Death After Death 222-224

Ch. 222 - Break Out

It was only when they tried to use words of power rather than minor words of power that he noticed any real difference between the girls. Emma, the younger girl, didn’t seem to be able to do it. The effects of her spells came out with such little force that she might as well have been casting lesser words. 

She complained about that, but Simon dismissed it. “These skills take time, and right now, we do not have time for more practice,” he said, relying on her older sister to do the work, which was a problem. 

He’d anticipated both girls breaking free fairly easily, but with Ara having to sever both of their chains and then handle the door, she was practically used up by the time she succeeded in lifting the bar, and Simon had to give her the words of lesser healing just to fix her throat. 

“Can you see the auras around people?” Simon asked her as she took a moment to rest and recover. It was only a suspicion, and truthfully, he should have waited until later to ask the question, but there might not be a later. 

“I—” she said, catching herself as she gave him a look of surprise that told him all he needed to know. “Mother said to ignore them and never mention them to anyone.”

Simon nodded and dropped the subject, wondering whether that was enough to explain the difference between the two girls’ levels of ability. She wasn’t ready for this, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t either. When they finally opened the door, he could barely stagger through it. He wasn’t a person or a warrior, he was a dried-up, desiccated corpse that had a bit more control over itself than a zombie. 

Than a zombie, huh? He wondered as his mind flashed over the differences in the two terrible forms of undeath as a spectrum more than anything else.

He dismissed it, though. As interesting as it was, he couldn’t afford to let himself get distracted by that any more than he could by the neatly sliced piece of wood that had barred his door until recently. It was even protruding from the bracket at the right angle. If he fell just right, he could end his life like that. 

Then the girls wouldn’t get away, though, he reminded himself. First, they would get free, then the sun would get him, and everything would be fine. 

They moved through the darkness quickly and quietly, determined to escape without raising an alarm or doing more fighting than they had to. That was a fine plan until they found the first guard, or more accurately, he found them. When that happened, everyone froze, uncertain of what to do. That was the moment that Ara should have taken off the man’s head with a word of force, but she didn’t. She didn’t have that killing instinct. 

Instead, Simon shuddered to life, moving forward in an attempt to disarm the guard as he drew his short sword. It wasn’t Simon’s preferred weapon, but it made more sense for the tight corridors of this area. That was doubly true when the man impaled Simon on it without too much difficulty. 

He gasped in pain as the blade went right through where his liver and stomach were. It would be a mortal wound for anyone else, but he’d probably be fine in a few minutes. Still, he resisted the urge to scream, and instead, he rasped, “Ara! Finish him.”

One look at the girl told him that she couldn’t, though. She didn’t have a killing blow in her body and stepped back as she mouthed, “I’m sorry.”

Simon was at a loss for what to do then, so he gave in to his darker impulses. He had no choice. Rather than let this asshole push him to the ground and go after the girls or raise the alarm, Simon finally barred his fangs and embedded them into the neck of the man. 

He told himself it was to save the girls or that it was to stifle his scream. Simon told himself a lot at that moment, but he knew it was a lie. The truth was that he was so hungry that he could no longer stand it. He’d been almost out of resistance before Freya had chained Emma and Ara up in his room, and the last two days, he’d resisted out of spite as much as anything else. He simply could not let her win. 

So he drank deeply and felt a thrill go through him that was more powerful than any he’d known before. Not even drinking the swarm of vampiric locusts was as intoxicating as drinking this man’s lifeblood directly from its source. 

The man struggled for a brief moment, but there was no way he could dislodge Simon. He might be dead weight, but he was firmly attached now, and the man lacked the strength to tear out his own throat to dislodge him. He fell to the ground a few seconds later, but Simon still didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. All excuses were gone now. He needed this, and when he finally drank the guard dry and looked up at the girls, it was all he could do not to pounce on them as well. 

“I—” he gasped. “Help me take off his armor. I… We’re going to see if we can’t bluff our way through this.”

Simon was having a lot of trouble holding himself together at that moment. The power of a human life was flowing through him, and for the first moment since Freya had turned him, he felt himself coming alive. His internal organs were expanding, his muscles were swelling, and though he would never again be able to use a mirror to look at his face in the mirror, he was sure he looked only half as haggard as he had moments ago. 

