Death After Death PLUS 235-237

Ch. 235 - A Demon in the Dark (Part 3)

This time, Simon’s instincts had been exactly right. He had no idea what this asshole was doing, but he was very clearly some kind of hydra, and every time Simon cut off one of his heads, another took its place. Or maybe each time he dies, there are two more, he thought, unsure of what it was he was facing. 

It didn’t really matter. If killing the demon didn’t stick, then he was going to have to go with plan B. By the time Simon reached the torso, it was in the midst of growing another arm and a comically tiny head, whereas the arm had barely started to grow a shoulder and a sternum. 

The larger head did not yet have a mouth to speak and it would take another five or ten minutes for the smaller one to start on a second limb, but even so the way this thing continued to multiply was terrifying. He considered using a word of transfer just to drain some of this thing’s excess energy but decided against it. That was both because he didn’t want any part of hell inside of him and because he wasn’t even fully healed. 

As well-fed as Simon was, thanks to the nearly eliminated beast men tribes that once ran rampant in these foothills, words of power took a lot out of him as a vampire. The last thing he needed right now was to have to pause to catch his breath.

He was holding the midget demon by the throat so it couldn’t cast any spells even if it revived, but as it reached the headless torso, the thing made a glowing sign in the air with its fingertips, and Simon was struck with shards of solidified air. It did very little damage compared to the black lightning, but it annoyed him deeply. 

“What in the fuck is that?” he growled as he reached forward and broke all the fingers in the thing’s hand with a single squeeze. 

He had no more time to waste now. He picked up all three of the growing demon pieces and then ran toward the closest boulder he’d undermined earlier, a couple of hundred yards to the west. It didn’t take much to get it moving. He basically just body-slammed it to start the slow roll. After that, he was racing in front of the thing. 

He wasn’t taking any chances. He was holding this prick down until they were all entombed under a hundred tons of granite. 

Simon ran like his life depended on it, even though it really didn’t. His life depended on killing this asshole hard enough for him to stay dead before dawn, and he had hours to make that happen. If boulders wouldn’t do the trick, then he’d settle for just burying the demon alive forever. 

“You think this will be enough to defeat Vargarzeleth? I am a demon prince! I am legion!” a tiny voice asked, surprising him. “If these three bodies are not enough to carry your bleeding corpse back into hell, the ten thousand copies of myself that await my return will join in the fight to end you! I have been promised 600 souls to slay you, and I will not lose them.”

Simon had no time to stop, and his hands were too full of body parts to shift around and deal with the tiny head which had apparently grown just large enough to form a small mouth. All he could do was hope that whatever spells it cast in the next few seconds weren’t bad enough to knock him off his feet. 

Even then, we’re all probably still going over, he thought as he considered the demon’s words. 

As fast as he was, the wave of stones and dust almost passed Simon as he made his way over the cliff. With an extra surge of speed, he managed to leap a hundred and fifty feet off the sheer cliff, with a waterfall of death in pursuit. He never hit the ground, though. Instead, halfway down, he released his burden as he turned first into a flock of crows to gain distance and then into a mist to avoid the fatal wave of scree and stones that shot out in all directions even as the boulders rained down without end onto the pile of courses far below. 

Though the demon’s comically high-pitched voice had robbed his words of any malice they might have had, they were enough to remind Simon of one crucial fact. The demon was not his own weak point. Those were the portal through which he came, the circle through which he’d entered the world, and the bargain that he’d struck with the warlocks in the camp. 

Right now, with his opponent out of action for somewhere between a few minutes and forever, Simon had an opportunity to attack any or all of those, and that was exactly what he did. When the rocks stopped raining so hard that they would have knocked him out of the sky, he coalesced intoflock of two dozen crows once more and wheeled once in the sky to regroup before he headed to the heart of the Murian army’s camp. 

Nothing had changed there, save that everyone was looking toward the mountain in an effort to understand the fight that was taking place. While Simon could see that no one felt precisely safe, they certainly didn’t think they were in any danger personally, and even as he soared above the camp, studying the people as well as the binding circle with fifty eyes, he decided he would prove them wrong in less than a minute. 

