Death After Death Ch. 114-115 (Patreon)

Ch. 114 - Beneath it All

The following day Simon felt like shit. This wasn’t just because the life energy he’d stolen from the would-be thief had faded to some degree. It was also because he’d done it at all. He was definitely looking and feeling better than before he’d dropped a nuke on the graveyard, but he was still pretty far from one hundred percent.

Draining the life of a man had felt worlds better than draining the life of a swarm of insects. It was dangerously good, and though, in this instance, he could certainly say what he’d done was self-defense, it was a small fig leaf for such a terrible thing. 

Would it have been any better if I’d beheaded him with a word of force or stopped his heart with a bolt of lightning instead, he wondered. At least this way, the asshole lived. 

Whether he lived or died wasn’t the problem, though. The worst part, though, was that Simon craved to do it again. That craving was enough to make him decide that Zyvon was the most dangerous word he knew, and yet it haunted him. 

As he lay there with a headache, trying to ignore the clatter of crockery from the first floor and the sound of wagons from the street beyond, some small part of him whispered that he could easily steal a little strength from any one of them, just to silence the throbbing in his head. No one would know. 

Well, no one but his experience score, for whatever that was worth. He still hadn’t gotten a straight answer out of the mirror, and baring a better question, that was probably what he was going to ask Helades about someday on level 40. That was a long way off, though.

For now, he forced himself to get out of bed and move. He might lose weight if he lay there and wasted away, but he was never going to get stronger like that. Instead, he explored the backstreets, looking for someone to fight, and when that didn’t happen, he went beyond the walls of the city, looking for monsters to fight. Sadly, this wasn’t a video game, and there were no areas to grind, so at sunset, he returned to the inn. 

There, at least, he made a conscious effort not to get drunk again. Though it was understandable when he’d been hurting, he was past that now, and he’d been heading down a dark road with that sort of behavior. He had no wish to add alcoholism to his list of achievements. Instead, he listened as people talked, and he tried to learn more about the city he found himself in. 

He could leave at any time, of course, but even if he was ready for the fight on the next level, he was close enough to solve this one that he was loath to leave it. He’d beaten the mist once; he just needed to figure out what he was missing so he could strike the final blow. 

It took a lot of random conversations and buying a lot of drinks for talkative old men before he finally found someone who claimed to know the story of why it had started in the first place. 

“Folks talk about the mist like it’s been there in that graveyard forever, but it ain’t,” a retired merchant told him. “It wasn’t here the first time I passed through Darndelle, nor even the second or third time, but one day after a trip up north, it had just sort of settled in.”

“Well, that should have made the cause easy enough to figure out then,” Simon said. “Do you have any idea what caused it?”

“Of course! They buried the wrong body in it! It was some warlock, that was said to be cursed and all that. Turns out the rumors had been right,” the greybeard laughed. “Poisoned the whole place, and only the light of day is enough to keep his angry shade at bay.”

“Well, why didn’t they just dig him back up and dispose of the body some other way?” Simon asked. “Toss him in the sea or burn him to ash?”

“They did just that, so the story says,” the trader nodded. “They dug him up a week after they buried him, they burned his corpse to dust, and then they scattered that dust into the river so he could never again be reconstituted.”

“So then, why is the graveyard still cursed?” Simon asked. 

“I wish I knew,” the man laughed. “The church has offered a tidy sum for anyone who can purge the problem once and for all, but no matter who shows up to do the deed, the mist fades for a week or a month, and then it returns with a vengeance. I tell you, the land is poisoned.”

Simon’s knowledge about the way magic worked didn’t cover curses and whether or not they were real, but then, that didn’t mean anything. He knew how to cast a few spells, but he only had a basic knowledge of the way that magical items worked, and both the diagrams he’d made about the runes that powered the golem or held back hell were still beyond him. 

So, realistically, he had no idea if or how something would be cursed. Since he was definitely dealing with an evil spirit of some kind, and he’d killed plenty of skeletons in the past, he was inclined to agree that something like that was possible, though he doubted it was as simple as a word or two he didn’t have. 

Simon asked more questions of the man, but he had no answers. It was unreasonable for Simon to expect that he would, of course. Who could say where a body was buried twenty years ago. He’d be hard-pressed to draw a map to a place he visited frequently but hadn’t been there for twenty years.

That applied to pretty much everywhere he’d ever been since he’d been gone from Earth for like a century now. His whole life was slowly fading beneath the tidal forces of the Pit’s continual grind. 