Part of him hated that he’d done it at all, but the rest of him knew it was the only way. He reminded himself of that several times as he donned the dead man’s armor. Then, as he escorted the girls at sword point up and out of the dungeon, he reminded them. “You have magic. Don’t be afraid to use it at the critical moment. It could mean the difference between life and death!”

“One of us has magic,” Emma sighed as they headed up the stairs, but Simon ignored her. 

“A spark of fire or a gust of wind can make all the difference in a fight if used at the right moment,” Simon reiterated. “I’ll do what I can, but we’re running out of time, and if Freya finds us…”

He let that last part linger, as much because there were men nearby when they reached the courtyard as because he couldn’t bear to finish it. If Freya finds us, she could make me turn on you, he thought. It was a dark thought but a likely outcome. She’d let Simon resist for so long only because it was enjoyable for her to drag this out, but with a glance and a few words, she could leave him utterly unable to disobey her. He knew that, and he hated it. 

Still, his disguise worked, and they reached the gate almost without incident. It was there he saw that they still hadn’t repaired the portcullis, which made sense. Even for a good blacksmith, that would be a hell of a job. For now, they just had a few boards nailed across the gap, and with the inhuman strength flowing through him, Simon was sure that he could make short work of those. 

When they reached the gate, though, all of that changed. The guard on duty chuckled and asked, “Where are you taking these beauties off to? Ain't they supposed to be vampire food or something?”

“The Mistress changed her mind,” Simon said, gesturing at the girls as he cringed at how rough his voice still sounded. “He turned his nose up at this feast if you can believe it. She decided to lock him in a coffin for a century and see how he enjoyed starving instead.” 

The guard laughed at that and said, “Well, if they want to come work as maids in her ladyship's service, I’m sure they’ll be very popular with the boys. They…”

His words trailed off as Simon got close enough for the man to get a good look at his face. He wasn’t sure what tipped the man off, but something in his face made the guard shrink back in horror, and he started drawing his sword as he opened his mouth to shout an alarm.

Simon was faster, though. This time, instead of drinking the man’s blood, which he sorely wanted to do, he whipped his short sword out with shocking speed and embedded it in the other man’s throat, leaving it there as he took the guard’s longsword. 

The attack was so sudden and so quiet that no one noticed, but they would soon. He was sure of it. Simon dragged the guard into the gate house’s shadow and then turned to the girls and said, “When I rip the boards off, you walk away like you don’t have a care in the world. Don’t start running until you hear a commotion. I don’t want anyone on watch to think you’re the reason to sound the alarm. I only want them looking at me.”

“But what about—” Ara started to ask. 

“Forget about me,” Simon repeated as he started pulling the boards free. “I’ll be okay, but this is your only chance.”

They wanted to linger and talk, but Simon practically shoved them out the gate. His skin was starting to itch. Dawn was coming, and they had to get away from what was going to happen next. 

You don’t need to fight, his mind told him. You need to die and get the fuck out of here. Simon couldn’t argue with that. 

No matter how much he wanted to take vengeance on Freya, he knew that he shouldn't. She was far more powerful than he was, and via their bond of blood, he felt some perverse sort of loyalty to her. He needed to be ready, though. The alarm would sound, the men would search, and he needed to be that distraction, at least until the last moment. If he was wrong, and they escaped clean, then he could greet the sunrise and be swept away by it. It would be a fitting way to purge his stained soul. 

Simon ignored that cowardly urge to suicide and ran up the stairs to the catwalk, taking them two at a time. Then, he walked to the closest guard he could find up there and devoured him, taking the man completely by surprise, too. Simon didn’t feel as bad about this one. He told himself he needed to be stronger for the fight to come.

That was true, but it was also true that the sensation of devouring his enemy's blood was the single most intoxicating moment of his life, and he craved to do it again like a junkie. This time, the moment wasn’t as intense. He allowed it to linger. He indulged in the darkness of his new nature, practically savoring the terrible moment. He knew that he shouldn't. It would make trying to kick this habit that much harder in the future, but he couldn't help it. It was only when the heart had stopped, and the taste had turned bitter, that Simon stopped and picked up the man's shield.

