Death After Death Ch. 118-119 (Patreon)

Ch. 118 - Fighting Fire With Fire

“Nothing ends without bloodshed,” one man said, older than the rest. “Well, bloodshed or fire…”

The guy probably thought that he was being clever, but even as he shouted “Meiren” and used the word of fire to launch a barrage of flames at Simon, he was already whispering the words, “Karesh Uuvellum Meiren,” as he imagined a wall of solid glass reaching from wall to wall of the space he was in between two large wine racks. 

He could have struck back of course, but he wanted to talk to Kaylee, and she could have easily been hurt in the crossfire. So for now he played defense. Lets the waves crash against his invisible fortification. They raged hot enough to light the wood on either side of him on fire, but thanks to his magic he didn’t even feel the heat. 

Instead, he simply stood there, and when the tide of fire receded, he said, “There, now can we talk about this?”

The only answer of his opponent was to shout the word twice more. The second time, he bolstered his shield, but only a little. This man clearly lacked any real power or imagination. When his voice cracked on the second attempt, and he started coughing up blood, he also showed he had very little in the way of stamina either. 

How long has it been since three basic words would have done that to me? Simon said, reflecting, even as the basement was on fire on both sides of him. 

There had been a time, so long ago that he barely remembered it, that two greater words would always reduce him to a painful hoarseness. That was in the past, though. Today, he suspected that the pain came at least as much from failing to pronounce or understand the word correctly as from actually channeling more power than you could handle. That was a lesson he was only slowly learning with time. 

“Say the word,” the coughing man said to his companions. “Say it! He’s weakening! If we all say it together!” As he tried to convince his allies to attack him, Simon chuckled at the idea that he was the one weakening and whispered “Aufvarum Gelthic” to smother the flames with the lesser word of ice before they could burn out of control and cause serious damage to the place. 

That shocked the assembled group visibly. “Listen,” Simon said again. “The words of power are cursed, and you damn your soul to use them. Surender and I will ensure that you’re treated fairly by the law. I—”

Simon stopped talking as soon as he saw everyone’s temperament change. When he’d been talking about damnation, he was clearly winning them over. They obviously believed that much. It was the notion that there was any justice to be waiting for them at the hands of their betters that they found to be ridiculous. 

He didn’t have time to formulate another argument, let alone time to figure out where they’d learned such a destructive word. He couldn’t even contemplate the fact that fire seemed to be far and away the most common word out there. Instead, he raised his defenses. 

As one, almost everyone in the group assaulted him with a new wave of fire. “Gervuul Karesh Uuvellum Meiren,” he said very clearly, bringing an even stronger wall to deal with such an assault. He’d never faced a group of spellcasters before, so he erred on the side of caution and used a greater word to hold back the inferno. 

It was certainly enough to make him regret his earlier overconfidence, though. He’d never cast a spell as long as that one and almost always used one word or two, and he felt the burn immediately. He wasn’t sure it was drawing more of his life than a normal greater word, but the complexity pulled at his mind and his throat in ways that were more painful than usual. He’d thought that he could keep this up all day, but that was turning out not to be the case. 

Still, nothing they were doing was showing any signs of weakening his spell. The concert of flames roared like a typhoon against him, but no amount of power could cross a line that had been defined so boldly. The only way to make it more powerful would have been to carve the thing into the stone in a sort of reverse summoning circle. 

For a moment, he allowed his mind to wander and wonder if that would actually drain less or more from him than saying the words. However, as soon as the flames started to slacken, he drew his sword and focused on whatever was going next. 

As it turned out, though, he probably wouldn’t need it. Most of the would-be mages were already wounded or dead. Some lay on the ground, coughing up blood, and others were horribly burned. They clearly hadn’t given much thought to what would happen if they released so much heat in such a contained area. Simon muttered a few words to smother the flames before the smoke became a problem, and then he moved toward Kaylee. 

She was on the ground and obviously wounded, so he was done trying to play nice. A couple of the men still had the strength to menace him with weapons, and Simon didn’t hesitate to cut them down. While he still wasn’t at full strength, they were no match for him. 

