Death After Death PLUS 279-281

Ch. 279 - Lessons Learned

That night, he had another fight, and this time, it was against three boys. There was no attempt to challenge him publicly, as his rival had done before. The fight had occurred just after dinner, and it had been as surprising as it was brief. Simon won, though he paid the price of a bloody nose. It didn’t hurt much, but the uneasy feelings it caused still made it difficult to sleep. He wasn’t safe here. 

It’s a good lesson, he reminded himself as he lay in bed that night. The children were just a reminder. It was the Magi that were the real danger. He could see them in the courtyard and occasionally at the edges of the dining hall or the back of their lonely stone classroom. Simon had no idea what they saw when they looked at him, but he was sure it was more than he wanted them to. 

Still, he did his best to put on a convincing act. After that, everything just sort of became the same. He started living the same day over and over again. Every morning would begin with a race and a prayer, and every evening would end with a struggle for food and dominance. 

There were little moments of normalcy with some of the boys and girls his own age. There was one afternoon when a few sticks and some spare time became a pitched sword fight at the base of the pyramid on the way to dinner and another time when they tossed an under-ripe melon around like a ball during lunch until they were punished for it. 

Simon didn’t even mind being forced to stand the rest of the day. It had been worth it for a moment of normalcy. Those moments of joy were rare enough that even that one element made it clear that this was the worst imaginable way to raise children. 

However, they weren’t being raised to become children or even good citizens. They were being raised to become fervent cultists and mages in the service of the God-King of the Murani. That was the only reason they would spend more time on prayer and song than on anything he’d consider practical magecraft preparation. 

Still, he couldn’t deny it was effective. It was almost hypnotic to be living the same day over and over again, and even if the propaganda didn’t affect Simon, he couldn’t exactly blame the other kids for falling victim to it. Some days, they had new teachers, and other days, a new kid would arrive or depart from their group. These were never pointed out by anyone; he just noticed them because, in a world of seeing the same thing over and over again, anything new stood out. 

Simon was tempted to try to be friendly to them, but that would have stood out even more than the new people, and he restrained himself. The most he was willing to do was to deflect the worst of the bullying, which wasn't too hard given his growing reputation as someone who knew how to fight.

Those became the rhythm of Simon's life. He’d fight when he had to, eat when he could, but mostly, he just tried to deal with how boring it was to pretend to learn and progress from illiterate street rat to biddable mage in the making. The curriculum seemed to reset every week or ten days. They’d go through the alphabet, learning to write each letter, and then after the students had been introduced to the whole collection, they'd get to simple words. After that, just when the class was starting to make headway, they’d go back to the letters again. Though it would take a few loops to be sure, he was all but certain he'd be learning the same things over and over until he graduated in a couple of months.

The teacher would make them repeat the same few sentences, which were mostly just praises and oaths of obedience to the God-King, at these points. They were so repetitive, though, that even as she pointed to the words, he was pretty sure that most of the kids were memorizing rather than reading or understanding them.

It wasn’t how Simon would have taught the class, but then, he was pretty sure that was on purpose. They weren’t trying to create a thinking, literate group of people here. They wanted people who were just literate enough to read the words of power and string them together in appropriate ways.

Suddenly, things about the way they’d fought him in past lives made a lot more sense to Simon. He'd always thought that they’d had a certain arrogance and a lack of creativity in their tactics, and this was the reason. They were learning obedience first, arrogance second, and everything else after that.

Is that the reason their generals were more creative? He wondered. Were they taken from the tribes outside the city or the nobles who had a more well-rounded education? 

He wasn’t sure, but all of this became easier for him to bear once he started to grasp what and why. Boredom was insufferable, but resisting sinister programming at least gave his mind something to struggle against. 

In the meantime, he had Ajeem and a few other acquaintances. They weren’t quite friends. Simon wasn’t sure anyone had friends here. They were just the people that he didn’t expect to attack him over an extra serving of jam or the last skewer of roasted chicken. 

"What does it matter if we go hungry or are beaten!” the boy proclaimed on more than one occasion when someone would whine. “We are to become Magi! Such a thing is worth any suffering!”

Simon had to agree, and truthfully, he could only admire the kid's optimism. He tried to act the same way, but in Simon's case, it was entirely fake. He hadn’t experienced a real thrill in this life since…

Well, since I made a tree that grew a fruit which transformed me into a child, he realized. That had been months ago, though. By now, winter was almost over, and the chill in the air could only be felt at the windy heights of the pyramid.  