“Let’s do this,” he told himself. He was overflowing with strength now and as ready as he’d ever be for what was going to happen next. 

Ch. 223 - Only a Distraction

Simon lurked and waited as the minutes passed, resisting the urge to kill and devour more men just because he could. Instead, he only eliminated one more man, and that was only because he’d been walking too close to the alarm bell for Simon’s liking. Then, after he’d hidden the body, he broke the man’s spear in half to create an appropriate wooden stake with the haft and positioned himself on the tower nearest the stables that gave him the best view of the girl’s retreat. 

They did not run, just as they’d promised him, which must have been hard, given what an awful place Castle Gravenstone was. They went down the long hill slowly, making good time. It was only when the horizon started to glow blue that the alarm went up from an unexpected quarter when they were almost out of sight that Simon finally had to act. 

Simon turned to the shouting and noted it was coming from a guard who had just come up from the basement. “The bloodsucker’s escaped!” he shouted. 

Simon sighed. He’d been so sure that no one would check on him that he hadn’t tidied things up more. If they’d just dumped the corpse of the first guard into the cell and shut it tightly, it might not have been noticed until Freya visited him tomorrow. Still, he forgave himself. It was all he could do not to devour the girls in that moment. He’d hardly been in the right state of mind for thinking ahead. 

Word spread quickly, and Simon was sure it would attract Freya’s notice soon. That left him with a hard choice. Should he kill himself now or try to buy them more time. He looked to the sky, even though his every impulse said that he should not, and noted that they had less than a half hour until the sun finally rose. They might only have twenty minutes, but that was still enough time for Freya to soar through the sky and rip those girls’ heads off. 

So, Simon decided to sew a bit more chaos. He walked around the battlement like any other guard, appearing to search for the escapee, but each time he passed a building with a thatched roof or, in the stable’s case, an exposed haystack, he whispered the word of lesser lesser fire. 

Each spell, as weak as it was, was a real exertion. When he’d been alive, he barely felt a lesser word, but as he was right now, a lesser lesser word felt almost as hard on his body as a greater word usually did. He thought that he might be able to cast a lesser word while his body was saturated in power. A true word of power might even be an option, but it would take all he had to do it. Greater words were definitely off the table.

For now, he didn’t do either. He just lit fires and watched the light blossom ever faster as the castle came alive in the worst way possible. When every building on this side of the compound was on fire, he decided that was enough. He looked to the horizon where he’d last seen the girls one last time. He couldn’t see them now. He could only see the sunlight building there. 

The light of false dawn terrified him. It made him want to flee, and even though he knew that the light would be strong enough to take him in seconds or minutes, he decided that wasn’t enough. So, with his eyes on the horizon, he raised his stake with both hands to end his cursed life. 

Simon had felt the thing pierce his skin and brush against the bone, but fractions of seconds before it penetrated his heart and reduced him to dust, Freya arrived. She ripped it out of his hand, and with a single gesture, she tossed him off the catwalk, and sent him tumbling twenty feet to the cobblestone courtyard below. 

Before he’d even risen, she was already there again, kicking him hard enough to break ribs without every blow while he tried in vain to defend himself.  “What is your problem!” she raged. “I give you a lovely feast, and you thank me by letting them escape? I build a lovely home, and you try to burn it down? Unforgivable! I was in the midst of a perfectly nice orgy, and then you do this to me? I will make you rue this day for the rest of eternity!”

Simon lashed out at her with his fists, trying to carve out some breathing room, but it was hopeless. She was a blur, and the only reason he wasn’t dead already was because he wouldn’t stop healing. It was only after she collapsed his eye socket for the second time that he realized she was practically naked and dressed only in the most indecent of robes. 

Once upon a time, he would have given anything to see Freya like this again. Now, it only made him sick. She’s not your Freya, his brain reminded him for the thousandth time. This time, though, he agreed totally. He’d kill her if he could, but he was entirely outmatched. 

When she was done kicking the shit out of him because it was almost sunrise, she personally dragged him down into his crypt and left him there bleeding. Simon spent the day lying there in torpor. Occasionally, thoughts about what she might do to punish him bubbled to the surface, but he dismissed them as much as he was able. 