Before Simon’s time in the Unspoken’s black library, he’d known only a little about the nature of demon summoning. Now he was somewhat of an expert, even if he never planned to use it. When Simon had taken apart his first portal it had been with the care of a bomb squad veteran. That had been based purely on a normal, healthy fear of what would happen if the situation spun out of control. 

Now he knew what happened if things went out of control, and they were ugly. The Librium Malifica had provided two accounts on the subject, but they weren’t the only ones that Simon had read. In one, an apprentice had tripped, smearing the blinding circle's chalk. The poor man had been torn in half by the spatial shifts, but the thing had expanded out until it swallowed the mage's whole tower before vanishing. 

In another similar tale, an overeager witch hunter had killed a warlock and sought to end his vile experiments. He’d sundered a well-made circle that had been composed of wound copper wire around a set of stakes. The result had been catastrophic. Rather than banish the thing, it had expanded for hours, and the demons that swarmed out of it devoured the village and most of the countryside before it ran its course. 

As Simon dove for the warlock’s camp and reformed into his hulking, monstrous form, he was hoping for the latter, but he would accept the former. Neither of those mattered as he landed on the closet warlock, crushing him beneath his bulk. He even exploded in a burst of flame afterward, though, Simon shrugged it off. 

The man died messily, but the half dozen other mages that saw Simon do it were shocked into silence for only a moment by his sudden appearance. After that, they unleashed hell on him, bombarding him with a dozen flavors of pain. Unfortunately for them, none of them were wood, so he kept right on moving.  

Simon went on a rampage then, and no matter how many words of fire and ruin rained down on him, it didn’t slow down his killing spree. He could feel the blows slowly leeching his vitality, of course, but compared to that awful black lightning, it was nothing. 

The first man he killed was the luckiest of all of them. He’d merely been murdered. The rest Simon didn’t even bother to kill before he tossed them at the glowing portal to hell that pulsed in the middle of the clearing. It was surrounded by the corpses of the men and women who had already been sacrificed to the dark powers that were called forth, but Simon ignored those for now. He was only concerned with killing the people who were trying to kill him and breaking their circle.

The first two men he tossed at it fell well within its bounds and vanished in the flames without disturbing anything. The third man landed half in, half out of the circle, and even as he tried to crawl away, he was yanked inside by shadowy figures while he screamed for help. There was no one to help, though, not after he smeared three or four runes into oblivion. After that, the whole thing started to unravel in an undulating curtain of fire and spatial distortions that looked like a heat shimmer on steroids. 

Simon backed away immediately, even as he’d been about to slaughter another warlock. He was unwilling to take the chance, even for a second. Instead, he leaped back and burst into a flock of crows to escape. Despite how quickly he reacted, the advancing flames moved like a wildfire. He only just managed to stay ahead of it by a few seconds, and was sure that a few tail feathers had been scorched. 

He didn’t need to risk it all for a chance to be sucked into hell, there were other fights to be had elsewhere in the camp. He was entirely unwilling to trade his pseudo-immortality for an endless torment, and if he knew Helades at all, there would be no coming back from those infernal depths. 

Maybe I’ll even allow myself to feed on the blood of men tonight, he thought wistfully. It had been nearly a year, after all, and his strength was flagging, even as hell literally broke loose. Surely, he owed himself that much. 

Simon pondered that slippery slope as he landed far from the action amidst a crowd of soldiers who were woefully unprepared for him. One second, they were gossiping about how the warlocks were going to summon another demon as the flames grew and the screams spread. “It will be even stronger than the last one was,” one man insisted moments before Simon charged from the shadows and ripped his head off. 

They thought the light meant reinforcements, but really, it was just the opposite. In a few minutes, Simon wouldn’t be the only predator amongst the woefully unprepared sheep. As far as anyone here was concerned, this was the end of the world, they didn’t know it yet. 

They reacted just as every group of soldiers he’d killed before. Some ran like cowards, some fought to the last. A few of those even managed to hurt Simon. No matter how many blades ran him through, and no matter how many slashes tried to disembowel him before the wound vanished. 

