It was much less intense than the shorter-range burst, but there was no denying the burn scar it left across his overwise pristine meadow. 

It turned out that he needed a path from where he held the thing and started the circuit to where he imagined the spell being released from, which was, in this case, the tip. It was pretty straightforward but only of limited use. 

“Well, that won’t make my spells more powerful, but it will speed them up,” he said to himself as he eyed his crude work. Only having to say one word instead of two or three wouldn’t matter in most situations, but it could make all the difference in the world when he was fighting another mage. “What I need to do is make something that will fire on command, like a gun,” he told himself. 

That idea came with its own problems, of course, but it had real advantages, especially in lives where his tongue might be missing or he couldn’t cast for some other reason. Simon smiled grimly at that memory but didn’t start carving immediately. Instead, he went inside to review the orb and amulet. 

He’d planned to start with the orb at least but as many symbols as it had, and the fact that half of them seemed to be conditional symbols that linked to multiple other symbols, put him on his back foot pretty quickly as he drank all the wine that hadn’t gone into last night’s stew in frustration. 

“What a tangle of knots,” Simon sighed, tracing and retracing runes. Even when he stuck to the simpler patterns on the outermost bands, he was missing too many symbols to say definitively what it did. 

He had much better luck with the amulet and became fascinated by it, spending several days on it before he decided he’d learned all he could for now. That one made a fair amount of sense, but mostly because it was only about 80 runes linked together in several glyph structures. Some symbols defied his understanding here, too, but he could guess what they meant. The thing seemed to have two major functions and several minor functions. 

The minor functions were resistances, not so different from the protective holy symbols of the Unspoken, though this one seemed to offer some level of protection against fire, ice, life drain, and soul damage. Soul damage wasn’t even something he’d considered until the exact moment he finished tracing the circuit, and that concerned him. 

“What would that even look like?” he asked. “Radiation? Memory loss? What would happen if your soul was damaged?” A chill went through him as he considered it. There was only one part of him he kept from life to life, and if someone could damage his soul, that would have unforeseen consequences. 

Though soul damage piqued his interest, it was the life drain he was more drawn to. Simon would have thought that such a thing could get in the way of their blood magic, and he didn’t see any way of discriminating on the direction of the flow. If you were blocking the rune Zyvon, then you were blocking it. He thought that lightning was a strange oversight, but he wasn’t the one who’d designed the thing. 

Simon unraveled the mystery when he tackled the major functions. The first and simplest major function was the self-destruct switch. If the mage died, then the amulet blew up. It was a very straightforward, logical circuit that shunted all the remaining life force in the corpse when it fell below a certain level and turned it into a fireball. 

That made sense. He’d certainly seen exactly that happen enough times. 

What made less sense was the soul rune at the center of the whole thing. It was the most complicated cluster of runes, and though he wasn’t able to decipher it all, in the few hours before his fire died and he went to bed, he did reach one inescapable conclusion. 

The amulet kept the Magi from paying for their own spells. They were drawing that power from somewhere else. Whether that was their God-King or not, he couldn’t say. What he could say, though, was that the reason they never seemed to use a greater word was because the amulet wasn’t powerful enough to channel it. 

“Know your place, huh?” he said as he considered the solution. 

That certainly fit everything he knew about the group. Acolytes were taught they couldn’t cast a spell without a lesser word, and full-blown Magi were given a battery that was crippled so they didn’t have to use their own lives, but they could only use so much. 

That raised lots of questions. Where was the life force that powered everything coming from? Was that what the great pyramid was for? 

Simon fell asleep that night thinking about it, but it didn’t matter. In the morning, he was going to get ready to travel, and then he was going to go save a messenger from a wyvern and some kids from an owlbear. After that, he’d see. Simon was leaning toward escorting them all the way to where they were going and seeing if he could prevent trouble down the line, but he’d have to see how he felt when he got there. 

Despite his misgivings, a big part of him was certain he should just start taking these levels in order and knocking them all down like dominos. While he certainly couldn’t stand the idea of living in Ionar for a year or two while he waited for its volcano to blow his top, he could probably stomach it long enough to fight the fiery titan that emerged from it. 