She’ll do what she’s going to do, he told himself. She needs to make me suffer, and I need to escape, one way or another. 

It was that stoic attitude that let him endure what happened the next day when he woke to find himself in chains with little more than a shrug. He couldn’t sit up, but he could see that there were several people already hard at work bringing bricks into the room. Between that and the sound of cement, he figured she was going to go full… well, full whatever that revenge story he’d had to read in English class a million years ago about the dude that bricks up his enemy in the wall of his wine cellar.  

“Comfortable?” she asked sarcastically when Freya finally showed up. “You’d better get cozy because I’m not reopening this thing for decades.”

Simon didn’t answer. He continued to stare at the ceiling and wait for whatever was going to happen.

“I know you think you’re some big hero,” she told him. “You saved me, and now you saved those girls, but you know what I’m going to do? Tonight, I’m going to go find them, and make sure they think they got away. I’m going to let them live nice, happy lives. Hopefully, they’ll have nice big families, too, because one day, when you’ve completely lost your mind, I’m going to dig you out of this hole and let you spend the whole night devouring their grandchildren. Won’t that be fun?”

“I would never,” Simon spat, hoping it was true. 

“We’ll see,” she smiled wickedly. “Decades of starvation and isolation can take a terrible toll…” Simon knew that to be true, but he vowed to ignore it anyway. 

“No?” Freya pretend to pout. “No last words?”

“Rot. In. Hell.” Simon said coolly. He didn’t do it because he thought she needed to hear it, though. He only spoke because he was certain she’d drag out the moment until she got some sort of reaction out of him. 

He was right, too. As soon as he finally gave in to her needling, she smiled and slammed the lid on him, letting him breathe a sigh of relief. 

“Oh, I almost forgot,” she said, “We need to hammer this thing shut… Where are the… Oh, right here…”

Simon screamed when the first blade plunged through the lid and his chest, but only from the first one. All in all, she pierced his body in half a dozen different places, but none of the others got as much as a whimper out of him. 

“Sorry,” she taunted. “We didn’t have any nails long enough, so I thought I’d use the blades of my men you murdered. Have fun with that!”

Freya didn’t speak again after that, though Simon could feel her presence lingering. She might want him to think that she was gone, but she was still watching him suffer as he heard the bricks and mortar still piling up around him. 

The workman chatted some, but between his occasional grunts of pain and the supervision by their particularly scary boss, it was a quiet affair that was dominated by row after row of masonry going up around him. That wasn’t good, but truthfully, if he’d just been lying here, it would have been bearable. It was the sword in his fucking liver that made this truly awful, but for the moment, he did his best to ignore it, as well as the cold and the pain that radiated off of it. If there was anything to be done about it, that would have to be after they’d finished entombing him. 

Simon suffered for the rest of the night and most of the one that followed. It was only after the last of the bricks had been piled on, and they started work on bricking up the door, that he even tried to move. The first thing he tried to do was to see if he could work any of the wood slats free, to see if he might be able to break a wooden stake off of this and end himself. 

That proved impossible, which was a shame because Simon would have loved nothing more than to open this tomb in fifty years, only to find out that he’d long since turned to dust. Still, death was by far the preferred outcome, so he kept trying, and it was only after several days that he resigned himself to his prison and set about trying to make it more comfortable. 

One of the blades was short enough that he was able to push it back out of the coffin lid into whatever cavity lay beyond it. Three more, he was able to yank his limb through the blade and then allow it to heal up behind it. 

Only the two in his chest were intractable. They stubbornly refused to budge, and he no longer had enough strength to cast a word of force necessary to sheer either of them off. It was an awful predicament, but eventually, he made it better by doing the opposite of what he’d done with most of the rest of the blades. This time, instead of trying to shift far enough to cut his way out, he shifted his spine toward the blade embedded near his heart, severing the spinal cord and any sensation below his chest. 

That was enough to finally rest a little easier. Spending eternity with a sword in his chest wasn’t exactly his idea of a good time, but it beat being a pincushion. Now, he could focus on it. He could endure it. 

Will she really wait decades for her revenge on those girls, Simon wondered as his mind started to come to grips with the terrible situation he was in. What if this is all just another twisted game, and she wakes me up in a week or a month. 