Simon was saddened by the fact that he hadn’t really experienced wonder in this life since he’d become a child. That was the whole point of being a child, wasn’t it? He’d had fun playing with other children in the streets, and he’d enjoyed pulling the wool over the eyes of the Magi and figuring out their tests, but wonder? That would probably have to wait until he’d penetrated deeper into the organization. 

Toward the end of his second week as a brown-robed initiate, he saw his first dead acolyte. They went down the pyramid the same as always, but halfway down, all of the muted joy and boisterous he’d grown used to was drained from the group as they noticed the body laid out on a stone plinth near the foot of the pyramid. 

The black-robed child turned out to be a short-haired girl, not a boy as he’d thought from high above. She was laid out with her dark robes on two layers of wood, but no one seemed in any hurry to burn her. Not one of the gray-robbed Minders who stood there watching as the children regarded the corpse said anything, which was practically inviting superstitious rumors. 

Simon looked around surreptitiously and wondered how many of these kids were going to have nightmares tonight. He’d seen hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of dead over his many lives. This one only stung because she was so young, but the only burden that would be on his heart about it would be the fact that he would never know how she’d died. 

The girl was no more than fourteen or fifteen, and she was both pale and unmarked. If she’d had a bite on her throat, he would have said a vampire had done this, but as it was, his gut said that some magical mishap had drained her life force. 

No one spoke about it at the time; they just observed the body for a moment of respectful silence before continuing on their way. In the dining hall, there was less pushing and shoving for food than normal, but that was the only thing that showed that anyone had been affected. No one talked about it, at least directly, and Simon made no effort to force the issue.

He hadn't planned to bring it up at all until he saw the girl's funeral pyre burning as they walked out into the night. That was both eye-catching and traumatizing, and he could see that the sight stopped a number of his fellow students in their tracks. Still, he respected that grim silence and didn't attempt to break it, even with Ajeem, until they'd reached their drafty dormitory. 

“Does it scare you that you might die, I mean?” Simon asked the boy he almost thought of as a friend. 

“If there was no risk of death, then how would we even know it was worth doing?” Ajeem asked, trying and failing to cover up his dark thoughts with a smile. “This is magic we’re talking about!”

“It is,” Simon agreed. He, more than anyone, knew how valuable magical knowledge was and how much he’d risk for more of it. He was currently infiltrating people who might do terrible things to his soul if they caught him, just for a few more words of power. “But… nothing seemed wrong with her. What if it’s just random?”

“I’m too strong and fast for such a fate,” the boy boasted, “and you are too. We have nothing to worry about!” Simon thought about that a lot, especially after he heard someone crying themselves to sleep later that night. He didn’t know who it was exactly, but it didn’t matter. They were being trained to be little monsters, but they were still just kids for now, and what they needed was an adult to tell them everything was going to be okay. 

In the days that followed, he didn’t have any more heart-to-hearts with Ajeem or anyone else. That was more because of his growing bitterness, though, than because of anyone else. 

The idea that the very heights of friendship in this place could be measured by who wasn’t liable to attack you over food was depressing, but not as depressing as when Ajeem was taken from the class in their third week. Until that moment, he didn’t realize he’d miss the boy; He’d provided moments of normalcy if nothing else, and in small ways, he’d made this whole charade more bearable. 

When Simon saw the minder stop Ajeem partway up the pyramid one overcast morning and take him off to the entrance that had been reserved for those wearing black, he was surprised to find that he did. Simon kept running, but the boy looked back long enough to flash him a smile. Then he was gone. 

“I guess I’ll never beat him to the top now,” Simon thought with some regret. He tried to tell himself that it was a stupid thing to feel bad about and that he’d see the other boy again in a couple of months, but even after he finished his breakfast and started practicing his first letter of the day, that feeling of disappointment lingered. 

Ch. 280 - Lessons Learned (part 2)

If the days had felt repetitive before, they only became more so in the weeks that followed the disappearance of Simon’s only friend. The weather might have been improving, and the pyramid might have remained just as colorful as it always had been, but his life had become very gray. With every new body brought out of the pyramid and set alight in the plaza, his mood darkened further. 

None of this needs to be happening, he told himself, for the thousandth time, just to avoid screaming it out loud in one of his incredibly repetitive lessons. 