You don’t even need to do that, he reminded himself with a scowl. Not according to Helades. You just need to save the people on the street between points A and B, and it’s all good. 

Ch. 292 - The Way Forward

The last thing Simon did before he opened the hatch and found a set of stone stairs leading down to the crusty snow of the wyvern level was to use a word of metal to mark his old sword with the runes of lesser draining along the edge. He didn’t anticipate needing to kill anyone for the next couple of levels besides monsters he’d have to use magic for, but it was better to be safe than sorry. He’d already burned more than six months of life in the last few days doing his testing, and he was going to need to replenish that where he could. 

His thoughts about logistics and trying to remember if had everything he needed were stolen away almost as soon as he stepped out of the door and looked around the vista in front of him. “How long has it been?” he asked himself as he smelled the crisp mountain hair and a wave of memories about all of the different times he’d been here cascaded over him. 

For a moment, all he could think about was the first time the beast chased him and how well Freya had handled coming here on their long, terrible trip to Crowvar, but gradually, he filtered back down to more recent events and the most recently he could recall being here was a very long time ago. 

“It was just after the White Cloaks and just before I joined the bandits for Ennis’ little rebellion,” he recalled. What went unsaid was the second half. It was the time I didn’t kill the wyvern but still somehow managed to lock in my time in Ionar. 

It was bittersweet. When one added up all the time in Ionar and all the time as Freya’s unwilling guest, he hadn’t been back to this spot in at least a hundred years, which was crazy to think about because it felt like only yesterday that he’d been here every few days as he struggled to solve a single level. 

Simon spun in place, and then, seeing the nest, he moved toward it. There was no point in delaying the inevitable, nor was there any point in waiting to kill the wyvern. The sooner he struck it down, the sooner he could wait for the rider to arrive and force him to explain if his message was important enough to justify a whole level to save. 

The first time Simon had struck down the wyvern, he’d used force to let gravity do the work. He remembered how difficult it had been to sight down his longsword and slice through the thing’s tough wings before it reached him. This time, he did something far easier and blasted it with a spell of distant lightning. 

“Vrazig,” he intoned, holding his walking stick out and pointing the thing at it. 

That was all it took. The beast never even saw him. One moment, it was there circling among the peaks in search of prey, and the next, there was a bolt from the blue, and it fell deflated from the sky. The way that the thing tried to regain control showed that his blast hadn’t killed it from this range, but its impact with the ground would. It was impressive, but he didn’t even feel good about it. 

“It’s basically cheating at this point,” he sighed to himself as he advanced on the nest. He still doubted he could actually take the thing down with just a sword, of course, but some part of him wondered if he might be capable of getting a lucky shot with his bow before leaping to the side to dodge its wrecking-ball-like tail. 

As he pondered his odds on that, he smashed the giant eggs in the nest and then did a brief check to make sure there were no magical artifacts that he was supposed to find before he started down the mountain toward the uneven ribbon of road that he only had a few hours to get to. 

Downhill was always easier than uphill, but as he went, Simon was glad he’d finally taken the plunge with his flesh shaping. Partway down, he took a break to examine the shattered carcass of the wyvern because this was hell on his knees as it was. His pride warred with his guilt that he’d been able to take it down so easily, but both of those emotions paled in comparison to his annoyance as he looked back up the mountain. He was not looking forward to the hike back to the top to take the gateway to the next level when he was done. 

Despite how fast he was going, Simon was forced to throw caution to the wind and run the last hundred yards when he saw the dust of a horse approaching. Simon was in such a hurry that when he dropped his sack of supplies by the side of the road, he drew his bow and aimed it at the man. He was in too much of a hurry to listen to reason, and Simon was too short of breath to make a coherent argument. 

The threat of an arrow brought him up short, and though he looked like he was tempted to wheel around and ride the other way, he thought better of it. “I’m just a messenger,” the rider explained. “I carry no riches, only—”

“I know what you carry,” Simon interrupted. That man paled enough that he’d obviously gotten the wrong idea, but Simon didn’t disabuse him of his misconceptions. “And honestly, I don’t care. I don’t even want your scroll. I just want more information about it.”

