Death After Death Ch. 112-113 (Patreon)

Ch. 112 - Out of the Frying Pan

Simon had seen a number of different levels on the other side of this portal, but the graveyard concerned him more than the golem or the ghosts. “Well, they’re both ghosts,” he said to himself, clarifying. 

“Who are,” the devil asked, looking up from his writing to study Simon. 

Simon ignored that, though, and continued to think about the whole thing. They were both ghosts, but they behaved very differently. Did that mean that they were the same kind of ghost? Were there even different kinds of ghosts. He’d heard of poltergeists, of course. He’d even seen one of the movies a long time ago, but he wasn’t much of a horror fan. 

Right now, though, he kind of wished he was. He was certain that would have been helpful for some of the weirder levels like this one. He didn’t know what the mist creature was or if it had weaknesses beyond light and fire. He just knew that if he used magic to create those, it would backfire.  

“But how am I going to create light or fire without…oh.” As Simon thought that through, he realized he was being an idiot. There were lots of ways to create fire that didn’t involve having to use a spell, and he grew annoyed at his ever-increasing dependency on a handful of magic words. 

There’s at least one level where that’s not happening, and probably more beyond that, so I need to learn to do without, he thought to himself as he looked at the wooden furniture in the room. 

Sadly, he’d lost his axe somewhere along the way, he realized as he went to retrieve it. That had almost certainly been the sewer, but there was nothing he could do about it now, so he unsheathed his sword instead. 

“Oh, are you finally ready to fight?” the devil asked, unsheathing a scintillating rapier. “Name your stakes, and we’ll go a round or two.”

Simon looked at the preening fob and rolled his eyes before he started hacking up the nearest pew with his sword. He didn’t need magic fireballs; he just needed a source of firewood, and sacrilegious or not, this would do just fine. 

He spent the next twenty minutes breaking chairs and benches and then very carefully carrying them over to the edge of the portal and dumping them through the other side. One his second trip he even heard it sound midnight, which seemed strange, because it had done so right after he’d entered last time. Still even though he waited for it, the mist did not appear. 

“Huh,” he said to himself as he stepped over the shattered floor to get another load of broken furniture. “I guess there’s more to it than that.”

“You’re not the first person to say that,” the devil agreed. “Not that your dreary little graveyard is a place I’ve seen often, mind you.”

“Oh?” Simon asked, finally responding to the thing. “I suppose this is where you offer to tell me how to defeat this level for a price?”

The devil laughed at that for several seconds before finally sheathing his sword. “Why would I think you need any help with this one. The few of you that have gotten so far tend to make short work of it.”

“Is that so,” Simon asked as he picked up more wood and started walking back to the portal. Sure, this thing was trying to make him overconfident or distract him. It wouldn’t work, though, and he focused on his feet as he went. 

“What? It’s true,” the devil insisted. “I’ve talked to other heroes in other pits about some of the levels that frustrated them to no end, and ghosts made the list, of course, along with castles, dragons, armies, and mazes, but these spirits… well, I’ve said enough already.”

Simon looked at the devil, trying to figure out what his game was. It was there he made an almost fatal mistake. As he turned, a broken chair leg fell from the pile he was carrying and clattered to the stone floor. That by itself wouldn't have been a problem, but when it bounced off of one of the chalk outlines, the thing snapped like it was a physical thing under tension. 

“Oh, look what you’ve done now,” the devil said with a smile as the circle began to uncoil and unravel like a spring under tension. “I think we’d best agree to terms in the next few seconds before…”

Simon ignored the voice and charged toward the portal even as the demon paced at the edge of his collapsing cell like a hungry tiger. He’d meant to grab a lantern to light the fire he was planning, but he was out of time now. He’d much rather use a word of fire instead of getting sucked into hell, which was what he imagined was about to happen to everyone.

As soon as his feet touched the grave earth, he dumped his wood and drew his sword as he whirled around. Even as he did so, he could see the mist starting to seep up from the ground around him. As concerning as that was, though, he ignored it for a moment as he focused all of his attention of the portal he’d just left behind. 

The thing was set into the doorway of a mausoleum, and part of him desperately wanted to slam the door shut, but another part was almost hypnotized by the way the runes caught fire and unwound, sending up showers of sparks as they failed and burst into flames. 

It was like the whole thing was a fuse leading to a pile of dynamite, but even as he feared the explosion, it would let loose. He couldn’t help but watch as the floor fell away and the gateway to hell grew wider and wider. 

“I’ll see you next time,” the devil yelled across the widening gap.

