Death After Death Ch. 46-47 (Patreon)

Seven Chapters ahead! Just three more weeks at this pace and i will fall over dead (or finally slow down as we reach 10 chapters ahead. One of the two!)

Ch. 46 - A Walk Through Hell

Freya tried asking him questions several times as they navigated the small, slippery ledge through the vile sewers, but each time Simon shushed her. He’d already done his best to explain to her that these corpses weren’t zombies, but she obviously didn’t entirely believe him, and he didn’t have the time to explain it to her again. He couldn’t even hold her hand because he was carrying his crossbow in his right hand and his sack in his left.

It wasn’t that he wanted to blow her off, of course, but this was exactly the wrong place to get distracted. Even if that awful worm was almost always in its stack of bodies if it ambushed and paralyzed them, he would have to lay there for god knows how long and watch the vermin devour his girl.

He’d rather be a zombie again than be forced to witness that. Of course, he’d also rather not have to cast a fire spell if he didn’t need to. He’d already freaked out Freya enough, and the last thing he wanted was to send her screaming into the night at the first chance she had to escape from him.

Just before he rounded the final corner where he could usually see it, he whispered to Freya. “Stay calm. The thing I was talking about before? It’s right there.”

No sooner did he round the corner than he saw the pale wiggling thing goring itself on the bloated body of a young man. It didn’t see him yet, so Simon carefully lined up his shot. That plan was interrupted when Freya took a look and screamed bloody murder as soon as she saw the slimy, tentacled thing devouring corpses.

It charged them immediately after that, and Simon waited until it was much closer than usual before he put a bolt in its belly just to be sure he wouldn’t miss. For a moment, that felt like a mistake as he thought the thing might just keep going, and he almost threw his crossbow in the water, so he could free a hand to draw his sword. Fortunately, that proved unnecessary, and with its usual screech, it turned and fled back into the pile of bodies it had built by the main sewer grate.

“No way I’m getting any closer to that thing! What in all the hells was that?” Freya asked as she resisted Simon’s efforts to drag her forward.

“It-it’s a carrion crawler,” Simon said slowly, wishing he could take the time to reload his crossbow, but he had nowhere to set down his bundle. For a moment, he really missed the fine backpack he’d had made the last go around, and he wondered how adventurers ever did without that sort of thing. “And it’s not really interested in us. It eats corpses.”

“So if it kills us, then it will become interested?” she asked skeptically.

“Well, when they’re wounded, they tend to steer clear, but if we stick around too long….” Simon let his words linger, both because he didn’t want to say anything too awful and because he’d had to suppress his need to be a know-it-all and explain to her that they would be perfectly happy to paralyze the two of them and then devour them both while they were frozen in place.

Eventually, she accepted the need to move, which caused a dilemma. Simon wanted to send her up the ladder first, but he feared what would happen to her if he wasn’t physically holding the portal open. So ultimately, he climbed up, set his bundle down, and then sat in the opening with his legs dangling while he helped her up. They’d been intimate several times now, so there shouldn’t have been anything embarrassing about touching her. Somehow, though, the combination of closeness and coldness that was currently between them made the whole thing incredibly awkward.

Still, she’d made it through, and the carrion crawler hadn’t killed them, so what else could they ask for?

“Where are we now?” she asked in a voice full of wonder while he was bent over, reloading his crossbow. Her words reminded Simon she’d probably never seen someplace tropical or even heard the word jungle in her life. Though her reaction to a desert might have been just as extreme.

“We’re in a warmer sort of place that…” Simon’s words trailed off as he looked up and saw her approaching the vine-covered wall, intent on one of the large orange and pink blossoms that dotted the vine-strewn masonry.

“Be careful!” he yelled, dropping everything he was doing and running to her so that he could drag her away before she got too close. He didn’t think that was one of the blossoms that launched the darts at him, but he couldn’t be sure.

“It’s just a flower,” she said, shaking him off. “What the hell is your problem. You act completely calm when monsters charge at us, but you freak out when it’s a flower? What the hell!”