Simon could practically predict everything that his teacher was going to tell them on any given day. The letters always followed each other in the same pattern, and the stories and paeans she offered up to the God-King almost always occurred after the same letter they always did. He’d lived in a complicated sort of time loop for a long time, but he’d never felt more like he was trapped in the same day than he did now. 

Every day, he woke up and ran to ensure he was fed. Then, he was bored to death all day while he slowly pretended to get better at the remedial writing lessons. All that really happened, besides giving him hand cramps, as well as the chance to sketch the city that stretched out around them in all directions, was that he slowly moved forward in seniority. After a few weeks there were more than a dozen kids newer than him, and just as many of the older boys and girls had vanished into the pyramid, never to be seen again. 

Well, never was probably too strong a word. Simon saw Ajeem twice in the dining hall. Once, their eyes even met. However, even though Simon saw a flash of recognition on the other boy’s face, there were none of the dark-eyed boy’s smiles to accompany it. They both just continued on like nothing had happened. 

Simon thought about that meeting for weeks. He even drew the boy’s eyes sometimes when they had time to practice art as he wondered about his fate. Was the gulf between them one of trauma, experience, or magic? The latter concerned Simon the most, of course. After his time as a vampire’s thrall, he had no wish to be beholden to anyone like that ever again, though he thought it was the least likely. 

The Magi he’d met, however briefly, seemed to have their own personalities and priorities. The same was true with the minders. If the ruler of the Murani could just turn everyone into adoring mind slaves, then he would have no need to bombard the public with statues and stories of his greatness. 

That meant that the answer was trauma, experience, or some unguessable third option. Simon had no idea what that could be, but he had a lot of time to contemplate the horrors that awaited him when he finally donned the black robes because they didn’t seem to be in any hurry to give them to him. 

Even after Simon had been there for almost two months and made sure to show that almost all of his letters and pronunciations were perfect, they showed no interest in graduating him. Instead, they simply slowly collected one of the boys who had been there longer, even if his penmanship and art skills were only half as good as Simons. 

That, at least, was a good sign. If they were so hidebound that everything had to be done in the proper order, then they’d miss a lot of details, and all of that would be to the good for him because once he had some idea of where they kept the things worth knowing, he planned to find a way to get his hands on them. 

It was somewhere in his third month when he started to get flashes of people’s auras again. It was usually first thing in the morning when the doors opened up before he started his run. That moment of glare from the increasingly bright sun wiped his sight. Then, for just a moment, he could see the world as the place it really was, and in this compound, it was much darker than any of the colorful decorations would lead someone to believe.

It surprised him, but it made sense, too. He hadn’t used magic in about half a year, and his whole life had become a sort of tedious mediation of the pointlessness of being. However, without the Oracle’s teaching, he would have surely dismissed it. It was just a few hazy blurs around the people that happened to be in his vision and a web-like array of black lines that looked like a spider's web. It only lasted until he blinked a time or two, and then they were gone. 

Still, it was those black lines that he found to be the most haunting part of his gray little world. They came from every part of the Magi’s compound, and all of them disappeared into the heart of the Pyramid of Lesser Miracles. Something terrible awaited him down there, and Simon felt like he could almost see what it was in the eyes of the boy who had once been his friend. 

Line or no lines, his purgatory continued on. Truthfully, at that point, Simon was starting to believe that they’d figured him out and that they were just toying with him. He might stay here, scratching shapes into his slate until it was as worn out and useless as he would be by that age. 

Then, suddenly, on a drizzling morning when he could scarcely be bothered to run up the steps one more time, that all ended, and Simon found one of the gray-robed minders standing in his way. At first, he thought that the man was there for another boy, running to his right. They both slowed, but after a moment, the other boy started up again. 

No, he’s not stopping him, he realized. It’s finally time. Something different is finally going to happen. 

Simon smiled as he slowed to a stop at the realization before walking to the gray-robed man who was beckoning to him that morning up the stairs, but he wasn’t feeling joy or happiness. His facial reflexes were on automatic these days, but he only felt relief as the vast weight of frustration was being lifted off of him. He was finally being released from purgatory into some fresh new hell, but he would take it. He would take anything over living this week one more time. 

“Well, Nijam, have you mastered the art of the word?” the stern-faced man asked. “Are you ready to experience the greater mysteries?”