Simon had half a second to wonder about that, and then the portal flicked and vanished. “The doorway it was sitting in must have collapsed,” Simon mumbled to himself as his heart raced and he tried to piece together what had happened. He’d never thought of the portals as being a sort of physical object, but then he’d never tried to destroy one, either. “Thank fucking—-Aghhh”

As he tried to parse everything that was happening, his left leg suddenly went cold, and when he looked down he could see why, three different foggy hands were wrapped around it, and more were reaching him. It was clear that last time he’d been wrong that time was the key factor, clearly it was time and fresh meat, and these things were hungry for him. 

“Barom!” he yelled, instantly sheathing himself in white light as he fell to one knee. 

The mist dissipated instantly, but it began to gather more quickly around him at the edge of his aura, a few feet away. The light wasn’t waning yet, but he knew from experience that it would be soon, and with a numb leg, running through the graveyard would be impossible. So instead, he turned to his scattered pile of firewood and started staking it back up before he whispered, “Aufvarum Meiren,” and lit one of the smaller pieces of kindling with a minor word of fire. 

Even as his own light waned over the next few minutes, the light of the fire grew, and that seemed to be enough to keep it at bay. That was good because he still only had a little feeling in his left leg, and he knew he wasn’t getting out of there soon. 

The longer it persisted, and the thicker it got, the more the fog began to take characteristics that would be impossible for normal weather. Dozens of faces and hundreds of hands boiled up out of the mist before melting back a way to make room for another tide of disjointed limbs and tortured expressions. It might have been beautiful if it wasn’t so terrifying. 

Every single one of those things wanted to suck the life out of him, and if his fire went out, he was probably screwed. As time wore on, he noticed that it seemed to be able to affect even the fire he’d built. With the three armfuls of wood he had stacked there, it should have burned like a bonfire. Instead, it was a guttering campfire that seemed ready to go out at almost any moment. 

Somehow, this thing craved light and life and drank it in. It wasn’t the magic he’d used before at all. It was just an endless tide of darkness that seemed to be annihilating the light. 

“What am I supposed to do about that,” Simon wondered aloud, but he didn’t have any answers. This was definitely a level he needed to be careful of, though, no matter what the demon on the last floor had said. He could very easily see things ending badly for him if he let this thing devour his life and suck out his soul. 

Would he definitely end up as another tortured spirit left behind in the mist with the rest of these poor bastards? No, but the very idea that he might, terrified him. What could he do if his fire went out? He could run for it again now that his leg felt like it was reattached to the rest of him, but that wouldn’t solve the level, and… 

Even as he ran through his options, the light continued to shrink as the angry wraiths circled him like the storm wall of a powerful hurricane. The mass of hungry spirits was a wall that towered above him in the dark, and each of them drank a mote, and there were hundreds now, or thousands, maybe, just waiting to devour him. 

Part of him wondered how the rest of the city that obviously surrounded him dealt with this, or really, why they weren’t noticing it right now, but he couldn’t give that too much thought because his fire was guttering now, and the swirling darkness was closing in. 

Simon drew his sword and shouted “Barom!” again, making his sword glow bright enough that one might confuse it with a sci-fi laser sword, but a wall of darkness drank it in greedily even before he thrust the thing in. 

Still, it bought a little time, and the fire sprang to life once more for a few more minutes. The wood was ready to burn. It was only the dread magic that these things were using to leach it away that soaked it in and prevented it. 

The one thing that his spell didn’t do, though, was open a path through. Before, he’d managed to stay just ahead of the worst of it, but now he felt like he was surrounded. 

No, he didn’t feel like it. He was surrounded. He tried a word of light one more time when the flames started to get low again, but it worked no better than the first. So, after that, he switched to a word of greater light. 

“Gervuul Barom!” he yelled, sending out the illumination in a beam that cleared the path for a long way. The greater word of power flared to life, burning its way out of his throat leaving him with the taste of ashes in his mouth. 

The wound in the darkness started to stitch shut immediately, but Simon didn’t care. He was already running with a slight limp. By the time the way closed, he was already on the other side and jogging awkwardly toward the gate. 

He wasn’t going to make it though. Not this time. He was slower than last time. He was out of shape, and he was exhausted. Even after his ill-advised nap in the demon’s chapel, he had nothing left. So he stopped, and decided to try his last trump card. The safe thing to do would be to use a word of greater fire on himself right now and start over, but he didn’t do that. 

Why would he? He was tired of giving up. Instead he shouted “Gervuul Gervuul Meiren!” 

Ch. 113 - Into the Fire

When he’d heard Festuvian try and fail to set off the magical equivalent of a fuel-air bomb, Simon had thought that it was dumb, but deep down, he knew he’d have to use it someday; he just didn’t expect it to be so soon. 