Then you count yourself lucky as hell and impale yourself on the nearest fence post, he told himself. 

He could worry about all of that later. For now, he had to worry about keeping his sanity in all the years that lay between here and there. It was a long, terrible road made worse by the blade that jabbed into his spine, but he’d endured it before, and he would do so again if he had to.  

Ch. 224 - A Painful Eternity

Even with all Simon did in those first few days to make himself more comfortable, he was still in agony. That didn’t change as the life force he’d drained from those three unsuspecting guards slowly leaked out of his open wounds, leaving him with hunger and pain as his only true companions. 

In his tomb, it was so quiet that he could hear every small move that he made but nothing else. The world might as well no longer exist, and Simon tried to make peace with that. For a time, he even tried to use this time productively and think about some of the lingering questions he had in regard to magic. After a lifetime of painting, he had a very vivid imagination and didn’t need paper to draw. He could trace the runes in his mind without much effort. 

This effort didn’t last for as long as he would like, though, and neither did his attempt to count the days. Even buried in stone, he could still feel the oppressive weight of the sun as it crushed him into torpor, and even with the pain of the hunger, he was still able to think clearly for a while, but in time, he weakened, and the last day he bothered to count was day 167. It hadn’t even been half a year, but already, it was starting to feel like an eternity. 

If I stop counting, then it won't seem as long, he told himself. 

A watched pot never boils and all that, that was a lie, though. The truth was that he was losing heart. That number had been the cornerstone that gave structure to his tiny little world. Once he took that away, it started to fall apart within a few days or a few lifetimes. It was hard to be sure of which. 

He didn’t quite regret saving Emma and Ara, but after a while, his most common thought was that he shouldn’t have sacrificed so much time to ensure their safety. I got them out of the castle! He raged at himself. That should have been enough, right there! I should have killed myself the moment I’d given them a fighting chance!

Regret was a toxic thing in an infinity of hunger and pain. He tried to find some way to be zen about it, but it wouldn’t come. He’d been able to endure a lot of hardships that way. When he cut out every last sprout of the demon seed in a version of Ionar that never existed, he’d watched the waves every night until sleep took him and reminded himself that his efforts mattered little more than those waves but that he couldn’t do anything else. 

Now, he didn’t even have the peace of the sea. He only had a gnawing hunger for flesh and blood that was rivaling the senseless need he’d had back when he was a zombie, along with the terrible pain of a sword jabbed into one of his cervical vertebrae. 

He played with that, sometimes, because it was the only means of entertainment he had left to him. It was the only sensation in the world besides his hunger and the smooth feeling of wood that was his prison. 

If he moved a little to the left, eventually, his spine would heal enough to reveal the painful wound of the other sword still embedded in his chest. It also revealed that he had toes, and if he tried, he could even wiggle them. If he moved to the right again, he severed his spinal cord once more, and all of that vanished, leaving him with only a single painful wound to focus on. 

Eventually, all of that became too much trouble. For a while, a year or two at least, he hoped that water damage would rot and warp the wood and let his feeble finger reach up and pull a piece of plank free to end himself. Surely that would be enough, he thought. Even rotted wood would penetrate my parchment skin. 

It never happened, though, and eventually, he grew tired of checking. Not long after that, in the grand scheme of things, he couldn’t check at all. He no longer had the strength to lift so much as a finger. He couldn’t even blink anymore. All he could do was lay there and wait to die. 

When this started, Simon had earnestly believed that it wouldn’t have been as bad as his time as the statue, but he’d been wrong. There, he’d experienced no pain or hunger. He’d just laid there, immune to the ravages of time as the sun rose and set. He would give a great deal for a single sunrise now, and not just because it would scourge him from the world and let him start over properly. 

He just wanted some stimulus that wasn’t horrible. A flower, a view of the stars, or really, anything at all would do. He would settle for the smell of a home-cooked meal or the feeling of a soft bed. His ability to think abstractly was starting to break down under the weight of years. 

His negative emotions were growing ever more powerful in comparison to the thinking, rational part of his mind. Eventually, all he could hold on to was Freya’s promise that she would release him. She meant that as a form of torture, but he really longed to be free so badly that he would accept any other humiliation or abuse she planned to heap on him in exchange for removing these blades and walking under his own power once more. 