It was a pitched battle, though, and though the smart ones ran from him, others, running from the flames blundered right into him. It was a tide of humanity, and Simon was soaked in the scents of blood and death as he murdered and maimed. They maimed him too, of course. With so many people stabbing at him, remaining uninjured was impossible. 

He’d thought himself safe from the green Murani soldiers and their ineffectual weapons he’d been rampaging through. He never died, though, not until a boy with a broken spear had made a futile last stand and managed to slide that jagged piece of wood between two of his ribs and right through his cold, dead heart. 

The young man with a broken spear ran him through in what should have been a futile but valiant attempt to avenge a fallen comrade. That was the end of Simon, for this life at least. 

A hundred spears with steel heads did nothing, but a single broken one, and that’s the end of the run, he thought wryly as he felt himself starting to come undone. 

To say the moment surprised him was an understatement. It was his own fault. He’d been distracted by rumbling from the hillside as the demon he’d done battle with a few minutes earlier was rising out of the rubble as some kind of malformed giant. Simon had hoped to cut him off from the powers of hell, but until the gate extinguished itself, that didn’t seem likely. 

Simon stopped then as the mortal blow rebounded through him. It hurt. It hurt more than any of the other wounds he’d shrugged off this evening, but even as it did, he could feel the rest of his body going numb, and he could see the dull grey-green flesh of his hands already crumbling as it flaked away to ash. 

What shitty timing, he thought as his eyes flicked from the pillar of fire to the shadow of the giant and back again. There was so much more he could learn tonight. 

Then, there was Ionia to consider. Even without him, though, this screw-up was probably enough to set the invaders back for a long, long time, as long as the demonic activity didn’t reach the fortress itself, but he didn’t think that likely. 

In those critical few seconds, Simon let the moment that he could have taken his revenge come and go. He thought about it, but decided to let the boy who’d killed a monster live. That was just what he was supposed to do. Really, on any other night, Simon would have been nothing but grateful as he fell to pieces. The sight was fading from his eyes, and his legs were burning away so quickly in an ugly green fire that he was already toppling toward the young man. 

The boy was scrambling backward but he had nothing to fear. Simon would dissolve into dust and ashes long before he crushed his killer beneath his monstrous form. 

Ch. 236 - An End to Suffering

Even as Simon slipped away into the darkness and the burning wound in his heart slowly extinguished, he worried that something terrible would happen to him. What if the demons find a way to steal my soul? He wondered. That was his last conscious thought before the darkness took him. 

When he woke up in his own bed, he felt like that dark moment of oblivion between lives had taken longer than usual, and as he studied the knots on the wooden beams over his head, he worried about that. Was it just in my head, or was it like those deaths with the skeleton knight? He asked himself.

Simon wasn’t sure, but rather than worry about it, he sat up. There was something more important he needed to test. He reached for the sour red wine he’d long since grown used to and took a sip. This wasn’t to get drunk, though he suspected he could if he wanted to. It was to remind himself of what sustenance tasted like when it was something other than blood. 

While it wasn’t like ambrosia or anything, he was pleased to find that neither his body nor his corrupted palette was repulsed by it. He tried a bit of bread next, with slightly better results. 

“Thank fucking god,” he said to himself as he appreciated that moment. 

He didn’t linger. Instead, he stood to test the sun next. That caused more hesitation than Simon would have liked. He opened the door, but he paused at the threshold, and he had to practically force himself to step outside into the light. 

“Six or seven decades without the sun,” he said to himself as he stood there, feeling that unfamiliar warmth on his skin. 

While the taste of food had underwhelmed him after so long, this was more intense than he’d expected. He’d spent the best part of a century being afraid of the sunlight. Now it felt almost taboo to be standing here like this, but it thrilled him so much that he didn’t even mind that, at least for the moment, he was doing it as a fat piece of shit. 

He stood there for several minutes. Then he walked to the stream for a drink of cold, clear water, and appreciated the fact that he had a reflection once more. It was only when he started to sweat that he finally went back inside, mumbling the words of lesser flesh shaping that would allow him to shed two dozen pounds over the next ten minutes. He’d evaluate again after that. 

For now, now that he’d made sure he was really living once more, there were things he needed to do and record while they were still fresh. “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the most useless of them all?” he asked as he walked back into his cabin. 

