Death After Death Ch. 129-130 (Patreon)

Ch. 129 - Letting it Simmer

Simon was forced to live with the information that everyone in the north, probably even as far south as Slany, knew of him as the villain for months, and it ate at him. All through the cold winter and into the spring, when there was a sudden uptick in the number of people afflicted with the weeping, it was there, waiting for him in the quiet moments, ready to make him rage all over again. 

It was so bad that he did everything he could to try to fill the quiet spaces of his life with more work. In the winter, that started off as an attempt to piece together a more accurate map from the knowledge of the sailors under his care. When those became too wildly divergent, he switched gears and spent the dark hours of the night studying the runes of the demon’s circle by candlelight instead.

Eventually, that was the only task that was engrossing enough to keep his angry thoughts about Kell at bay. He traced and retraced the way the runes fit together from his mirror notes on clean sheets of paper until he finally understood the way they would have looked without all of the distortion from the magics of hell straining against the summoning circle. 

It was only once he’d done that that he understood a number of things. The first was that the reason some of the symbols hadn’t made sense to him was because they were twisted and mirrored. Once everything was in the proper scale and orientation, the whole thing felt a lot less dizzying. 

The second was that he’d been using Dnarth completely wrong. Until now, distance had meant simply hitting something far away from him. That was all he used it for, but the summoning circle used it almost like teleportation. No, he corrected himself. It was more complex than that. It was like translocation - like that old show with the stargate he’d only seen a few episodes of. Simon had no idea how it worked or targeted its location or whatever, but he desperately wanted to. The world was a big place, and being able to move between far-flung points at a pace somewhat faster than walking would be a huge deal.

Even that idea, as big as it was, wasn’t as important as his third revelation, though. After months of nighttime study, after everyone else finally went to bed and he was left alone with the sick and the dying, he finally figured out which part of the structure he needed to strike out to make the whole thing collapse in on itself. 

In a way, the last two revelations were linked because, at first, every attempt to defuse the circle would have led to the outer boundary collapsing first, letting hell into the world, which was exactly what he didn’t want. However, if he attacked the third layer of runes first and canceled out the line that connected the flow of power to the distant rune, then the spell would collapse inward, as the circle suddenly found itself surrounding nothing, and hell faded away with the barrier still intact. 

Of course, he also realized he understood the whole thing well enough that he could summon demons on pretty much any floor now. He had no desire to do that, of course, and he still didn’t understand exactly what all the connecting pieces and the parts that might have been numbers or designators did, but he was sure he could copy them well enough to reproduce them. He’d been very careful in his copies to leave gaps in the lines lest he do exactly that. 

Of course, Simon burned all of this research after he showed it to the mirror. The very last thing he wanted to do, besides accidentally opening up a portal to hell on something as fragile as paper, was to let anyone else see what he was doing. Not only would that stir all sorts of uncomfortable allegations, but it would release dangerous knowledge in the world that would have entirely unpredictable effects. 

Truthfully, Simon would have preferred to keep all of his research in the mirror at all times. That way, no one but him could access it. However, the interface was pretty jank, and the resolution wasn’t so good. He felt like he was writing on an old drawing tablet or something, so he preferred to work on paper before saving it into the mirror. 

Life might have gone on like that for months or years longer, even after the patients had started to slacken, and his hospital sat half-empty most weeks had someone not informed him that the Sea Seraph was back in port. Just like that, Simon realized it had been more than a year as he lost himself in the depths of his various studies. All this time, he’d told himself he was just waiting for them to come back while he pursued experiments in medicine, geography, and his words of power. 

It had become more than that, though he couldn’t point to exactly when it had changed. At some point, he’d given up on the idea of pursuing his current run any further, and he’d started a new life. Now, he was loath to give that up. 

Still, since it was here, he went down to the harbor and chatted with the quartermaster and some of the other crew, whom he still remembered. He told them about quelling the epidemic, and they told him stories of their most recent voyages. There wasn’t anything about them that stood out to him, though. They’d taken the long way back to Targis on Colloum in the lands across the sea, then gone north before coming back across as they always did. This time, they had a close call with pirates, apparently instead of refugees, but the captain had been able to outrun the bastards in a harrowing chase before a storm had finally separated the ships. 

