Death After Death Ch. 35-36 (Patreon)

Alright, volume number 2 of the story is now starting: Life After Death After Death is here. It's only 1 chapter ahead of the public, but I will improve that over the next few weeks. Enjoy!

Ch. 35 - Intermezzo

The darkness came and went for Simon, though it was impossible to judge exactly how long each cycle took. Still, each time his view of the desert was replaced by dirt and shadows, it was utterly terrifying.

He would be plunged into absolute darkness for some indefinite period, with nothing but a dull ache for company. Then he would suddenly be allowed to see the wider world above the sand for days or weeks until the next storm rearranged things again.

The first time he got his tedious desert view back after an eternity of darkness, he thanked a god he didn’t even believe in for saving him. He would have wept tears of joy if he’d been capable of such a thing.

He couldn’t, though.

So, instead, he burned every one of the stars in the night sky into his mind, trying to make sure he never took them for granted again. But no matter how hard he tried to remember them and their exact positions, they faded after weeks or months of being alone in the dark.

Sometimes things changed or stood out, but in the months and years that must have followed, his petrification, boredom, and monotony were the rule, not the exception. Sometimes the basilisk would return and eat more of his body, filling Simon with hope.

It never entirely managed to get to his head, though, and so end the end, he continued to exist as a disembodied mind as he watched the world go by. Twice he saw merchant caravans in the distance, though they gave this place a wide berth for obvious reasons. Once, he saw a group of warriors entering this place to slay the thing that had done this to him.

However, Simon couldn’t shout a warning or see if they were successful. Because of the way he was pointing, he would live forever in mystery. Part of him hoped they had failed because he would only get out of this if the thing finally finished eating him. Most of him wanted vengeance more, though, and he hoped the monster was just as dead as its victims, scattered around this city for the rest of eternity.

All the dark periods he was forced to endure seemed endless at the time. Still, eventually, Simon was submerged so far underneath the suffocating sand that he never reemerged. Intellectually he knew that a few weeks could feel like an eternity, but there was something altogether different about the way he felt after being lost in the void for months or years. His thought process started to dull as he could feel his mind slowly grinding to a halt.

This was a new terror that felt more like the feeling that the zombie hunger would erase his mind than the fear he’d had for the darkness up until now, and he struggled against it as hard as he could. He spent that quiet eternity slowly revisiting every memory he could think of and exploring all of his hobbies anew in an effort to fend off that horrible mental death that he could feel lurking at the edges of his mind.

He replayed all his favorite games in his mind, noting how unrealistic some of the sword animations were and adjusting them to better reflect the mechanics he was now better aware of. He had his favorite streamers watch him and critique his performance, noting just how empty their jokes were compared to the traumatic, gruesome scene that the gameplay was slowly morphing into.

He invented a third game to his favorite series, Sword of Glory. He based its level design off the pit as he went deeper and deeper into the darkness. Of course - his version made sense and had stats and abilities, but other than that - it was an authentic recreation of his attempt to reach level 99 and finally put Helades in her place.

Even though it was his game, in his head, he never succeeded in making it all the way to the bottom before losing interest. Whether it was because he couldn’t imagine a well of darkness deep enough to descend into or because he simply couldn’t picture himself winning, he couldn’t say. Still, he never got past the giant fire-breathing dragon on level 43, no matter how many times he tried. So, he eventually moved on to other hobbies.

He turned the cabin on the first level into an elaborate farm. Once the valley was totally developed and the goblins were slain, he got bored again. He had no idea how long he’d been in the darkness now. It had been years, probably. It was difficult to say, but his mind felt like it was starting to short-circuit.

Humans were social animals. They were damaged enough by solitary confinement and surviving shipwrecks, and either of those would have seemed like paradise compared to what he was enduring.

As the feeling of exhaustion started to spread over his mind once more, he was reminded of his scoutmaster from back when he hadn’t yet learned to hate people. “If you’re lost in the snow, and you go to sleep, then you’ll never wake up again.”

Somehow, despite his failing imagination and fraying sanity, that memory came to him from the dimmest recesses of his mind just as he felt like everything was shutting down. It wasn’t snowing, but it didn’t matter. If he went to sleep now, he would never wake up again. He was sure of that now.

That fear gave him a second wind, forcing him to redouble his efforts as he turned everything he had left to 11. There was still hope that the thing would find and kill him, wasn’t there? That should be enough to save him, shouldn’t it? Simon wasn’t sure, but he pretended he was as he blasted his mind with commercials and anime fight sequences.