‘I do not know,’ the mirror responded dryly.

“You!” Simon said. “Tell me, do you even know where I’ve been the last few decades?”

‘I was unable to locate you,’ the mirror wrote. ‘Though I did attempt to find you on many occasions when I heard your voice.’

“Well, it’s nice to be wanted, at least,” Simon said, letting go of the issue. He’d called out to the mirror in an attempt to activate it lots of times, but it wasn’t the mirror’s fault he didn’t have a reflection when he did it. “For now, why don’t you make it up to me by helping me take some notes.”

‘I will document whatever you require,’ the mirror agreed. 

Simon spent the rest of the day and part of the following morning telling it what he’d done and making notes about his theories related to hell and the widening Murani war. Once, after dinner, he used another word of flesh shaping to make more of his excess fat melt away, but he remembered his experiments with harvesting the goblin’s strength in his last life and felt no need to rush things. He was fairly certain that that experiment, combined with the half healed injures he’d had when he’d been turned and his questionable diet, was what had made him so freakish in his last life. 

It was a good theory, but he’d never know for sure. Finding out would require ghastly experiments that he wasn’t willing to conduct to confirm. 

Throughout this effort, there were a dozen times he was tempted to take a break and ask the mirror to show him his progress, but he resisted. It was only when he couldn’t think of anything else to add, and he’d reread all of his notes on summoning circles that he finally said, “Alright, mirror, show me my character sheet.”

The mirror complied instantly, and all the familiar words reappeared once more. 

‘Name: Simon Jackoby

Level: 33

Deaths: 44

Experience Points: -312,664

Skills: Agriculture [Poor], Archery [Below Average], Armor (light) [Below Average], Armor (heavy) [Poor], Armor (medium) [Below Average], Art [Above Average], Athletics [Below Average], Baking [Poor], Cooking [Poor], Craft [Excellent], Deception [Average], Escape [Poor], Fishing [Below Average], Healing [Above Average], History [Above Average], investigate [Excellent], Maces [Average], Navigation [Above Average], Research [Excellent], Ride [Below Average], Search [Above Average], Sneak [Above Average], Spears [Below Average], Spell Casting [Excellent], Steal [Poor], Swimming [Below Average], and Swords [Average] Transformation [Average] Warfare [Above Average].

Words of Power: Aufvarum (disperse, minor), Barom (illusion, light), Celdura (plan, shape), Delzam (cure, order), Dnarth (connection, distant, hidden), Gelthic (ice, death, weakness), Gervuul (greater, power), Hyakk (flesh, healing), Karesh (location, protection, understanding), Meiren (creation, fire, life), Oonbetit (focused, force, motion), Uuvellum (anti-, null, boundary), Vosden (earth, growth, metal, strength), Vrazig (lightning, ruin, quickening, wind), Zyvon (transfer, plants, water)’

There wasn’t anything unexpected there, not really. If anything, he’d expected to have more negative experience points than he had. He was at negative 100,000 after a year or so as a zombie and negative a million after a century as a statue. He would have thought that decades bricked into a wall would have earned him nearly as much, but that didn’t seem to be the case. 

“Maybe I’m just getting better at coping,” he said dismissively as he reviewed the details. 

Or maybe I enjoyed all of the killing more than I want to admit, his brain whispered darkly to him. His skills had adjusted quite a bit, and he could see that he was getting pretty bad at baking and cooking, which was about right considering how little contact we’d had with food in the last century or so of experience. 

“Alright, then,” he said after another minute or two of looking. “Show me the levels that are currently accessible.” The mirror complied even before he was finished speaking, bringing up a very short list. 

‘Level 4 - Skeletons in a crypt

Level 34 - ???’

“That’s it?” Simon asked. The mirror didn’t respond to that. 

Even though he’d never found the way out of level 33, and he’d somehow brought a Vampiress into it, it counted as solved now. That was, meant that there was only one level between here and unexplored territory. That felt pretty good. He should have been gearing up to explore it right now. Still, he hesitated. There was one other question that he wanted to ask. 