“Scroll… I can’t… M-my master said…” the messenger stammered. 

Simon sighed heavily, wishing he understood how vampiric mesmerism worked so he could force the man to tell him everything. “Listen,” Simon barked. “I just told you that I’m going to let you deliver the thing. I know that they’ve been discovered, blah blah blah and that he wants her to meet him somewhere.” 

Truthfully, Simon didn’t remember that part well, and even reviewing it in the mirror didn’t help because he’d been too frustrated to note more than just their names. A missive from L to Antonia to go to Abresse was all he’d written. “I just want to know where your journey started and where it ends. That’s all.”

The man swallowed hard, apparently trying to decide if that information was worth his life or not. Finally, he answered, “I ride from Coramon to meet the lady… my destination is Liepzen. Will that suffice? My cause is urgent, and I must be on my way!”

Simon considered it. There was certainly more information to be gleaned here, but that would require torture or murder, and he was unwilling to do either on someone who hadn’t done anything wrong. Then there was the fact that the level was solved when he didn’t even save this guy's life, which said something, too, but what?

Finally, things clicked into place as he looked at him. It's not about making sure that his message gets through, Simon decided. It's about making sure it's not intercepted. That's why all I had to do was pick it up and throw it away.

“Do you fear you’re being followed?” Simon asked. “Is that it? You need to keep this message out of enemy hands?”

The man looked startled at that statement, but he nodded. “Who is it?” Simon asked.

“I, uhm… the people in question… I-My Master said I was not to speak of the angels who—” the messenger. 

“White cloaks,” Simon growled, recalling the symbols they hid behind. “Go on then, I’ll take care of them.”

The man seemed surprised by that. He was more surprised when Simon lowered his bow, but smartly, he decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth and kicked his horse into a gallop. 

Simon hadn’t been looking forward to going back up the mountain today anyway, so he made camp right there by the road in the shade of a boulder and decided he’d wait to see who came. He even used a word of metal to engrave one of his arrowheads with the word of disperse fire. While that looked similar to minor fire, he was pretty sure that it would create minor fire over a much broader area, which was exactly what he would need if there was a group of them.

Simon stayed up late into the night, and after he made a small mirror to make sure this level really was complete, he fell asleep sitting against the boulder, waiting for his guests, but no one arrived. Just to be on the safe side, he waited for two more days, but other than one old tinkerer who shared his fire long enough for Simon to be sure he wasn’t a member of the order, no one came. 

He spent that time slowly sorting levels into categories and reached the conclusion that except for one-offs like the jungle pyramid or the spider level, the outcome of almost every level was something to the effect of ‘and then Brin got weaker because X happened, or didn’t happen.’ Even the zombies fell into that category when you knew that they were the thing that ended an extended civil war. 

“What does Helades have against this part of the world exactly?” he asked himself, trying to decide if that should be his question to her on level 40. “How does that make the future brighter?” Simon struggled to think of some parallels in Earth’s history, where making a specific country weaker would result in a safer world, but he no longer remembered enough about his original world to make an appropriate metaphor. 

Frustrated by his lack of a good answer, he spent the third day summiting the mountain, which turned out to be a lot taller on the way up than it had been on the way down. He didn’t bother to camp at the top. He just rested for a few minutes and made sure he’d noted down all the relevant information so he wouldn’t have any blank spots if it took him another hundred years to get back here. 

As he opened the door, he told himself, “I guess this will just remain one of those little mysteries.”

The far side contained the level he expected, but even knowing that he’d see Ionar burning again struck him like a physical blow. He’d fought for lifetimes to save this city, but no matter how many times he succeeded, it still caught on fire. 

“No this time,” Simon told himself as he walked out onto the ashy street and shut the door behind him. “Today I’m going owl bear hunting. Next time I will deal with you.”