Like an exhausted trucker trying to stay awake after the meth had run out, he forced himself to explore anything that might be interesting. TV commercials? Annoying jingles? Earworm songs that he hated but could never quite get out of his head? He examined them all, and only once that was done did he decide to rewatch the longest anime he could think of, one remembered scene at a time.

It was filled with guest stars in the form of his favorite childhood cartoons and video game characters by the time it was done. That didn’t matter, though. All that mattered was that he forced his spirit to keep functioning.

He’d been down here long enough that he was starting to believe that this was genuinely the underworld. Death legitimately lurked somewhere in the darkness just beyond his circle of consciousness, and it was only the light of imagination that kept it away.

It was sometime during this endless standoff, without warning, that two hands reached down from somewhere above him, pulling him out of his eternal night and into the bright light of day. It was only when the person rotated the head that he could see that they were slender female hands, and a second later, he saw who they were attached to. Helades. It was an unthinkable twist and so unlikely that his first thought was he’d finally lost his mind.

It had to be real, though, because suddenly, he was seeing things again with a level of detail that he’d almost forgotten existed. His imagination was only a pathetic shadow of this. She set his head on the low wall, then she sat down next to him at the edge of his field of vision so that he could enjoy the gorgeous view of the setting sun.

It was the first one he’d seen in a long time - maybe the first one he’d ever really seen in his whole life. She was talking to him, be he couldn’t hear her as he focused on the sunset. He’d remembered red, yellow, and blue, but the thousand little shades of orange and purple blended together in a way that he would have sworn was impossible in his almost empty mind.

With some effort, Simon tore his attention away from the majesty of nature and forced himself to focus only on what she had to say. That she’d bothered to pull him up out of the darkness instead of leaving him there forever was a miracle, and he needed to know why she’d done it.

“... it’s like when I told you that only one soul in twenty makes it beyond the tenth level? Well, only one in a hundred makes it past level twenty, which is where you are now,” she said simply as she looked at the sunrise with him. Simon struggled to remember if he’d known this was the twentieth level or if that was new information.

“Though you have to finally kill the basilisk to succeed, I like to come through every century or so and help some of the heroes that get stuck here. Given how many get stuck here, it seems only fair,” she sighed. “Of course, given how long you’ve been stuck inside your own head, there might not be anything in there worth saving, but we’ll see, won’t we?”

He wanted to scream at her, to ask why she hadn’t freed him or how she could sleep at night knowing she did this to people routinely. Still, the anger never left his mind, and all he could do was stare at the slowly setting sun with her in silence.

“You probably think this is the worst thing that could happen to you, don’t you?” She finally asked, breaking the silence. “That an eternity in stone is the most terrible thing. I wish that was true, but even with the sort of quasi-immortality that this awful place grants, there are so many other worse things that could happen. If the shadows were to get you, or you were to make a misstep in the chapel… The are so many horrible places between here in the mazes, but there’s nothing for it.”

She lapsed into silence again. “Well, the less said about that, the better, I’m afraid. The point is that this world was always a monstrosity waiting to happen, and many terrible things need to be resolved to make that happen. You’re starting to show just a hint of promise Simon. Keep it up, and maybe you’ll be able to do more than care about a kill streak or a speed run.”

Simon desperately wanted to rebut any of those points or ask her what the hell she was talking about, but he was still trapped, screaming in his mind. Then suddenly, she was gone. He didn’t know how long she’d been missing, and he certainly hadn’t seen her leave. What he did notice, though, was the shadow that was approaching from his right side.

It was only now that both eyes were uncovered again that he could appreciate that his left eye still had perfectly clear vision. At the same time, his right had begun to blur so severely that all the stars in the sky had little halos around them.

He idly wondered how long it would take for wind and sand to erode his stone eye so that it would be noticed pitted. Still, he wouldn’t have done the math even if he could figure out how as he studied the movement that was getting closer and closer to him.

Even though he could only make out the vaguest outline of the dark, he knew exactly what it was. He’d never be able to forget the basilisk.

For a moment, he worried that Helades had put him up somewhere too high, just out of reach, but that proved to be misplaced as the thing came straight toward him and, in a moment of blessed relief, crushed his skull between its giant jaws, ending his pain.

Ch. 36 - Life After Death After Death

When Simon woke up in bed in the cabin as he’d done two dozen times before, it was with relief that bordered on disbelief. He just lay there unmoving for several minutes as he stared at the ceiling. Finally, he worked up the courage to turn his head, which somehow managed to feel climactic. After that, he flexed his hands and wiggled his toes before he finally tried sitting up. He’d feared that after the years or decades, he’d been lying beneath the sand, he would have forgotten how to move, but that wasn’t the case.