All told it made for an interesting story, but there was no part of it that made him think, oh, that’s why the ship needed to be saved. They hadn’t even killed the pirates. In the end, he’d gone back to his mostly empty hospital in a daze, unsure what to do next. He was in no hurry to be burned alive by Dragonfire after all, and he was fairly sure that was the only thing awaiting him if he tried to speed-run things. 

The next morning, he told the few devotees who still clung to him despite the city returning to normal, “I’m going north in search of new challenges.”

“But why?” one of his apprentices asked. “Abresse still has many sick, even without the plague. There’s more to do here.”

“And you will tend to them, I’m sure,” Simon smiled. “I’ve taught you well, after all.”

“But will you do?” Another asked. 

“I will heal the sick as I find them and work on my maps where I can,” Simon smiled. 

He’d made no secret of the maps he was working on from the testimony of sailors. In fact, he’d often used that as cover for the research he was doing on the binding circle from level 13, so they were well aware of his obsession in that department. 

Simon had spent a year here, and another five to ten years of life on magic at least, so he was fairly sure that he was approaching middle age. This wasn’t the first time he’d approached that threshold, but it was probably the first time he really felt like an adult, or worse, an elder, as he looked out on all these people who were so much younger than him. 

They held a feast to celebrate his decision once it was clear that it couldn’t be changed, and more than a few nobles attended to praise him for all his good works. They should, he thought with a wry smile. I saved half of them from the weeping. There was some polite roasting, but on the whole, it was a celebration, and he ate better than he had in lifetimes. It was almost enough to make him miss the good life instead of the ascetic he’d become over the last year.

He enjoyed the night of praise and considered it a more than adequite reward for all his hard work. Simon left most of the money he’d managed to earn in that time with the men he appointed to keep running the hospital in his absence. He told them he’d be back in three years. “Perhaps sooner,” he said. “We shall see how long it takes to get to Darndelle, and past that, to Liepzen perhaps. We shall see where the road takes me.”

That was a lie, though. He only said it to ensure they remained diligent longer than they otherwise might if they thought no one would ever check up on them. While he had no doubt that some of the men who had served under him did so to help people, he was sure that several of them saw his tutelage as a stepping stone to a position of prestige serving the well-heeled citizens of the city and that they would find a way to spend his hospital’s capital reserves all too quickly if they thought there would be no one to explain themselves to. 

Once that was done, Simon left quietly one night out the western gate with no fanfare. The last thing he wanted was people begging to follow him to the ends of the earth, or whatever it was this world was called. “Am I going to have to invent a name for that, too, or do they already have one?” Simon wondered. He wasn’t sure. 

He supposed he was going to have to find a library or something and find out. Only he hadn’t actually seen one of those yet. A few nobles had libraries, of course, but in terms of public learning institutions, they hadn’t seemed to have been invented yet.  Simon wondered if maybe he should add that to his to-do list as well but decided that was probably too much. 

He resolved to focus on simple things first, like finishing his map as he put one foot in front of the other, but with only his mule for company as he circled north and the miles drifted by, it was hard not to let his mind wander. After all, a world with magic was full of limitless possibilities, and he could do anything if he wanted to. 

Simon spent almost two weeks ploding north before he reached Mietere. It was a city he’d heard of before, though he couldn’t quitre recall where, even if he’d never been there, and was little more than a farming hub and a county seat. Politically it seemed to belong to Darndelle, and marked the furthest eastern point of that tiy kingdom. 

Geographically, that was one of the questions that puzzled him most. He had a pretty good idea of where most cities were in relation to each other at this point, but where they connected and how they aligned with each other. That was harder. Even what language they spoke was often mysterious to him. 

Sometimes it wasn’t the big cities he was looking for, though. Two days out of Mietere he found thetown of Esmiran, which was where he’d almost been drowned in the well by that crazy cult. He lingered there for almost a week trying to learn about the men in white, but found nothing which meant that they either liked to keep a low profile, or that they hadn’t come into existance yet; he wasn’t sure which was more ominous.