Simon headed straight to the palace after that. The only stop he made along the way was to stop several people in the street in attempt to learn the date this happened. If he was going to fight Brogan atop Mount Karkosia again, the last thing he wanted was to stay in this city longer than he had to, but given that fire was raining from the sky no one seemed particularly interested in giving him the date. 

Ch. 293 - Memory Lane

Since no one was interested in Simon, or even the fact that he was the only one walking uphill while everyone else ran down, he decided to check the temples. He wasn’t exactly interested in beating the answer out of someone on what was almost certainly the worst day of their lives. He knew. He’d lived here in the years leading up to this moment, and it was as close to paradise as he’d probably ever come. 

While he didn’t think any of the Temples had a calendar on their walls or anything, he’d be able to get pretty close just by seeing what offerings had been left and what holy days were coming up. If I can’t find what I’m looking for there, I can just ransack the queen's library. Surely she’ll have messages from the last few days that I can…

Even that glancing thought about Althena was too much. He might not pine over her in the way he had with Freya for life after life, but it was a wound he didn’t want to rub salt in unless he had to, and the easiest way to find the answers he needed was anywhere but the palace.

In the high city, all of the most important temples were on the same street, and surprisingly, he didn’t see a single looter on it. The Way of the Revered was a winding road near a precipice that made it stand two stories above the next street, letting all of the gods look out and take in both the city and the sea. 

The Temple of the Sea was the largest of the fine buildings, as it was in every Ionian city he’d been to. It was flanked on either side with slightly smaller marble palaces dedicated to the Goddess of Wine and Harvests and the God of War. Other smaller temples, including some dedicated to Elthena’s ancestors, who had been elevated to the status of deity upon their death, continued on in a line down the winding way, but Simon didn’t think his answer would be hard to find. 

He started in the Temple to the Sea God, but only because it had been so long since he’d walked inside the place that he wanted to take a moment to appreciate its mosaics despite the distant rumbling. He was in no hurry. It would be hours until the lava reached the palace. 

Though he was certain he’d find the answer more quickly in his next stop, Simon took a moment to appreciate the artistry of Ionar’s second most beautiful building, apart from the palace. Despite the fresh cracks that had almost certainly been caused by the violent tremors, the illusion of undulating waves on the floor of the building was still intact, and Simon took a moment to appreciate not just the artistry but the cost of the endeavor. 

The floor had been made to look like waves in a delicate repeating pattern, but the walls were the true beauty. Every one of them was covered in a frieze depicting some myth or legend of the sea, and even at the peak of his talents, Simon wasn’t certain he could have painted some of them any better. He took several minutes to take those in on both a technical and purely aesthetic level before the distant thunder of the volcano goaded him forward. 

The last time he’d been here was before he’d been an artist and understood the price of good, ultramarine pigments. Now that he was looking at the place with a new eye, it might as well have been covered in gold. 

Simon found prayers against the summer storms on the altar and concluded that it was early summer. That corresponded with his dim memory of events, but after helping himself to the silver that had been left as offerings, he moved on to the Temple of Harvests. There, he found more specific information about the cycles of the moon and the upcoming harvest prayers. This disaster was happening in the 11th year of Elthena’s reign, four or five days after the Fire Moon, which was basically June in the calendar he’d grown up with. 

Measuring time had been a frustrating thing for Simon across his many lives for a couple different reasons. The first was because the literacy rates across the world were so low. Ionar’s was quite high compared to Brin’s, but even so, less than half of the nobles could read and write. The rest used slaves, and amongst commoners, it was a vanishingly rare skill limited to certain trades, such as merchants and artists. 

On top of that, every kingdom and region had a different calendar. The people of Ionia reset their calendar with every ruler, while the Murani measured their time from the founding of Zurari and not the beginning of the God-King’s reign, which surprised him. 

It was a mess, which made it hard for him to track what was going to happen and where. “My map is in pretty good shape, and I’ve noted most of the levels on it,” Simon told himself as he walked to the palace. “Now I’m going to need to figure out a calendar and get everyone to adopt it, just so I can make a proper plan.”