The first thing he did was look in the mirror and consider asking it a question to see if he was still capable of speech. That was a silly fear, of course, and he shrugged it off with a forced laugh as he reached for the wine.

“Fuck that,” he muttered as he decided the last thing he wanted to see right now was his character sheet. His experience was probably at like minus a million right now, and honestly, he was better off knowing. Besides - he was sure his skills had dropped since he hadn’t used them in such a long time, and that would probably hurt more, given how much he’d suffered to improve.

Instead, after he took a long drink, savoring the lost sensation of taste that had been restored before trying a bit of the food and reveling just as much in that. Intellectually he knew the bread and cheese he had was mediocre at best, but that didn’t stop it from tasting amazing in the moment. “Well, what now?” he asked himself once that was done.

From here, he could see all the gear he usually took on his quests into The Pit, but that was the last thing he wanted to see right now. There was no way he was going down there right now. Honestly, he wasn’t sure he was going to that deep ever again. As far as he was concerned, level twenty was a no-go zone. Level six might be, too, honestly.

He wasn’t sure he had it in him to be a zombie or statue again. Getting stabbed to death or dying of exposure was fine. Normal deaths could be painful or humbling, but the crazy ones where he died and kept living? He was completely over it.

Simon looked around for literally anything he could do besides gearing up for a fight. He opened up the dresser and saw nothing of interest. Still, in the top drawer under a stranger’s small clothes, he finally found something promising: a handful of fishhooks. At first, he didn’t realize what they were because they were made of bone, but eventually, his brain decided that was the only thing they could be used for. He looked around the room for a fishing pole or at least a little string he could tie to the spear.

Fishing would solve nothing, but that was precisely the point. Right now, the last thing Simon wanted to do was solve or fix anything. He just wanted to be for a while and remember what that felt like.

Fishooks in hand, he went outside with nothing but his dagger, waterskin, and a little food. He didn’t recall there being a shed or anything, but he hadn’t exactly looked for one, so anything was possible. A quick look around showed him that there was no shed, but a few tool pegs were built into the back wall of the cabin.

There he found a shovel and an axe meant for chopping down trees instead of the one inside that was obviously meant for chopping up monsters. Above those, though, just below the eves where he almost missed it, was a simple wooden fly-fishing rod. It lacked a reel or any other fancy bits and pieces he was used to, but it had plenty of line and looked like it would do the job.

While Simon walked to the part of the stream he thought was the best place to do this, he contemplated the pole. It looked so like his grandfather’s that for a long time after he sat down in the shade by the water, all he could do was look at it and remember what the old man had tried to teach him before his PSP had monopolized his attention. His parents had used the man as a free babysitter for years. Still, Opa, as he preferred to be called by his beloved grandchildren, had always tried to get him to take an interest in being outside more.

At the time, he figured it was pure perversity: the kids wanted to be inside watching TV, so why not take them fishing, hiking, camping, or literally anything but sitting on the couch. “He was probably just trying to keep me from getting fat,” Simon said with a wry smile.

His grandfather had been a strange guy in a lot of ways. As Simon turned away from the bittersweet remembrances about how old-fashioned the man was, he was as surprised as anyone when he looked down and found that he’d tied the Palomar knot without even looking.

That made Simon smile. “How the hell did I manage that?” Simon asked himself as he baited it with a small piece of cheese before making a half ass cast into the water.

After that, he just waited. After all - the fishing itself didn’t really matter. It was just something to do. All that really mattered was sitting in the shade and stretching his limbs or turning his head whenever he wanted. It was something he had no idea he’d ever appreciate, but after he’d lost that ability for longer than he’d been alive, he certainly did.

He spent the next hour or so just enjoying the breeze before a deeper question finally tugged at his psyche. How long had he lay there frozen? How old did that make him now, mentally speaking? Would that have made him as old as Opa? Older? Of course, he didn’t know for sure, but it was an interesting question.

“How old was Opa anyway?” he asked himself, trying to do some mental math. If he was 30, then his dad was like 50, which would have made his grandfather like 70…

“No, that can’t be right,” Simon corrected himself. “He was seventy-something when he died, like what? Four years ago?” He started counting on his fingers when he suddenly felt a pull on the pole that made him lose his train of thought as he struggled to catch it before it was yanked out of his hand.