There was only one answer to this question. “I am if the God-King allows it,” Simon said with a small bow. He could have said that in ways that were more grand, but he was supposed to be a teenager, not a courtier. 

“The God-King doesn’t allow it,” the Minder answered. “He demands it. An empire as vast as his always requires more loyal, talented Magi to run. You are a long way from there, but in time, if you survive…”

He let the unspoken threat linger, and then, without a word of explanation, he turned and walked into the dark tunnel entrance that led further into the Pyramid of Lesser Miracles. Simon didn’t hesitate and followed the man into the dark. This was what he’d come here for, after all. He was finally going to learn some magic. 

Simon moved to catch up with the man, but by some trick of geometry or magic, the Minder moved further and further away from him. Two dozen steps into the tunnel, Simon was shrouded in darkness and apparently alone. That was enough to make him slow to a stop. “Hello?” he called out cautiously. “I think I’m lost and—”

A room to his right suddenly illuminated. Simon knew that it was magic even before he turned. Unless they had a particularly well-crafted red lantern, there was no way to make that color light in this world without it since they were a long way from inventing neon. 

Half blind by the sudden flare of light, Simon turned to see a small room he would have run past. It was round and perhaps twenty feet from one side to the other. Numerous boys in black robes stood around the walls, but the center was reserved for a Magi in red robes. He was standing beneath a glowing replica of the God-King depicting the man with his arms spread wide as he looked down in judgment. 

In this case, I’m the one being judged, Simon thought as he stepped forward after only the slightest hesitation. 

While he was getting sick and tired of all this ceremonial bullshit, he understood the purpose of it at least. This was a special moment, and they wanted to burn it deep in the minds of all of their would-be acolytes. They wanted to make this impression permanent, and how better to do that than with an image of the God-King presiding over this important moment. 

It’s probably not even a lesser illusion, he decided as he approached the Magi and gawked as he looked up at the thing.  

“Nijam, you have come before us today to be given a singular opportunity,” the red magi intoned. He was wearing a monstrous half-mask that was meant to make him look like a devil. At least, Simon was pretty sure that’s what it was. “Are you ready to swear your allegiance to serve the living god that rules over us all so long as you shall live?”

“I already do,” Simon lied in a tone that was as eager as it was genuine. With a little more ritual and any sign of magic, he might have been hesitant, but only for the rest of his life? He was game for that. “But I will swear to serve him with every ounce of—”

“You live for him, but would you die for him?” the Magi interrupted. 

“I—” Simon hesitated, as he suspected anyone would, but that was mostly just for show. 

If they actually tied him down to an altar to turn him into a blood sacrifice, he’d turn himself into a supernova, but as long as it was just words, he’d play along. A quick look around the room revealed that the only one wearing one of those amulets was the Magi in red, so the other acolytes here were definitely still way down the totem pole. 

“I will give my life to the God-King in whatever way he requires,” he said with something that sounded a lot like conviction. 

“That is a noble offer, and we will take you up on it.” As the Magi spoke, all of the acolytes produced black clubs from under their robes and advanced toward him. 

A surge of cold fear went through him then. It’s all just a ceremony, he told himself, willing himself to stand there like a good little brainwashed puppy. He thought that they’d stop just short, or at worst, there would be a little ceremonial violence, but that wasn’t what happened. 

Instead, they beat the crap out of him. He didn’t even try to fight back. There was no set of clever moves that could help him avoid the blows of a dozen boys with cudgels. He didn’t recognize any of the faces and took some solace that at least it wasn’t Ajeem who was beating him. At least he didn’t see the boy. That would have made all of this hurt more. 

It took less than ten blows to drive Simon to his knees and less than twenty to make him curl up into a ball. He could feel a concussion as his skull bounced off the ground and the way that his hand went numb after a particularly hard strike told him that one or more fingers had definitely been broken. Still, he didn’t cry out. He wasn’t sure if the Magi who had spoken would actually carry out his threat, and he kept expecting the other boys to stop before they actually killed him, but either way, he was determined not to give anyone the satisfaction. 

He did that much, but the only satisfaction he got from the experience was the sudden unconsciousness when someone struck him on the temple. Simon didn’t even have time to wonder if he was unconscious or dead. He was out like a light. 

Ch. 281 - Wearing the Black

When Simon woke up, almost pain-free and lying in a lumpy bed, he felt a surge of disappointment. Back to the cabin after all of that, he sighed internally as he opened his eyes. What a waste.