“Helades, it’s been a while, and I know I haven’t gotten to level 40 or anything yet, but would it be possible to have a moment of your time?” he asked, addressing the mirror. 

There was a short delay, as he presumed the thing had to call her up somehow, then the light drained from the glass, and the glass fell away to find her in the same dark throne room he’d encountered her in so long ago. 

Back then, he’d been kind of a jerk, and she’d given him help appropriate to being a jerk. This time, he wasn’t entirely sure what he was looking for, but after reviewing his decades-long journey as a monster, he felt a little lost, and he needed to recenter himself. 

Like it or not, she really is the center of the universe, he reminded himself as he respectfully approached the throne. She was a capricious entity. She seemed so warm when he’d first killed himself so many deaths ago, and she could be quite understanding when she met him on every tenth floor as she’d promised to do, but both other times he’d tried to contact her like this, she seemed much less approachable. 

“Mr. Jackoby, it’s been an age,” the goddess said almost warmly. “What is it I can do for you?”

“Helades,” he said with a slight bow. “Thank you for agreeing to see me. I know you can’t answer any questions for me—” 

“I cannot,” she agreed, “But I can ask you one. What is it you think you’re accomplishing here? You’ve come so far, but for what purpose?”

“What do you mean?” he asked. “I’m solving levels and saving people as I descend further into the pit.”

“And for a time, you were doing it marvelously,” she agreed with a tight smile, “I mean it. You did better than I ever thought someone like you would. But now you’ve gone a bit off track.”

“What do you mean?” he asked. “I just beat level 33. I’m like a third of the way done.”

“Oh, how I wish that were true,” she answered. “You’re so far off track that the world looks nothing like it should at this point. Your obsession with that woman created a whole dynasty of vampires, you know. I doubt anyone could save that particular version of events now.”

“I’m doing the best I can,” Simon replied, feeling the anger beginning to build inside of him. He was past blaming this Goddess for everything, but it was clear she saw him as nothing more than a pawn and a defective one at that. “As for Freya, all I did was try to keep her from becoming a zombie.”

“No, you’re changing the future, everywhere, and in all things, and that’s not the point.” she sighed. “The Pit is a tightly prescribed set of circumstances that allow one man the opportunity to act at many different points in time to usher in a Golden Age. I’ve told you all this.”

“You didn’t say I’d be running into evil versions of myself from the future,” he said, trying not to sound too exasperated. He still remembered well the time she had shredded him with mirror shards for his insolence and had no wish to repeat the experience. 

“Is that what you think happened?” she asked with a widening smile. “Simon, time travel is difficult, and as far as you should be concerned, it goes in only one direction. Recursive loops are far more than you can handle. They’re almost more than I can handle. Don’t worry about distractions. Worry about the Pit, Simon.”

“Well, you said I’ve already blown it,” Simon shrugged, “But even if I reset all of those levels and do them all again, there’s no rhyme or reason to what I’m supposed to do when I get there.”

“A hero shouldn’t need anyone to hold their hand,” she said in a tone that implied her patience was wearing thin. 

“I agree,” Simon said, “But the hero that should be there in that moment would have a lot more information than I do. They would know who people are and what things are going on.”

“That’s a fair point,” she conceded, surprising him. “But there is a fine line between a Goddess interceding in cases like this and simply solving the problem. I’m afraid the latter is not an option in this case. Some things may happen by the hands of mortals or not at all.”

Simon nodded at that. “I’ve spent the last lifetime as a monster, and I’m just not sure what to do now. I know that I need to return to the barrow mounds and wipe out my mistakes before they metastasize into the future I just saw, but what’s the point? It will undo all the projects I’ve already done.”

“We all undo good work so that we may replace it with better work, Simon,” she answered, softening for a moment. “You are an artist now, or at least you were for a life or two. You should know that almost as well as a goddess.”

“It seems like such a waste, though,” he said regretfully. 

“The you that was went as far as he could,” she answered with a shrug. “The you that is may do even better. If you’re going to change one level to make the future a better place, why stop there?”

Simon opened his mouth to continue his point, but she spoke over him. “Still, if there is nothing more pertinent, then I must ask you to leave. I’m a very busy woman. I’m sure you’ll figure out what comes next, eventually.”