In theory, that was the right way to handle the Pit. He understood that. What he really needed to do was spend a few lives indifferent to the suffering of people and just study the world around him. He needed to map out the important events, note them all down, and decide on a plan. Helades and the Oracle would both agree with that. 

Well, no, they wouldn’t, actually, Simon corrected himself as he made his way up the lava-streaked road to the palace and noted that its lush gardens were on fire. The Oracle would tell me that change is only possible with that understanding but not necessarily desirable, and Helades would tell me just to follow her plan. 

Sometimes, Simon was tempted to throw both away and start over, which he supposed was what he’d done in his last life when he’d used level zero to fix levels four and six. Maybe that was the right decision, and maybe it wasn’t. He didn’t know, but right now, it felt better to fret about it than think too much about the building he was walking into. 

Gazing at the burning gardens made him think of all the days he’d spent teaching his son as well as the other members of his class. That was touching, even if he felt like the fire ruined the memories of watching boys learning to swordfight to some degree. He didn't feel the same emotional tug when he entered the grand hall of the palace. That place only made him think of Elthena’s war councils, and he didn’t have nearly as much emotional attachment to those. 

“What’s even the point of all of this anymore?” he asked, stopping before the empty throne and the open portal to the forest in one of the archways behind it like he expected an answer. “Why do I even need to finish the Pit? What is waiting for me if I finish, anyway?”

Simon spoke to himself, but he addressed the room as if he could make Helades respond and address him for his impudence. She wouldn’t, of course, but he was feeling rather impudent, so he sat on the queen’s throne as he continued to process all of this. 

He’d only planned to stay here for as long as it took to get to the forest, but he’d already been in Ionar for an hour now, and a few more minutes wouldn’t hurt anything. So he sat there on the queen’s gaudy, golden throne and looked at the volcano erupting through the windows on one side of the room and the buildings of the upper city burning out of the windows on the other. 

“And to think, I did this, didn’t I? Some version of me, at least,” he sighed. Part of Simon expected his evil twin to pop up and complain about the way he’d phrased that. But nothing of the sort happened. Instead, he sat there, like the ruler of all he surveyed, and wondered why he was still doing this. 

“Forty-five deaths, and all so I can be the king of ashes,” he complained. “I might as well make a farm after all. Maybe I don’t need to save the whole world. Maybe I should stake out a valley like that vampiric bitch did and rule over it with an iron fist. Then everything else can burn.”

He said the words, but he didn’t mean them. While Simon wasn’t sure he wanted to finish or even leave the Pit at this point, the last thing he wanted to do was stop making the world a better place. He needed to. It was why he kept doing this, and while he didn’t think that either one of the women who were trying to tell him how to go about it was right, he hoped he could learn from both. 

Simon might have stayed there for hours pondering the topic if a fireball hadn’t struck the roof directly, flinging pieces of roof tile and plaster throughout the hall. That was his cue to get up and walk to the portal. One more rock from the heavens could very easily shatter the arch, and then he’d be stuck here for another life, and as grumpy as he was, he had no wish to fight a lava titan, if only because it would lock in the level in its miserable state. 

I could not bear to see Ionar look like that in life after life, he thought with a shake of his head as he remembered just how broken this city had looked when he'd seen what the demon seed had done to its ruins.

The dark forest was utterly unchanged from his last visit, and after a cursory glance, Simon left the smoky throne room behind for the soft rain of the forest, immediately feeling his mood improved. This was the first level he’d ever completed, and he’d only reset it by accident once in all the runs since then, so it had been a very, very long time since he’d been here.

The first thing he did was draw his sword, even though he knew it would do almost nothing to the beast in question, as he tried to remember which way he was supposed to go. 

Was it slightly left or slightly right? He wondered. All he could really remember was crawling beneath a fallen log once, but he didn’t see any of those around. In theory, the way the road was shaped, he had at least a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right, but something about visiting levels that had been solved for most of the time he’d been in the pit made him feel completely off. 

As he set off into the woods, he kept an ear open for the sound of predators. The owlbear was frighteningly fast, but it would only take one spell to cut it down, so Simon only needed a moment to turn ambush into victory.