After that, everyone who was capable ran for their lives, and he let them go. Those who weren’t visibly burned were already scared by this experience in other ways, and once the guards came for them, he doubted that any of them would survive. 

Kaylee, who was already on the ground, she was burned pretty badly on her left side. To him, it looked like whoever had been standing next to her practically exploded rather than trying to use his will to direct the fire. 

Just looking at her suffering was enough to make him feel bad for her. So, after he carried her some distance from the others to a darkened corner, and despite the strain he’d already put on himself, he whispered, “Gervuul Hyakk,” and practically erased her would with a greater word of healing. It wasn’t perfect, and he could do nothing about her burned hair or dress with any of the words that he knew, but she wasn’t going to spend the rest of her days being disfigured, at least. 

“Why did you do this?” he asked, taking off his mask as she finally looked up at him with clear eyes. “You didn’t just plan a massacre, but you worked with warlocks? Don’t you understand how insanely dangerous that is?”

“Simon?” she asked, confused. “How… Why? You can’t be here.”

“And yet I am,” he nodded. His throat was still sore, but he ignored it. After this, he was going to be on a nice relaxing boat cruise for the better part of the week, so he’d have plenty of time to recover. “So talk.”

“But you haven’t aged…” she said, “Well, maybe a little, but it’s been more than two decades…”

“Good genes,” he lied. “I get that from my mother’s people.”

“But why didn’t you help us?” She asked, tears welling in her eyes. “If you have all this power, then you must know… you must. They were so cruel to us, to Eddek and I. For what they did to him, there can be no answer but violence.”

“I don’t,” he answered, “but I wish I did. Tell me, and maybe I can fix it. I just know that violence isn’t the answer.”

“It… isn’t the answer?” she asked in confusion before she looked around and laughed. “How can you, of all people, say that Simon? Violence was the answer against the owlbear and the troll you said you were off to fight. It was certainly the answer you used in this basement today.”

“If you killed everyone up there today, I promise you that worse people would replace them,” he explained to her. “You think that these men would have created a better ruling class?”

“We wanted to create a country without rulers. We wanted to be free!” she said with a look of wide-eyed passion. “And you’ve ruined it.”

“Trust me,” he sighed, “if I’m here, nothing good was about to happen. That’s the way this works.”

This was the first time he’d run across something like democracy in the Pit, even conceptually. He didn’t remember a whole lot from his history classes, but Simon was pretty sure that early attempts were usually bloody affairs that didn’t end well. Right now he didn’t care about any of that. He just wanted information.

“Oh?” she asked. “I always thought of you as a hero of yore. Are you just a harbinger of terrible things to come? An albatross?” she asked plaintively, getting more aggressive with each moment, but he really wasn’t sure what to tell her or even what he could tell her. “I see what you are now. You’re no different than the rest of them. You were just going to hold us down like they did!”

“Kaylee,” Simon said. “Please calm down.” 

He could hear that they were running out of time. The door to the basement hadn’t opened yet, but people were definitely stomping around upstairs, and any second now, the guards would come for them. They wouldn’t be looking for innocents, either. 

“Calm? I am calm. I know what you are,” she said, leaning forward to whisper something in his ear. “You’re, Mei—”

Simon sensed the betrayal coming, but he waited until she actually said the first syllable before he seized her by the throat. He held her there so tightly that she couldn’t breathe, let alone speak. Even then, he would have tried to reason with her, though. Was that because this was all somehow his fault because he’d had a hand in bringing her to this fork in the road? He wasn’t sure, but before he could figure out what to say next, the guards burst through the door. 

Simon dumped her off his lap then and bolted toward the door on the far wall before she could blast him. She didn’t disappoint, either. 

The flames licked at him in his wake, and though he heard her cry out that terrible word twice, only the first time was aimed at him. The second time, it was followed by the guards coming down the stairs, who screamed instead. 

It’s not my problem anymore. That’s what he tried to tell himself as he sheathed his sword, opened the door to the Sea Seraph, and then quickly closed it behind him. 

Somehow, those words did nothing to make him feel better. Had he done everything he could to save her? No. Had he let her down in any major way? Not that he could think of. He’d given her every chance to turn from the darkness. He would have gladly brought Kaylee with him, and away from whatever terrible situation it was that she found herself in, if only her presence wouldn’t have been a constant knife, waiting to betray him.