He’d expected a gang initiation with some secret society mumbo jumbo, not a murder. He supposed that meant that he’d done something to reveal himself, cutting his quest to learn more about magic short. Now, he expected to see the same thing he always did after he was returned to life, the rough timbered ceiling of his cabin by the dim light that managed to leak in through the closed shutters, but he was disappointed there, too. 

He wasn’t in the cabin. He was lying in a dark room with a stone ceiling. Simon blinked as his brain froze, trying to square this circle. Wait, did I die or not? He balked. If I was alive, then I should be in a lot of pain, I— 

“Healing magic,” he whispered to himself as he struggled to rise. His limbs were heavy and weak, and now that he was focusing, he could tell there were a few lingering aches that whoever had treated him had missed. 

Almost as soon as Simon started to sit up, he was pushed back down by a gray-robed woman who leaned forward from the shadows. “Easy there, Nijam,” she said soothingly, forcing him to lie where he was. “If it was just healing magic, you’d have been up days ago, but this will take longer, I’m afraid.”

“Longer?” he asked, trying not to let his skepticism leak out. “What happened?”

“Exactly what the Magi told you would happen,” she said seriously as she lay a cool cloth on his forehead. “You died for your God-King, and in his kind, beneficent wisdom, he raised you up, and you live again.”

Simon didn’t believe that for a second, but after thinking about it for a moment, he said, “Praise be... I-I’m so glad he found me worthy.” As he spoke, though, he noticed he was wearing the black robes of an acolyte now. 

“Only those who are restored to life by his grace are fit to learn true knowledge,” she answered reverently. 

The two of them prayed together then for a time before she left him to recover. The whole time, though, Simon’s mind was racing.

What a mindfuck! His brain screamed as he examined the strange symbols that had been drawn on his body with flaking red paint now that she was gone. At first glance, they looked like words of power, but they were just nonsense words, and as he found no pair of matching symbols on him as he went, he felt sure they were just another layer of stage dressing in all of this.

He knew that some religions crossed the border into cult territory, but to beat children into unconsciousness, then heal them and tell them they died? That was crazy. No, what’s crazy is that they make you believe their God-King is where all this power comes from, and it’s not! Simon’s mind shouted, refusing to let the topic go, even as he lay there in the dark. 

While he didn’t think that magic was a natural force, it was certainly a universal one. It might even be reliable enough to be considered a scientific force. If he had a few lifetimes and a laboratory, he could probably figure out the variables involved in some of the words. He could write equations that explained how pronunciation affected the power of a word of fire, and he could accurately measure the difference in life force costs between a lesser word of force and a word of force. 

While Simon wasn’t close to understanding any of those things with any sort of precision at the moment, he believed that they were understandable in the same way that the more he understood anatomy, the better he could heal someone and the more vividly he imagined a spell, the better it would turn out. 

While he was certain someone had created this framework of words and spells, he was sure it wasn’t this God-King. What need would a city or a nation have for war if they could simply rewrite reality? No, this is the work of Helades at best or the demons at worst, he decided as he lay there, reiterating the opinion he’d decided on long ago. While it was entirely possible there was some third answer to the question, he was sure the Murani one wasn’t it. 

Well, he was mostly sure. If he finally infiltrated the Magi and found exactly the sort of equations that he was hoping to discover one day, then he supposed he’d be willing to eat some crow. That wasn’t very likely, though. 

Later that day, or night, or whenever it was, the woman returned by candlelight and gave him some water. He asked for some food, as he expected any child his age would, but she insisted that he had to fast. “Being reborn is hard on the body,” she insisted. “Once you have rested, we will feed your mind and your soul, but your body must adjust.”

The way that she persisted in going on with this lie angered him, and Simon had to look away often as he composed himself. No wonder Ajeem could barely meet my gaze, Simon swore to himself. The poor kid thought he was a zombie. 

Looking back on the way some of the kids in black had acted, though, it suddenly made more sense. For every loud, obnoxious bully, there was a quiet kid coming to grips with all of this. Simon had assumed that what he was seeing was sadness because someone they knew had died, but that probably didn’t upset them half as much as finding out they had died. 