There was nothing that said he had to keep going, of course. Darendelle was a nice enough city. He could stop living off his gold, get a real job killing things, and enjoy a nice, quiet life here. The King didn’t seem so bad, and because of the nature of the city as an inland trade hub, they were friendly enough to outsiders. 

That felt too much like giving up to him, though. Simon would be happy to spend a lifetime in a level so long as he got to clear it, but to just decide it was home meant that he’d stop looking and striving, and that was intolerable to him. If he did that, then all he would do was prove Helades right and make all the suffering he’d endured to get to the point so far pointless. 

“Mirror, how many floors have I completed so far?” Simon asked when he was back in the room, studying his washbasin. 

‘18 floors are currently completed,’ it responded in wavering, glowing blue text.

“Eighteen,” he told himself. “Well, then let’s make it nineteen, shall we?”

The next morning, he visited the temple next to the graveyard, making sure not to go through the door that led to the next level to do so. It was a lovely old building with fancy mosaics and even a large stained-glass window. 

Simon had yet to see any evidence that the Gods of this world were real at this point, but he took a better safe than sorry approach with them. Just because magic was real here didn’t mean that the religions had to worship real gods and goddesses. After all, that hadn’t stopped any number of religions on Earth, so he didn’t see why that should matter one way or the other. 

Still with his twin worries about the shadows that some people saw in his soul and the gnawing hunger to find another excuse to use Zyvon, he went inside and offered a tithe for a benediction. Would the priests or the acolytes be able to see him? Simon wondered. Would they brand him a warlock and try to burn him at the stake or something?

It wasn’t impossible, but part of him certainly hoped that they would try. Instead, they took his silver, gave him a blessing, and then answered his questions about the history of the cemetery. 

It turned out that they did indeed have records going back that far, but the name of the man interred had been lost to time, so it was impossible to cross-reference them. “How can you expect someone to purge this blight if you don't even know the guy’s name?” Simon asked in frustration.

“Ah, you see, our records contain only names of those who are buried here,” the priest corrected, “and since this man was dug up shortly after he was buried, he’s not in our records anymore.”

“But he was buried, soo…” Simon said, a little exasperated. If he tried to scourge every last inch of the graveyard with fire or something again, they’d probably arrest him. He needed a target more specific than ‘the graveyard.’

“Well, if you discover his name and preferably the date, then we could probably go back through the records and tell you where he was buried,” the priest said, trying to be helpful. 

“And where am I supposed to get that information?” Simon sighed. 

“The county seat where he was tried and executed might know,” the priest said helpfully. 

That turned out to be a lie, though a subtle one. It turned out that the county seat would, but that there were dozens of counties in the Kingdom. Even if he just visited the nearby ones, that meant he had to travel to eight different towns, which was going to be at least a hundred miles of walking or riding. 

Simon sighed and got started, thinking of it as a weight loss pilgrimage as much as anything else. He bought a few supplies, like a new bow, a better backpack, a warm bedroll, and some comfortable boots, but eschewed a horse. He wasn’t in a hurry. 

Maybe I can find some goblins to suck dry, he thought hopefully as he left the city gates behind him. 

Over the next few weeks, he visited five different towns before he found at least some answers in the form of a particularly knowledgeable records keeper in Lyndon Hills. He didn’t know precisely what the name of the warlock was, but he did recall the Blackheart incident as he referred to it and was happy to tell Simon all the lurid details, though the only thing that was really useful to him was the town where all of this had started, a little town a few days ride to the north called Kawsburl.

It was standard fare as most of these warlock stories went, a stranger arrived in Kawsburl a decade before things had come to a head. He’d kept to himself, he’d been nice enough, but people had started dying and there were strange lights sometimes at night. The trouble had really only started when and angry mob showed up on the stranger’s doorstep to demand answers. 

Almost everyone in that mob died that night, the clerk told him, and in the end it took trained witch hunters to find the monster and bring him to justice. It turned out that the whole thing got its name from dead heart inside the man when they finally cut him open after killing him the fourth time. The warlock simply wouldn’t stay dead. 

The thing that bother Simon, though, was how he said it like it was just a horror story, like the man was retelling the events of Sleepy Hollow or something, but Simon couldn’t help but imagine himself in the role of the villain as the man described the fire and lightning that the evil mage was supposed to have summoned. 