Ch. 119 - Another Voyage

Simon contemplated his culpability a lot of the first few days of the trip. Oh, he still played dice with the crew some, even though he knew enough about the ship to blend it without it. He also spent a little time every day trying to find the source of the plague that was bound to happen. 

Mostly, though, he wondered what he could have done differently. Based on the timing of the levels, he was already fairly certain that the purpose wasn’t to stop every tragedy. Sometimes, it was, but most of the time, it seemed to be to mitigate them. He couldn’t say why Heledes had chosen the places and the times she did, and he wasn’t going to waste a question asking. 

That was because he already knew the answer. The answer was that this was the answer. This was the way it had to be to get to whatever destiny she’d promised that hero from her story. Beyond that, it didn’t have to make sense. That was only frustrating to him, of course. She could presumably see everything, so it made total sense to her no matter how convoluted things got. 

For any normal person, though, it was hard to figure out how rescuing a couple of kids on their way to a festival so they could be chewed up and spit out by the world would lead to the correct outcome. He had no idea, but that didn’t stop him from feeling like he’d let them down. 

Hell, Kaylee never should have been there. She wasn’t the first time. Before, it had been a different girl accompanying Eddek on that long, dark road. Would this level have turned out better if she’d been the one to survive? These were the sorts of questions that could drive men mad.

After all, for all he knew, those men had gotten the word of fire from her, and she’d gotten it from him. He had no way to know. Had he used it to fight the owlbear when he went through the level last time? He couldn’t recall. 

That was why he gambled and drank as much as anything. Because trading raunchy jokes with a bunch of strangers blocked out the questions that resonated in his soul.

He spent some time filling the mirror on the last level, even though he doubted he’d ever forget Kaylee’s betrayal. He was just trying to build the habit of telling it everything since he was already sure that there was much that he’d forgotten. 

When he felt better he used a word of greater cure in an attempt to purge the whole ship of disease. He doubted that would be enough to unravel the mystery, but he could spare the year. 

Really, I’m unlikely to figure it out this go around, he decided, but at least I can stay with the ship this whole time, see what happens, and then help with the plague when we reach our destination. 

The very last thing that Simon planned to do was to disembark the boat for Ionar, so, one day he was very surprised to see that they were sailing right by it without any intention to stop. He looked closely and thought it looked different, but it wasn’t until he asked one of the sailors about it that he discovered the horrible truth. 

“Ionar? What would we go to that twice-cursed hellhole?” he said with a laugh.

“Twice cursed?” he asked. “You mean something happened there besides the volcano erupting?”

“You don’t know?” the man asked, studying Simon to decide if he was stupid or merely foreign. “That volcanic eruption dragged some monstrosity straight from the lowest pit of hell, and it consumed the whole city. Every place where the lava isn’t, it is.”

Simon’s body went cold. He’d spent half the voyages learning about unintended consequences, and now he discovered that he’d inadvertently unleashed a new evil on an old level. It was shocking, but as he looked at the silhouette of the palace high on the clifftop, it was impossible not to see the truth. 

Simon sighed. “I guess I’m not going to figure out the plague on this trip, either.”

“What plague?” the sailor asked, but Simon ignored the man. He was already moving away from the prow where they’d been chatting, the the port side of the ship where they kept one of the long boats. With a word of force, he cut the ropes on both hoists that raised and lowered it into the sea before anyone had any idea what he was up to. 

There were looks of shock and dismay, but he ignored them. This run was toast anyway. He’d already fucked it up as far as he was concerned. He could do one thing right, though, and that was to fix this fucking mess. He’d spend decades here if he had to undo what he’d done. There was no other choice. 

After the boat splashed into the water, he vaulted over the rail like some guy in a pirate movie and used a word of lesser force to cushion his landing. Then he picked up a pair of oars and did his best to start rowing to shore. It only took a few minutes for the news of what he’d done to spread on the Sea Seraph. Though they didn’t have cannons, they had plenty of crossbows, and he was well inside their range. 