“If the God King can restore me to life, then why does he let any of his acolytes die?” Simon asked his minder later that evening when she brought him a scroll to practice his reading on. “Surely they—”

“It is not your place, nor is it anyone else's, to question his will or the word of his Magi,” she corrected him sharply before softening slightly. “Nijam, you have to understand that what happens here can be very dangerous, and those students that you see taken lifeless from this pyramid fell short in some way. So, our ruler decided not to raise them up a second time. You don’t have to worry, though. As long as you are devout and focused, he will protect you.”

“Is that what those amulets are for, then?” Simon asked, pointing to the small amulet the minder wore around her neck. It wasn’t as large as the strange lotus-shaped amulets that made the Magi explode, but it was the first time he’d gotten to ask one of the minders about it, so he decided to go for it.

“In a way, yes,” she agreed as her hand went to her throat. “One day, if you are worthy, you will have the very same honor.” The woman seemed conflicted about that and left Simon soon after that, but he couldn’t quite pinpoint what her turbulent emotions were supposed to mean. 

Was it shame because she wasn’t a full Magi or guilt for lying to him? Were the minders simply the lowest rank of Magi, or were they the highest rank of slave? He didn’t know. No one bothered to explain any of these things to him.

Over the next few days, all he did was grow hungrier and read the same few scrolls over and over again. Though he pretended to have trouble sounding out the words and acted like it took him two days to discover what it was he was reading, he knew in seconds. It was the same religious propaganda he’d read aloud with all of the other initiates every few days for months now. That was tedious, but it was expected. It was also one of the only things to do in this dark room. 

While his minder had confirmed that this was the Pyramid of Lesser Miracles, besides the black featureless walls, her occasional presence, and the occasional echo of disturbing sounds from somewhere else, he had no real information about that. Simon spent those days with regret. It wasn't regret that he’d done this, but regret that he hadn’t brought the entire house of cards down already. The place was a madhouse. It was a factory of abuse and psychological manipulation that produced zealots.

It’s so strange, he thought to himself as he meditated and tried to make everything he knew align in some way that would make it make sense. It’s like the Murani are two entirely different cultures. There are the clans on the plains that seem more likely to fight each other than anyone else, and then there's the God-King’s cult in here, training the next generation of monsters. How does that happen?

While Simon understood that the mages could probably destroy the tribes or at least crush them enough to bring them to heel, he also saw why they wouldn’t want to. It was those endless minor wars that powered the slave trade of the region, and blood magic was thirsty business. 

While Simon didn’t have a clock or a calendar in here, based on the way his hunger rose to a fever pitch and then slowly fell away, he was pretty sure he was in his dark cell for three or four days before they finally released him. Then, weak from hunger, which he was assured was really enervation related to his resurrection, he was finally escorted from the pyramid through a complicated maze of tunnels that he was going to have a hard time learning despite how carefully he’d paid attention to each twist and turn. 

The place was very confusing, and that was almost certainly on purpose. Still, as he walked out, he did catch glimpses through different doorways. He saw a lecture hall, some practice rooms, some locked doors that might have been prisons or storerooms, and a library. It was that last one he was most interested in, but he didn’t expect they’d let him wander around that any time soon. 

Instead, he was brought outside just as the sun was rising, blinding him. Simon was sure that was planned, too. The whole thing just dripped with symbolism. Still, the effect was somewhat wasted on him because the flash of light let him see the river of darkness flowing up the pyramid into the tunnel they’d exited for a moment. 

They want absolute obedience before they give you cosmic power, he thought to himself as he walked down the pyramid with shaky legs. All of the other kids would be charging up the pyramid right now to make sure they were fed, but he couldn’t see them. Instead, he was being escorted down the second set of stairs on the far side. He hadn’t been over here before, but he was sure there was a reason for that, too. 

“Where are we going?” he asked when they were halfway down. 

“To get you fed first, then you’ll have some private lessons before you rejoin the rest of the acolytes,” she explained. “You might have thought that the black robes were only a single stepping stone, but there are many steps between the world of an initiate and the Magi. This is but the first step into the darkness, and it is only through that darkness that you will one day understand the light.”

The woman’s words were cliché, but they made a strange sort of sense to Simon, and he didn’t complain. Still, his patience was wearing pretty thin. It had been months since he’d started down this road, and he had nothing to show for it. Only the glimpse of that large room packed with books and scrolls was enough to make him wait a little longer. A little time in a place like that was worth almost any amount of suffering. So, for now, he let himself be led down the stairs to whatever awaited him next.