A few days after he left that spot, he found the valley where he’d faced the black swarmers, and a week later, he finally reached Darndelle. This level was several years past the one where he’d solved the issue with the Blackheart in the graveyard. As a result, he was able to spend several minutes looking at a fine statue of him that the people of the city had built, which was dedicated to Simon the Witchhunter. It was a surreal experience, and once he got over the shock, he left before anyone could notice just how much he looked like it.

Ch. 130 - Before It’s a Problem

As interesting as it was to see himself in statue form and read the only slightly tarnished plaque about how he defeated Blackheart’s curse, Simon didn’t linger in the city and was quickly on his way. It wasn’t that he was afraid that people might catch him or something. His anonymity felt reasonably secure as long as he wasn’t standing right next to that statue. 

Even if that wasn’t the case, though, it had only been a few years. He could always say he’d decided to come back and visit or something. The worst he’d probably face was a series of feasts in his honor. Maybe he’d have to fend off a marriage proposal or two. 

He wasn’t really interested in any of that, though. Instead, he briefly toured the hospital and orphanage that had been built with the reward money he’d refused. They weren’t exactly the nicest-looking places, but that was to be expected. They were functional, at least, and they seemed to be doing some good. Really, in this dark world, that was all he could ask for. 

He thought about joining up with a caravan, but he was enjoying the road too much to bother with company. So, instead, he restocked his meager supplies with things that did well on the road, like potatoes, coarse bread, and salt pork. The only luxury he spared some of his silver on was a thin folio full of blank paper. He had paper for his maps, of course, but as he’d encountered different vistas on the road north, he’d felt the urge to sketch some of them, and he didn’t want to mar his otherwise meticulous cartography with his childish drawings. 

The road north was in better condition than the one he’d used when he’d come in from the east, but Simon didn’t use that to travel any faster. It would have screwed up the scale of his map. He had no idea how professional cartographers did this sort of thing in the days before GPS, but his way was simple. Every day, he tried to go about ten miles at a nice leisurely pace, and every day, he added another millimeter of line to the road on his map. It was tiny, but he had no idea how far apart any of these places were, so he was leaving himself extra room as he documented each village and lake he came across. 

By land, no one seemed to know how far apart anything was. Traders that he talked to spoke in terms of weeks rather than miles, and though people expressed a bit more confidence about the sea routes, from what he’d seen, most of those maps varied wildly, too. 

He wasn’t sure. Hell, Simon wasn’t even sure he was going to share these with anyone when he was done, but he needed it for his own sanity. He needed as much of the world that he knew to fit together as he could. It would give him the information he needed to make better choices. He couldn’t keep treating every level like it existed in a vacuum. 

This point was driven home as he moved north and found the hills he’d been navigating slowly but surely turned into a desert. The Wantari, it was called, according to the traders, he had dinner with one night. He wasn’t exactly equipped for a desert, and he didn’t have the word for water to fall back on, so he paid careful attention to them when they talked about distances and oases. 

It turned out he didn’t have too much to worry about. Four days into the desert, he found a suspiciously familiar oasis that was thankfully unpoisoned. There were some horsemen there that seemed more like nomadic tribesmen than raiders, but he left them alone, and they, thankfully, returned the favor. 

The starry nights there were beautiful, and he noted down some of the more prominent constellations, unsure of what they were actually supposed to be. Two days later, the desert started to fade away in favor of grasslands, disappointing him. 

“If the basilisk city isn’t here, then where the hell is it supposed to be?” he grumbled as he searched the desert horizon behind him for any signs of the pillars he’d been hoping to find. Simon might not be able to explore the whole world, but he’d settle for at least finding most of the levels he’d been to before. 

The whole trip was starting to feel self-indulgent to Simon when he finally figured out where he was and what he needed to do. Even though time was meaningless to him, spending weeks slowly traveling to who knew where over the best part of a thousand miles, sketching landscapes as he went, didn’t seem like the best use of his time. 

Then he figured out how near he was to Crowvar. That was all the information he needed to decide that it was time to pay Varten a visit. As far as Simon was concerned, he was the Raithewait family curse, and he would gladly kill every single version of that monster that he found. He didn’t care if it hurt his experience totals or his karma or however that worked. He didn’t even care if it screwed with history. Varten was and always would be, a dead man. 