There was no reel on this ancient fishing pole, so he had to pay out the line and then pull it back in over and over manually, letting the fish tire itself out until he could drag it out onto the land. That took several minutes, but when he finally had the foot-long fish flopping around on the grass, it felt like a more significant victory than just about any of the floors he’d conquered to date. It was up there with the first time he’d killed the skeleton knight, and he whooped in response.

“Take that!” he yelled triumphantly before he moved the flopping fish onto a large rock. He lacked a bucket, so he would hold off on gutting it just now, but once it suffocated, he could put it back in the water until it was time to gut it and take it home. Gutting some strange brown trout species wasn’t exactly something he was looking forward to. Still, Opa had always made him do it himself, and he was sure he remembered how to do it at least, as well as how to tie those damn knots.

Of course, remembering how hard he’d always tried to get out of gutting fish as a child made him think of something that cast a cloud over his otherwise wonderful day. When Opa had died, Simon had been so busy with his guild on the latest MMO that he’d done everything he could to skip the funeral. It had felt shitty at the time, but in retrospect, he felt even worse about it now. Given the number of hours he’d spent playing that stupid fishing minigame in World of Spellcraft, you’d think it was some kind of homage to the old man. It wasn’t, though. It was just him wasting time chatting with online friends and collecting achievements.

That made him look at the fish differently when he finally put it back in the water and cast his life again. How many years he’d wasted as a statue didn’t matter nearly as much as how many years he’d wasted doing stupid shit like that. Not all his time playing video games was a waste, of course. He’d learned a lot about almost anything you could think of. Regardless, nothing he’d learned on his PSP would help him nearly as much as the few lessons his grandfather had tried to teach him while Simon struggled hard to get out of them.

He spent the rest of the day fishing and almost caught two more fish, but they both got away. That was fine, he told himself. How many fish could he really eat before they went bad anyway? It wasn’t like he had any way to fry them. Even though he’d only caught one of the slippery little bastards, this was still the most peace he’d known since he decided to come to the pit.

It was almost sunset when he finally decided to call it a day. He was enjoying the nostalgic moment as long as he could. With a grunt, he got up, dusted off his ass, and then after winding up his line around the pole, he picked up the fish and found a nice flat rock, making quick work of the thing. His dagger was shit for scaling, but no matter how many bones he was going to have to pick out of his dinner tonight, he was determined to enjoy it,

“Thanks, Opa,” he said quietly as he started toward the cabin in the darkening twilight.

The fire would be out by now. He’d forgotten about that, but he should be able to fix that with a half-assed fire spell if he was careful. It was fully dark by the time he could see the cabin by starlight. It was only when he was 50 yards away he watched a pair of goblins skulking out of the nearby forest.

It wasn’t hard to see him. The little bastards had a crude torch with them. That surprised Simon, but mostly because they didn’t usually try to burn the house down around him until the third night. He crouched down on the path and watched them get closer and closer, but they didn’t try to light the wood alight. Instead, they tested the closest shutters.

That at least made sense to him. They weren’t trying to burn the place down yet. These were the ones that had made footprints trying to break into his place in the past. “That mean’s they’re going for the door,” he whispered to himself, rising to his feet as he advanced purposefully. The last thing he wanted were goblins in his house. They smelled like shit.

Simon intercepted them just before they reached the door. The goblin without the torch noticed him and screeched in alarm just before he brought the fishing pole down on the little bastard’s head, hard enough to crack it. The second goblin responded by waving the torch back and forth in his face like a weapon, by Simon wasn’t scared by this. He dropped everything he’d been holding, pulled his dagger, and waited for an opening.

When the goblin swung too far to the left, Simon responded with a vicious kick that sent it flying against the cabin wall so hard that it bounced off it. He was on it before it could rise again, stabbing it until it stopped squirming. Once that was done, he did the same to the first one, making sure it was dead too. After that, he cleaned his knife on the long grass before finally standing again with their torch in hand.

“That’s what you get,” he said, spitting as he looked at the two pathetic monsters.

It was only when he fetched his fish and his pole that he noticed that it had cracked, just like the goblin’s skull from his attack.

“Oh well,” he shrugged. “No more fishing in this lifetime. It was fun while it lasted.”

He tossed the pole aside and then went inside. A little fire and a lot of fish would go a long way to making his life a better place. Besides - trying to go fishing two days in a row would have been boring as hell, right?

“Tonight, I’m going to eat, finish off that wine, and chill the hell out,” he told himself, “and tomorrow, I’m going to find a way out of this hellhole.” He’d tried it before, of course - but he was a different person now.