Simon shook his head. He tried to see her point, but really all she was showing off was her own ignorance, and he wasn’t about to explain it to her right now and fuck things up even more.

“Look, I’ll tell you later when we get somewhere safe, but first, we have to climb that!” he answered grumpily as he pointed at the largest ziggurat in the ruined city.

“What in the name of the gods is that thing?” Freya asked. “It’s like a mountain but shaped very strangely. Did people make that?”

“Probably,” Simon answered. “I’m not really sure.”

They took a small break by the river so that they could both drink plenty of water before Simon filled his skin back up, and Simon’s heart fluttered as he saw her lovely pale skin in the sunlight for the first time. That made him smile. They’d never actually been outside together before.

Did that make this their first date, he wondered. The idle thought made him smile. What a terrible first date that would be: a walk through a sewer filled with rotting corpses and a city slowly being devoured by plants. Real nightmare fuel right there. It kind of made him wonder what sort of relationship could be built on such a fucked up foundation.

This time when they set off again, he had her take the lead. He’d never seen anything dangerous in this place that wasn’t plant-based, so he felt like she would be safest where he could keep an eye on her. After that, things went fast, and eventually, the icy distance between them thawed somewhat as he explained to her how some parts of the world were warmer than others and that in the warmest parts of all were jungles, which were like forests but filled with far more life.

This time when she peppered him with questions about all the new sights, he didn’t mind answering. He did his best, of course, interpolating what he remembered from history class about the Mesoamerican civilizations, but ultimately he ended up telling her more about Tehouacticcan than he did about wherever this place was. After all - he had some idea of where Schwarzenbruck was compared to a number of other cities and portals he had access to. He was even pretty sure that the wyvern ruins weren’t so far from that area just based on the way it looked. He could be way off, though, given that New England and actual England also looked pretty similar.

They took a break when they reached the giant ziggurat and again when they were halfway up the structure. Freya seemed to be in slightly better shape than Simon, but to be fair, she wasn’t hauling an extra thirty pounds of armor and weaponry. When they reached the top, they just sat there for a good long while enjoying the setting sun, and eventually, she laid her head on his shoulder, and he took that as permission for him to put his arm around her as they admired the reds and oranges dancing above the jungle canopy.

“It just goes on forever,” she said

“It does,” he agreed, “Jungles are generally pretty huge places.”

“No,” she corrected him, “these strange portals of yours. They just keep coming one after another, don’t they? I’ll bet there’s another one just past this one and another past that, right?”

“There is,” he agreed, unsure of where she was going in all this.

“And somehow, you don’t just summon these portals or know where they’re going to go, but you already know what’s on the other side, like you’ve been here before.” she continued.

“And if I have?” Simon parried, answering her question with a question.

“It’s… I don’t understand, and I’m not sure if I want to, but… I’m not sure what that says about you, you know?” This time she looked away from the sunset to look at him directly. “You can wield magic and walk through the same moments twice, so does that make you a god or a demon?”

“Neither,” he answered truthfully. “I’m just a man trying to be a hero.”

“Well, you’re my hero at any rate,” she said. He was about to thank her, but when he saw that she was moving in for a kiss, he decided that seemed like a better idea. So, they shared a long, tender moment together.

Afterward, there was more talk, and he told her what he could without confusing things further, but really all he could say was that he was on a quest to help a goddess fix a few things, which seemed to satisfy her. As long as Simon wasn’t in league with dark forces, it seemed that she could tolerate the rest.

Freya was quiet after that. Eventually, after they’d crossed into the next level and found a nice spot to make camp near the edge of ruins, she finally asked a question that had obviously been on her mind for the better part of the day. “Does that mean we’ve done this before?” she asked. “Is all this just a part of your secret quest?”

“This? No, we’ve never done this before, Freya. I-I promise you that,” he said, briefly choking on his words. “I've met you before this, but we didn’t even escape from the inn together. This is all uncharted territory. As to if you’re important to my mission - I honestly don’t know, but I know that you’re important to me.”