That wasn’t the main reason he was going to go to Crowvar, though. That would have simply been petulant. Simon had a much better reason for going - this was the perfect chance to kill the centaurs before they became a real problem in a few years. 

He was fairly certain that Helades did not mean for him to solve levels like this. In fact, because of the way things worked now, he was pretty sure that the horse lords were supposed to win, at least for a while. Doing things like this might well screw things up as far as she was concerned, but he didn’t care.

All Helades seemed to care about was that he saved that one family he’d found near the exit portal. That wasn’t good enough for Simon, though. He was long past saving one person at a time when the world was falling apart. 

“If I go back in time and kill baby Genghis Kahn before he grows up to conquer all the centaur tribes, then I can save thousands. Tens of thousands maybe,” he told himself, and that was exactly what he aimed to do. 

The only problem was that he really only had one shot at this. It was actually refreshing to realize that as he slowly made his way to Crowvar. Normally, he had as many chances as he needed to solve a problem, but win or lose, he was pretty sure this level was complete, which meant that when he died and tried to come back, there would be nothing here. In fact, there would be nothing between the cathedral and the centaur levels, and those were probably a couple decades apart. 

“Figuring out the dates for every level is probably something I should have done first thing,” he sighed as he realized he needed a calendar every bit as much as he needed a map. A second try at things like this would involve him whiling away a dozen years doing whatever before baby Genghis Kahn was even born again. 

Obviously, that wasn’t going to happen, and the last thing he wanted to do was solve this Helades’ way, so he was going to have to make this count. Simon spent the next couple of days trying to decide the best way to take over the town and its military resources in a coup, as well as thinking about how he should kill Varten this time, but all that went out the window when he saw the black plume of a village burning in the distance. 

He didn’t have time to play political games at the Raithewait’s expense. There were people to save and hazards to fight. 

Simon had to leave the main road to reach the place and was much too late to do much good. At least, that’s what he thought as he watched the fires already guttering in the distance. That changed when the centaur war band that had done the deed spotted him as they were leaving the scene. Apparently, they hadn’t gotten enough murder in for the day and decided he was worth killing, too. 

That was fine. If they’d run, he would have had to hunt them down, but this way, it made things easy enough for Simon to kill them all with a single blast of greater forces. He didn’t bother to hold back. There was no one around, and they deserved no mercy. 

So, he waited until they were within range, used a world of lesser force protection to keep the arrows that they rained down on him and his donkey from finding their mark, and waited until they got into range. Then he said, “Gervuul Oonbetit.” After that, they never saw what was coming. One second, they were charging him with lances down in a tight group of almost twenty warriors as they jockeyed for position and raced each other to be the one to end Simon, and the next, they were only so much cooling meat. 

With a single swipe of his hand, an invisible sword dozens of feet long sliced through the group in a single clean line that left each of the half-men cut in half. Sometimes, their human torsos were cut neatly from their equine bodies, and other times, the line was closer to mid-chest or head. Some of them had time to scream, but most of them simply looked at Simon with uncomprehending eyes as their hearts beat their last. 

It was an unsatisfying victory, and Simon spent more time calming his mule as he tried to walk past the bloody sight than he did actually defeating the group. He sighed. Normally, he wouldn’t have acted with such brutality, but just because this evil wore a human face didn’t mean it was remotely close to human, and he reminded himself of that as he made his way to the village. 

Simon’s heart fell when he didn’t immediately find any survivors, but once he started to shout that the centaurs were dead and it was safe to come out, a few women and children started to crawl out from beneath burned-out buildings. Many of them were wounded, but all of them were covered in ash and dirt. 

The men had died fighting. That much was obvious from the corpses, but they hadn’t done much. For every ten human corpses on the ground, there was only a centaur or two. It was a familiar sight for Simon. He’d seen this kind of carnage before, though not in a long time. 

“Are they going to come back?” a little girl asked him as he was bandaging a split around an arm that might have been broken or simply sprained. 

“No,” Simon said confidently. “These monsters will never trouble your village again. I won’t let them.”

He wasn’t sure how he would keep that promise yet, but he was sure that he would, and it would take an awful lot more than a few centaurs with bows to change that.