He knew that it would be hard on him, even at full strength, but truthfully, he’d been entirely unprepared. Using greater twice in a row had filled him with such tension that he was barely able to get the familiar word of fire out of his mouth. It was a force of will to do so, and he felt like every syllable cost him.

He wouldn’t know how much for a while yet, though. Not until the spell ran his course. Instead, he collapsed there as he imagined a fiery nova rippling outward away from him to burn away the dark. 

That’s exactly what happened, fire tore through the darkness turning night into day, and burning away the massed wall of spirits that had been chasing him like the vengeful hand of god. They evaporated in an instant, with no more than silent screams to mark their passing.

For a moment, the world was awash in heat and light, and to Simon, it felt like the end of the world. To him, it might be, he realized. Even as he watched the magic he’d unleashed echo outwards, igniting grass of fire and knocking over tombstones, his consciousness began to fade.  

Simon tried to force himself to stay awake, but he couldn’t even make himself stand and slipped off into the blissful embrace of unconsciousness. 

Simon had expected to never wake up at all or perhaps to wake up back in his cabin. Instead, he woke sometime later, laying there at the center of a crater that he’d made while the stars still twinkled in the sky above him. 

The graveyard was a mess, but he couldn’t do much more than turn his head. Even reaching for his sword was exhausting, and for several long minutes, he lay there simply gauging his pain and exhaustion. 

It took much longer than it should to wonder where the fog had gone. “That can’t be it,” he croaked, regretting it instantly. 

Simon spent the next half minute coughing up a lung, and when he moved his hand from his mouth he saw fresh blood. It wasn’t a good sign. 

While he lay there, he wondered just how many years he’d used in that little blast. If a greater word uses a year, it’s unlikely that two greater words use just two, though, he thought to himself. It might even be ten. Blowing a decade on a spell seemed kind of insane to him, but he wouldn’t put it past Helades. Not when he felt this bad. 

With some effort, Simon rolled onto his back and looked up at the stars in the sky as they began to fade. The idea that he’d solved the level with a single explosion seemed unlikely, but the fact that he wasn’t being torn apart made it seem possible. 

If it had been so easy, though, then why hadn’t the townspeople done it ages ago? A few bonfires would have been more than enough to erode them to nothing, wouldn’t it?

There were too many questions, and eventually, he got tired of asking them. Eventually, he pulled himself to his feet, sheathed his sword, and walked toward the door to the next level. It was only when he got there that he stopped. “I’m in no shape to fight off a—” he rasped before a rasping cough stole the rest of his words. 

His exhausted brain had been leading him on autopilot to the next destination, but there was no way that was going to happen. So, instead, he staggered past it and toward the cemetery gate, where he left himself out into the unfamiliar city. It was a large place, though perhaps not quite so large as Liepzen. There was an empty market square a large temple, and most of the buildings in the area seemed to be two stories. All told it was quite nice. Most of the streets were even cobblestone instead of mud, and there were even gutters along the main thoroughfares. 

Slowly, Simon made his way to the inn, but the door was locked for the night. He should have pounded on the door, but he was too weak to yell, so instead, he just sat there on the stoop and waited for dawn. 

He was only woken up once during the night when a vagrant seemed like he was about to roll Simon’s unconscious body for whatever he could steal, but the moment Simon started to draw his blade, the other man apologized and ran for his life. That was just as well because there was no way that Simon had the energy to actually fight someone right now. He was as weak as he’d ever been, probably since he had to spend a week sleeping off his head injury from the orc raid. 

It wasn’t until morning that he understood why, though. Eventually, the innkeeper opened up for breakfast, and traveling guests left to get on the road. Simon skipped meals and gossip. Instead, he had a couple tankards of beer to take the edge off, and then he paid for a room so he could sleep the day away. 

It was only when he was stripping and setting his things aside that he noticed how differently he looked in his tiny mirror. Though not quite wrinkled, his face was certainly etched by years he hadn’t lived, and there was a sprinkling of gray amidst his normally dark hair. 

His weakness persisted even after he woke up. His voice was still shot, too. He tried to use a word of lesser healing to fix that, at least, but just the idea of starting to speak words of power gave him vertigo, and he decided against it. He had definitely screwed himself up pretty well with what he’d done, and both his body and his soul were unhappy with him. 

Fortunately, the proprietor was happy to take his silver and keep Simon in food and beer for as long as he felt the urge to lie around and recover. Honestly, for the next few weeks, it wasn’t a bad life. All he did was sleep and self-medicate with alcohol for the first few days, but after that, when his voice had recovered to some degree, he started to be social with the other guests who came and went in the evenings.  