So, once he saw the first one take a shot at him, he used a word of lesser force with every pull of the oars. That little bit of magic pushed him along ten times faster than rowing alone, and he quickly outpaced the ship. 

Simon had no idea what rumors would spread about this moment, but he was sure that they would. He beached the boat, and the drug it slightly higher, even though he never really intended to use it again. This was a desolate place, but he wasn’t leaving until he’d purged every last trace of his stupid mistake. 

“I should never have opened that damn thing,” he told himself as he started looking around for evidence that the plants had infested this far.  

Fortunately, it seemed that they hadn’t. Looking, he thought he could see some evidence that there were a few on the trail near the top, but the infestation seemed to be almost completely contained in the area around the main square and the palace. “Because that’s where I buried that fucking thing,” he growled, kicking a rock. 

The more he thought about it, the angrier he got. “I fucking boiled it in Lava,” he yelled, screaming so loudly that it echoed off the cliff face back at him. “What the hell else was I supposed to do!”

Leave it in its fucking container, his mind volunteered instantly. 

Yeah, that would have been the best choice. It wasn’t like the golden cylinder he’d found it in had any magical runes on it, though. He’d thought it was just a superstition, but it clearly wasn’t.

Simon spent the rest of the day building a shelter and doing a little spearfishing off the now-abandoned jetty. Honestly, it wasn’t bad. He’d never been a seafood guy, but flame-roasted fish and crab that had been buried in the hot ashes of his fire turned out pretty great. T

There wasn’t much variety here, of course. He didn’t seen see much in the way of seabirds, so he was sure he’d get tired of it eventually, but for now, he ate like a king. 

The well still had drinkable water in it, even if the place was abandoned, and the tavern he’d gotten drunk at last time had never been built. If he was going to be here for a while, then he wanted to get the rhythm of life down pat. 

That meant making a gorget so this thing wouldn’t kill him twice the same way. It also meant being methodical and thorough so the damn thing didn’t sneak up on him. 

After only two days of that, he was ready to start making his way up the path. He went a little at a time, and he used fire so things wouldn’t grow back. It wasn’t bad, especially early on. That low, there was really only the occasional creeper vine or orange blossom to mark this thing’s slow, creeping path of destruction. 

It didn’t get bad until he could actually see where the lava had dripped down from the highest level and ruined the few buildings that had been built along the windy road. There, he found that the real infestation had started. The vines actually didn’t seem to like something besides his fire, so he spent several days experimenting as he slowly burned them away to nothing. In the process, he ruled out wind and sun, as well as poor soul, and was forced to conclude it was seawater. 

The first time he poured salt water on a cluster of them, they wilted and died in minutes, and when he checked on that spot two days later, they still hadn’t started to regrow. That was the good news. The bad news was that he didn’t have so much as a bucket to his name. 

Thankfully, the well was shallow, but up until now, he’s used a rope made from spliced-together rope ends he’d cut off the ship’s tackle to lower his helmet in the well a couple times at the end of every day to stay hydrated. That might work fine for drinking, but there was no way that he was going to stop this infestation with a helmet full of seawater a day and the odds that he would make the mile-and-a-half walk up and down the cliffside road more than once or twice each day were equally small.  

So, he did the next best thing and set to work making a large pot for himself. Finding enough clay for that took a week of digging, and he cracked the first one from the heat when he tried to fire it. 

Still, his second try was a success, after he let it bake in the sun for a few days before he baked it over a flame. It was an ugly thing, and though he didn’t think he’d ever be able to balance it on his head, he used leather thongs and a bit of the canvas from his shelter to make a backpack of sorts. Now each day, he could go up, burn away the parts that were likely to attack him, and then drench the soil of a couple dozen weed beds with sea water and watch them die in almost real-time. 

That was when he started to make real progress. Relying on just the words of minor fire, it was libel to take him literally forever to clear this infestation, but with enough sea water, things were finally starting to look up. 

When Simon started this task, he'd thought of it as Sysiphean. He was going to push this boulder up the hill, not because it was possible, but because it was the only fair punishment in a just world since it was his fuck up. 

Now that he was making actual progress, though, he was starting to think it might be possible.