She smiled at that, and it was only afterward while Simon was wondering why a cheesy pickup line like that would have worked so well that he realized she’d never seen a romantic comedy in her life. He hadn’t either, of course, not all the way through, but he’d probably listened to a hundred of them in the background while he played his switch in the living room and his mom watched some sappy show. That was a skill that he never thought would come in handy, but as he watched her suspicion melt away while she clung to him, he hoped this might work out yet.

That night they slept near the embers of a fire that he’d actually managed to make without resorting to magic, and between Freya’s body heat and the stone wall behind them to keep away the wind, it was actually one of the nicest night’s he’d had in the wild ever. It certainly beat the chilly trip down from the goblin cave. He was sure that, eventually, he would lose a couple toes to frostbite on that trip.

In the morning, before they started down the mountain, holding hands. There was no trail to speak of, and the way was more than a little rocky. It wasn’t so bad, though. In the distance was another small town on a river, which seemed to be a theme for this part of the world, and it seemed like as good a place as any to take a break before they found somewhere they could put down roots.

Ch. 47 - Kill or be Killed

Progress down the mountain was slow, and by the following evening, they still hadn’t reached the gently rolling plains that would lead to the distant village. Simon would be glad when they did, though. He’d pinned his hopes on it. Not only was it exhausting having to double back whenever they encountered an area too steep to pass, but it took forever as they tried to get down the sandstone bluffs that separated them from anywhere hospitable.

Once, just after noon, they heard the shriek of the wyvern as it soared through the sky. Simon immediately dropped what he was doing and pulled Freya into the shadow of a boulder, where they hid for almost half an hour as they watched the thing soar across the sky. In the end, it was only when Simon saw it flying back to its nest with a goat in its claws that they continued on their way. Though Freya took the rest of the journey well enough, even though her feet were bleeding by the end of the day, thanks to her poor excuse for shoes, Simon couldn’t stop worrying even after they stopped and the sun started to set. All he could see was that wyvern flying back to its nest with her bloody body in its claws.

By the evening, she was noticeably limping though she still hadn’t complained. He wanted to heal her wounds immediately, but he didn’t want her to freak out, so he decided to wait until she went to sleep as they made camp for the evening. That night they didn’t make a fire, but because there was precious little wood on the slopes and because Simon didn’t want a beacon that would attract attention, because there was no real shelter, and he couldn’t help but think that given the slightest provocation that wyvern would swoop down looking for prey and decide that the two of them were the perfect snack.

He didn’t have any idea how far those things ranged when they hunted, but given their size and the number of calories they had to burn every day, it had to be far, and he was certain they’d still be at risk for days until they could make it to the light forest that was still over a day from here, and he had no idea what new dangers would await them there.

“What are you thinking about?” Freya asked eventually, rousing him from his recursive train of thought about all the dangers that they faced.

“How did you know I was still awake?” he asked. They were spooning together for warmth, and she was facing away, so he was genuinely confused.

“If you were asleep, then you would have been snoring,” she said playfully. “When you’re this quiet, usually you’re just worrying about things.”

“The Wyvern,” he said honestly, unwilling to tell her too much.

“It’s going to be okay,” she reassured him. “We’ll get somewhere safe soon. You said so yourself.”

“I did,” he agreed.

They chatted for a while about what he thought would happen next and what they would eat first when they got back to civilization, but eventually, there was a lull in the conversation, and Simon thought that she’d drifted off to sleep until she said, “It’s funny, you know? You spend all your time worrying about what’s going to happen next, but all I can think about are all the terrible things that have already happened.”

“I get that,” he agreed, looking briefly at the Pandora’s box of past traumas in his mind before he decided he did not want to open it again. “But eventually, all that just gets to be too much, and you have to move on.”

“I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to move on from Bre… From what happened in that inn,” she said, in a voice filled with sadness.