He suddenly had a much better idea of why people disliked magic in this world. He’d heard stories like this at the bar, of course, but he’d never really felt like they were about him. After he drained the life out of that mugger, though, and after he’d been disappointed that no bandits gave him an opportunity to do it again, he couldn’t help but feel like maybe he was the bad guy. 

Well, not the bad guy. He was a hero, but lately, he’d been a little less than heroic. He’d have to work on that.

Ch. 115 - An Unexpected Find

Simon journeyed north after only one night in Lyndon Hills before he headed north to Kawsburl. He probably could have gone right back to the city of Darndelle after that, but he continued because the story resonated so much with him. 

The hills part of Lyndon Hills was no joke, either, that town sat at the edge of the bottom lands, and the edge of proper roads, so from that point on Simon was reduced to game trails and doubling back to avoid washouts.

It was tough going, but honestly, it wasn’t so bad. The weather was nice, and the game was plentiful, so he took his time with it. As a mountain range slowly rose above him to the north he wished he had a camera to capture the rugged beauty of the vista, but sadly he had no way to capture it. 

“I guess I’m just going to have to learn to paint,” he sighed after another attempt to get his mirror to ‘take a picture’ for him. The thing would faithfully render what it saw, of course, when asked, but it had all the soul of an architect's elevation or an engineer's technical drawing. 

On his third night out of Lyndon Hills he was ambushed by a small nest of goblins. Fortunately he woke up before the first blow was struck and had time to smash the head of the first one to come at him. 

After that, he used a word of lesser force to leap to the top of a large boulder and used his bow to take them out one at a time while the searched for him. Many times he missed the shot and had to fire twice which lead to him chastising himself. 

“You can’t use magic to solve everything,” he grumbled. “That’s how you’re going to die horribly one day!”

That was his mantra these days, both because he thought he was using it too much and because he needed to resist the urge to drain these little guys dry like some kind of energy vampire. The very fact that he still felt the urge to after weeks without uttering the word Zyvon was worrying to him. It was like quitting smoking or something. 

The rest of the trip beyond that was fine, and after a few more days of walking and a day spent waiting out the rain, he finally found the town he was looking for. Village was probably the better word, though. It had seen better days.

Simon had seen several places in his trip that had fallen on hard times, though the version of Slany that existed after Gregor lost his arm was the clearest example. This place had obviously been important, once upon a time, but no more. Someone had worked hard to raise real city walls and create the two stone bridges that crossed the raging river that it sat astride. Even the homes looked like they’d been created by wealthy people, but no longer.

Many of them were in various states of disrepair now, and less than half of the homes looked lived in. Other than a tin mine and a tannery, the place seemed to have little in the way of industry, either. 

No one was particularly welcoming to Simon, though when he lied and told them he’d been sent by the temple to gather vital clues necessary to finally cleanse the world of the Blackheart incident, people were a little more cooperative. 

“Aint a lot of strangers in these parts,” the gate guard told him. “You can never be too careful.”

One of the town watchmen was assigned to show him where it had all started so long ago. The man didn’t know much about the actual incident, which was less than helpful, but he was able to show him the plaque in the town cemetery that memorialized the event and the lonely burned-out ruins of a cottage on a large hill at the edge of the cemetery. The cottage ruins and the plaques weren’t much, but the grandeur of the mausoleums in the oldest parts of the cemetery again hinted at former greatness.  

Simon tried to ask the man why he thought all of this had happened, but his escort seemed carefully coached not to have an opinion. Questions like, “Where do you think this warlock came from?” or “Why do you think he chose to stay in Kawsburl?” were met with a studied disinterest. 

“The Gods work as they will,” the man shrugged, “But I hope that this little trip helps you get some insight to end the blight this monster caused just the same.”

Those were empty words, though. There was nothing new here, and Simon had to fight the urge to leave on the spot in frustration. The only reason he didn’t was because one detail nagged the back of his mind. It wasn’t that there weren’t so much as weeds clinging to the low walls of stone that had once been a cottage; that was easily explainable as the result of magic. He was quite sure that he could drain a spot so dead with a spell like Zyvon that nothing would ever grow there again. 

It was that the ruins had a stone floor. That bothered him even after he went to bed in the inn that night. Every cottage he’d ever stayed in, in this world, had a floor of earth, or in rare cases like inns, wood. The Baron’s mansion in Slany had a stone floor. The castles and temples he’d been in did too. A cottage, though? That seemed unlikely. 

Simon left at the crack of dawn to give that another look, and after a few minutes of examination, he figured out what game was being played here. The stone of the floor was laid in after the walls and stuck up slightly above the doorway. Someone had laid this down to hide evidence instead of making it look like it had always been here. 