“Of course,” Simon said, biting his tongue. He bowed as he withdrew, but that word, eventually, stuck in his mind like a thorn for hours after he’d walked back into the day-lit world, and his mirror had restored itself. 

Ch. 237 - Turning the Page 

Simon spent the rest of the day contemplating Helades words, but in the end, he decided that he couldn’t wipe the slate clean, at least not intentionally. Asking him to make a decision that would erase so many things he’d already done was hard enough. Asking him to start over completely was too much. 

He knew exactly how he’d stop Freya from becoming a vampire, of course. He could probably even conscience going to the tomb and destroying the Blackheart when he was done. He should have done that a long time ago. 

If I had just learned how to make rune blades on my own, I wouldn’t have been so stuck on the skeleton’s knight’s sword for so long, he reminded himself. And if I hadn’t been sure I needed the blade to defeat whatever was causing the volcano to erupt, then I wouldn’t have to erase decades of history in Ionar. 

He sighed at that, as much because he seemed to be the cause of Ionia’s troubles as because of what his fixation would cost him. Some of his best years would almost certainly be undone when he was finished, but there was nothing he could do about it. 

“I just have to keep improving the painting,” he said, reminding himself of Helades words. 

The more he thought about it, the more he realized he’d been doing all of this wrong. Trying to move ever quicker into the future was like building a tower that grew ever more unstable with each level. He hadn’t known better before, but he should have. Once, he’d had access to more gold than he could use, and now he had to use magic to melt down scraps just to scratch together some starting funds. 

It was just one more avoidable mistake, though, and he wouldn’t obsess over it. He would learn from it. Next time, he’d find someplace to keep such valuable objects so he’d have resources to fall back on from life to life. 

He’d have to, too, if she wasn’t willing to give him any more information on what he was supposed to do. While he felt confident he could solve most levels in a single try now, it was probably naive of him to think that any of them could be solved the way she wanted in half a dozen attempts.

“If she wanted me to be that specific, she should have left better instructions,” he complained with a sigh.

He could only intuit so much if she wasn’t willing to give him more details, but the sheer nature of each level said a lot. Each one had an entrance, an exit, and a fairly obvious problem. Her position was that he was going too far past that problem to solve other things, and that those additional actions had undesirable consequences. 

Simon could see that, but he didn’t really see another way to handle it. Was he just supposed to let all those other people die? Wouldn’t all heroes try to do exactly what he’d done? If he interpreted her words and deeds as strictly as possible, then didn’t that mean on level four, he was only supposed to kill the zombies between the entrance and the exit? That seemed unlikely. 

“Haven’t I already tried that before, though?” he wondered aloud. 

Simon couldn’t remember. He was pretty sure he had. Even in situations where the goal was neatly between points a and b, though, it was hardly clear. The skeleton knight was proof enough of that. Killing it seemed to be the whole point for a long time, and then, suddenly, he’d found the dark heart hiding beneath its breastplate the whole time. 

He made himself a simple dinner and spent a little bit of time thinking about each level and how his interactions with them would ripple out from them depending on what he did. He even brought up the full-level list and tried to recall how each one had affected the levels around it. In the past, he would have disagreed ardently with the Goddess’s advice, but seeing the monster Freya had become made it easy for him to believe he’d done a few things wrong here and there. 

When all of that was said and done, he only had one more question. “What am I going to do once all that’s done?”

The question was simple, but any answer he could think of was hopelessly complex. If he really wanted to understand the effects his actions had or didn’t have, then the right move was probably to find somewhere out of the way and have a nice quiet life before he speed-ran the levels he had a clean solution for and re-solved them. He wasn’t too concerned about that. At this point, most of the levels he’d struggled with for so long were child’s play. The real dilemma was not how to solve future levels but how to spend his future lives. 

Simon fell asleep contemplating all of this and set off immediately the following morning after first light when it was still cool enough that a thin coating of frost still clung to the grass, and he left dark footprints in his wake. His dreams had been dark, dismal things that shed no light on where he’d go once he accomplished his current mission, but he still had lots of time to decide that. 