She didn’t come, though. Years passed, and she didn’t come, and slowly, his sanity paid the price for that. She’s never going to come! His mind raged. It was just a trick to give you hope. You’ll be down here forever, now, and not even that bitch of a Goddess will save you. 

Simon had no idea if that was true or not, but then, as the months and years passed, he was having a harder and harder time remembering who he was. Things were getting muddled, and only his happiest memories were enough to penetrate the darkness after a time. 

He thought about Elthna and his son Sayom often. The vampire level was in their future, so she hoped things were going well there. Sayom was probably the King of Ionia now. He probably had a family. At least, Simon hoped he did. 

He promised himself that when this was done, he would go and visit them if he escaped, even if he was a vampire. He wouldn’t let them know he was there, of course. He’d just watch from a distance as Sayom tucked his grandchildren into bed for a night or two before he let the sun scour him from the earth the way that God intended. 

He made up all sorts of stories about where he would go and what he would do when this was done. He knew that the real answer was that he was going to kill himself at the first chance he got and reset his miserable existence, but that was too depressing, so he thought about the other things he could do. He could visit friends and family, or he could use his fantastical vampire powers to kill people he didn’t care for, like the Unspoken. 

Simon spent weeks thinking about the best possible way to take those pricks apart, simply for something to do. He considered every weakness and every avenue of attack. Mostly, he was surprised and a little bit unnerved by how much better his mind seemed to work when he was fantasizing about something dark. He had trouble remembering what Eltha looked like, but when it came to vengeance, things were crystal clear. 

His only lucky break came several years into the whole process when the settling stone finally caused the mortar to crack. It was a tiny thing, but it was enough to return at least one of his senses: smell. In a world defined by pain and hunger, that counted for more than one would have expected. 

Over time, he was eventually able to smell many different things. He even heard a rare sound or two if someone was being tortured, murdered, or whatever it was that was making them scream so. While he still wasn’t depraved enough to take enjoyment in the suffering of others, he did appreciate any sound that reminded him that he still existed. 

Mostly, though, all he smelled in those first few years were damp air, shit, and the occasional whiff of cooking from the kitchen. He had a hard time coming to grips with the fact that in the body of a vampire wracked by years of hunger, the smell of freshly baked bread smelled almost as badly to him as vomit, but it was something, and he would take it. 

Eventually, though, even those things failed to motivate him. As the march of years became the passage of decades, almost everything failed him. He continued to shrivel and atrophy, and thinking became too hard for him to consider. 

His mind only operated sporadically now, and it ran off of feelings and urges instead of anything more abstract. Only his regret and his anger were strong enough to penetrate the thick fog of hunger that he seemed to permanently reside in now. Eventually, he was too far gone for even that. When that happened, he was reduced further to merely a desire to feed, which was only interrupted by the distant rising sun. 

With nothing else left to distract him, though, that hunger was forged into something sharp enough to sniff out a surprising amount of detail from only a few molecules. As the endless, unceasing cycle of the sun hammered against him, eventually, smell, and hunger were all that he had, and Simon used it to ever-increasing effect. He could smell when someone died when someone fed, and most of all, when there was fighting. 

That last one had nothing to do with hearing. He couldn’t hear the sword blows or the screams of the dying, but he could smell the different flavors of blood that had been spilled well enough that he could tell them apart, and though he couldn’t say how any of them had died, he could figure out who had bled the most as their odors made their way down into the dungeon. 

That was likely a process that took days, though, but then, Simon no longer understood time. He was just a hungry animal, trapped in a cage while the sun battered him with fear like a blacksmith’s hammer. 

So, it was with some surprise when he finally heard something again, and though he no longer understood that it was hammers and chisel banging against stones that were setting him free, he knew that sound meant freedom, and even if it was only freedom to suffer in some new terrible way, he welcomed it. He’d suffered enough this way, and anything would be better than continuing to exist like this.

As the wall that imprisoned him was chipped away, one thing mattered to him even more than the prospect of impending freedom, and that was the rising smell of blood. A lot of people had been wounded or killed recently, and he wanted to devour them all.