He thumped on each stone with the hilt of his blade until he found a cluster that sounded hollow. He tried to pry one of them up with his dagger, but the mortar was too tight to make fast progress. 

“Fuck it,” he growled, looking around to make sure no one was nearby to call him a witch before he whispered, “Aufvarum Vosden,” and used lesser earth to make the mortar flow aside like muddy water. 

Once that was done he started lifting paving stones out of the way, and he quickly found what he’d expected to, a dry rotted old trapdoor. For a second he got the feeling of déjà vu, but he quickly realized that this couldn’t possibly be his cabin. Despite the commonality, they were in totally different locations. 

The second wave of déjà vu hit him harder when he finally opened the door and saw the stairs beneath. Those he’d definitely seen before. He knew that even before he felt the cold air wash over him. 

“Son of a bitch,” he swore as he drew his sword and started down into the cottage. It wasn’t built on a hill. It had been built on a burial mound… like the one he’d been crushed to death in not so long ago. 

Suddenly, he was on edge, and he moved down each step with caution as he retraced a path he’d taken at least three dozen times by now. This was the skeleton knight level; he was sure of it, and somehow, he’d made his way back to it. 

It looked a little worse for the wear since he’d seen it last, but he was too concerned about that. His first concern was why it was here, and what this could possibly have to do with what he was looking for, but his second was even bigger.

If those stairs are in a burial mound, then what’s normally behind the door in the goblin cave? He wondered. 

In his mind, everything had fit together in a certain way. They were in order. First, there was this level, and then there was that one, and now, suddenly, they were lining up more with the real world than with the levels in the Pit. The idea made him dizzy. 

When he reached the bottom, he found nothing unexpected. The room was scattered with the wreckage of bodies and looked about like he remembered. The knight itself was dead on the floor, too, but Simon looked at it only briefly before he produced some light and moved to the gate at the far end of the sepulcher. If that didn’t actually lead to the next level, then where did it lead to? 

The answer turned out to be an antechamber and another set of stairs. He changed his mind. This was nothing like the burial mounds he’d been in before near Schwarzenbruck. This was more like one of the Egyptian tombs he’d seen while watching one too many documentaries on the Valley of Kings. 

There were no hieroglyphics, though. Whatever had been painted on the walls had long since flaked away. Simon continued down into the darkness, and it was there he found another room full of the dead. 

He raised his sword to shatter the first one as soon as it started to move, but it didn’t. Instead, it just lay there on its dais, confusing him even more. 

“Why aren’t these ones coming to life?” Simon wondered aloud as he explored the room, but he had no answer. 

Unless… for a moment, he stood stock still in that cold room as inspiration struck him. What if the same thing that animated the dead here caused the ghosts to rise in Darndelle. That wasn’t so far-fetched, was it? Here they had bodies to move around in, and there… well, no bodies meant they had to use the souls themselves or something. 

It wasn’t a complete theory, but it was a working hypothesis, and 

for now, he clung to it as he turned and ran back up the stone stairs, taking them two at a time. Something that was here when he left wasn’t here now. The Warlock in question had taken it, and it was very probably still buried in the graveyard. The question was, what.

Upstairs, the first thing he did was look for the sword. He found it laying just about where he’d probably left it, but was slightly disappointed by its discovery. I mean, if that was the answer I would have solved this place ages ago by accident, he thought to himself with a sigh. 

Next he looked for the key, since that was the other prominent item he had experience with, however when he turned the skeleton knight’s body over, he found something completely unexpected: there was a giant hole in its breastplate. To him it looked like something had just punched right through it or grabbed the metal and ripped it open like wrapping paper. 

Does that mean there’s a strength word of power? He thought as he studied the hole left behind by whatever had done this?

Simon had searched the room a couple of times, but he’d never thought to take the armor off the skeleton knight, and now that was biting him in the ass. 

As he looked at the hole in the chest and wondered what might have been there, it suddenly occurred to him. “Don’t tell me that Dark Heart is actually literal and not, like, a cool name for the damn warlock,” he sighed. 

He didn’t know whether to laugh or cray at that revelation, but he was fairly sure it was the correct one. Whoever had dug up the rotten corpse had left the cursed artifact behind, and that was what was stirring up all the dead. Now it was up to him to find it and destroy it. The only question was, was it the right thing to destroy it i this level, or back on the skeleton knight level instead?