“Perhaps this is the life I become a baker and learn to make that pizza,” he told himself as he set off toward the mountain that marked the way north. Simon had packed well enough that his bags were heavy, but he wasn’t concerned. Rest breaks were free, and he needed the workout. 

The trip north to Schwarzenbruck took almost three weeks. Along the way, Simon enchanted his dagger with the runes of lesser transfer to deal with the rising carving for life essence that got a little stronger every day, and he added runes of force to his sword to give him a vorpal blade that would give him the edge he’d grown used to in any fight. 

Those weapons might attract the wrong sort of attention, but then, his negative experience was likely to do just the same thing. He couldn’t shed the fog of gray-black smoke that was his aura, but he’d read enough accounts and met enough people that could, that he was sure it was there. He hadn’t even gotten the chance to enjoy his brief time in the positives before Freya ruined that for him. 

Simon didn’t attract any crazies or religious zealots along his way north. The worst that he faced was a group of bandits who attacked him after he had no coins to give them, two nighttime goblin raids, and half a dozen blisters. None of that troubled him too much. While it was not as pleasant to be a mortal once more as he remembered it, there was no way he was ever becoming a vampire again.  

Instead, he tried to take each hardship for what it was and stay positive. The nights his hunts didn’t go so well, leaving him with little to eat? Well, that was just the world trying to help him with his weight loss plan. The bandits that wouldn’t see reason and leave a poor man in peace? They refilled his own empty coin pouch, whether they wanted to or not. And the goblins? Well, they were still little bastards, but when one of them bit him in the arm when he’d over-extended himself, they were a clear sign that he’d lost his edge and had some work to do. 

Really, stranger than the food, or even the sunlight was the use of weapons again. In his last life he’d become almost an animal, and part of him missed tearing his enemies apart with raw, impossible strength. It disgusted him on some level, but then, his weakness now disgusted him too, which meant that he was just going to have to get strong in other ways all over again. 

Though the way north was long and hard, most nights, Simon was just happy he didn’t have to find a coffin or a cave to sleep in every night. Even a night beneath a tree in the rain was infinitely better than a day spent in a freshly cleared goblin den, so it was easy to count his blessings, however small. 

Some villages had bounties on goblins, so he saved the ears to pay for warm meals and soft beds as he hoarded his few coppers and silvers. Eventually, he found his way to Schwarzenbruck and its great black bridge. That wasn’t his goal, of course, but it was his sign that he was almost there. 

Simon only realized as he entered the gates that he’d never been to the place before the zombie plague. He’d been here after it had never happened, but even so, it somehow looked different like this, and he lingered there for the first time in a long time. He even stayed at the inn that was so familiar to him for the night. Freya didn’t work there, but then she was probably about twelve now and a little too young for such places. 

The barkeep was the same, though, and Brenna worked there. She was younger and prettier than he remembered her. She didn’t even seem like the complete bitch she’d become in a few years. In fact, as she served Simon his stew, he was surprised to find that he didn’t even hold a sliver of the grudge he once had toward the woman who had once turned him into a zombie. 

Is that because the world hasn’t yet turned her into an awful bitch, so it’s not this Brenna’s fault, or is that because being a vampire was worse in so many ways? He wondered as he ate his meal. It was a philosophical question that needed no answer, but he spent most of the night pondering it before he set off north toward the barrow mounds in the morning. 

That cursed place was still three full days at a good pace, but he took four because a day of rain slowed him down, and he took shelter in the shade of a large stone plinth rather than get needlessly soaked. Simon had never journeyed through this part of the world while it still lived and breathed, so he was surprised to find that every small farm and hamlet he came across still had people in it. 

The smith he’d used to create his plate mail a few lives ago was even hard at work when Simon walked through his town. That was a moment of real vertigo for him, and for a second, all he could think about was the day he’d seen Freya come down that road with a bite on her arm and the survivors of Kel’s folly in tow.

That will never happen now, though, he told himself, not after this. Any number of other disasters might befall these people, of course. Eventually, armies would march through this spot, and he didn’t imagine that fate would be kind to them, but that was a problem that was decades away. All he could do right now was take zombies off the table.