He learned that he was in a city called Darndelle. It wasn’t a place he’d been to before, but he was fairly sure that it was somewhere near the black swarmer level, though he wasn’t exactly sure where that was either. Talking to people he heard the names of lots of familiar places, but he didn’t pick up a lot. Not right away at least. All the details just swam together. 

Over time, he learned that Darndelle was the capital of the Kingdom of Montain and that it was just to the south of the Kingdom of Brin. Things fell together a little better after that. He could imagine Schwarzenbruck somewhere far to the northwest, Leipzig to the north, and Crowvar somewhere between the two. Ionar was probably to his south or maybe his southwest. He wasn’t sure, and he vowed to find a map to better understand the layout of the world as soon as he was feeling better. 

Getting better didn’t come quickly, though. It was two more weeks before he felt well enough to even heal his voice. Once that was done, he waited a few days before he chanced a word of healing on his body, but even that left him feeling weak and considering more drastic steps. 

He took some walks among the ocher brick buildings that dominated the city when the weather was nice, but even that felt like an exertion for far too long. At least I’m finally losing weight, he thought one day when he saw his reflection in the mirror. Sadly, unlike the last few times he’d shed the pounds, he wasn’t gaining a lot of muscles to go with it. This left him looking somewhat melted and sallow looking, and he couldn’t decide how much of that was the magical damage he’d inflicted on himself and how much was just lying around for weeks and weeks. 

Simon stayed at the Blind Owl long enough to eat all of their dishes, and to grow tired of most of them before he looked for work. He’d burned years of his life, but laying in bed indefinitely and getting drunk every other night at the bar wouldn’t fix that. Especially not after he heard the rumor that the fog in the graveyard had returned. 

Two weeks after his stay, he’d heard about the curse being lifted, but it had taken him some time to put the facts together. Apparently, the graveyard was cursed and had been unsafe to enter by night for decades. Simon had solved that problem, but only for a month or so. Then they’d found a widow stone cold not far from the grave of her husband. She’d stayed there after dark and apparently paid the price for it. 

That was what finally got his ass into gear as he started to move among the people of the city and learn what the hell was going on. He tried and failed to gain employment as a caravan guard and even a mercenary for the city watch. He couldn’t fault them, he supposed. He did have a bit of an evil look about him right now. 

It wasn’t until he was returning to the inn one night after attempting to gather clues about the cemetery’s history that all that changed. Two muggers suddenly flanked him on a narrow side street and gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse at knifepoint. “What’s it going to be, man, your coin purse or your life?”

Simon considered drawing his blade, but he didn’t like his odds against both of them. He was probably good for a normal word of power, but he didn’t really want to cause a commotion that would force him to leave this city, not when he was making progress in understanding the nature of the mist and the curse of Darndelle. 

So instead, he moved to hand the first man a heavy purse with a shaking hand, but as the rogue reached for it and grinned, Simon dropped it and whispered, “Gervuul Zyvon,” as he grabbed the man’s hand. 

A greater word was a bad idea. He knew that, still, there was no resistance or hesitation, and it flowed effortlessly from his lips even as the face of the other man went pale. For a moment, Simon could feel pieces of the other man’s life flowing into his own. He could feel his hunger and his desperation. More than that, though, he could feel the mugger’s youth and vitality flowing in to him. 

In that moment, Simon felt strong for the first time in over a month, and even as the other man fell backward and scrambled to get away, Simon turned to face his friend. The man lunged at Simon with his dagger, but now that he no longer felt like he was in the body of a geriatric old man, Simon had no trouble gripping his wrist and twisting it hard enough to break the thief’s arm before using the leverage to swing the man face-first into the brick wall. 

The would-be mugger went limp from the force of the blow and left a bloody smear on the bricks. Simon wasn’t sure if he was dead, but he didn’t really care. He just gloried in being able to move again before he stooped to pick up the dagger that the man had dropped as he turned to face the first man again. 

He was already staggering away from Simon, of course, and normally, Simon would have been willing to let him go, but he couldn’t help but notice that the man had scooped up Simon’s coin purse before making himself scarce. That was enough for him to throw the dagger, making it spin end over end into the other man’s thigh, sending him tumbling to the ground. 

“Please, mercy,” the man said, rolling over and tossing Simon the purse.

He looked down at it, hefted it for weight, and then stepped over the man and continued on his way. By the time he reached the main street, a tune had sprung to his lips, and he was whistling merrily away. He didn’t need to take the thief’s life; sepsis would do that fine all on its own.