“You know, it helps if you talk about it,” he said, not really believing the words. It was something his therapist had always told him, though, and somehow at this moment, it felt right.

“I just… I can’t believe that she would do something like that…” Freya said, “Not really to him.”

“You mean Breanna?” he asked. “She seemed like a real piece of work to me.”

“But you didn’t…” she paused as she remembered. “oh, was this before?”

“Yeah, we met before. Another time.” Simon agreed, not eager to tell his lover too much here. Other women were a sticky situation that he wasn’t used to, and facing a cave full of goblins was less than treacherous in his mind than trying to thread this needle. “She almost got me killed once.”

“Oh,” Freya said, letting the ominous word hang in the air for a long time.

“What did she do to you?” Simon asked, unwilling to let the conversation die in such a precarious place.

“She almost got me killed, too,” Freya said. At first, her words came out slowly, one at a time, like they were being dragged out of her. At some unseen critical point, though, that trickle became a waterfall, and she couldn’t stop. “No - worse. She almost made sure I was turned into one of those things. After the owner turned, she tried to use me as a human shield to save her skin, and we fought and eventually… I had to, you understand, don’t you? I had to…”

“It’s okay,” Simon said, stroking her hair. “I know you did what you had to. Only what you had to.”

Freya was crying now, and that made it hard for him to focus on much of anything else besides how uncomfortable that made him feel and how he could somehow get her to stop, but at least the mystery finally made sense. Every time he journeyed to level 6 and the door opened, it was in the middle of some crucial moment, and so sometimes Freya won, sometimes Breanna won, and sometimes no one won at all. That explained the blood on Freya’s hands and the weapon in Breanna’s whenever he found one of them, at least.

They both drifted off after the sobbing stopped, but it was only when he woke up that he realized he’d forgotten to do something about Freya’s blistered, bleeding feet.

“Ä̴̮̦̯́̅ű̸̡̙̩͛f̶͈̦́̃v̸͚̬̀̕ả̷̩͙̼r̶̦̀͊ú̶̪̮̉͝m̷͔͔̃͋ ̷̩̯̈́Ḣ̸̲̗̲̽̚j̸̺͔̓͘͜a̸̢̘̎̋k̶̞̀k̴̤͇̏̑̈́” he whispered in the dawn light while she still slept softly.

Under the blankets, he couldn’t see the results of his magic, but he was certain that he was successful as he felt the tingle of magic flow through him. Fortunately, Freya didn’t wake up from that, and even after he woke her up and they had the last of their stale biscuits for breakfast, she didn’t say a word about the state of her feet, even though he was sure she knew something was different.

Simon spent much of the next day thinking about the moment she’d described to him last night instead of the wyvern. Did the fact that either option was possible mean that the outcome wasn’t important, or did it mean that one of them was the right answer? Why would Helades have started the level right at the moment? Why not before the fight so he could save them all, or after the fight when Freya had lived.

He had no answers, but when they finally found a trail weaving through the rolling grasslands at the base of the mountains, they made better time and camped at the edge of the wood. They roasted some of the cured ham that night, which was delicious, but Simon spent half the night awake listening for the noise of predators as he realized that the delicious smell of roasting meat had been a terrible mistake in such a wild place. While Freya snored softly beside him, all he could think about was the razor-sharp beak of the owl bear and that he hoped they didn’t range in this wood like they did in the other one he’d traveled in so frequently.

It was two days later when they finally reached the safety of a village, and Simon was careful not to use gold when he paid this time. He struggled to introduce the two of them at the inn where they sought lodging because he doubted that there were words like girlfriend in the world, but Freya quickly handled that. “I’m his cousin,” she said quickly, making Simon wonder if she was intentionally choosing to downplay their situation or not.

“And where you folks traveling from?” the cranky old proprietor asked. “Not from the troubles up north, I hope.”

“No, definitely not,” Simon answered too quickly. “We come from a village to the east, beyond the mountains. Why? Has something happened?”

“We got any number of problems right now to choose from, but none as bad a Schwarzenbruck,” the older man said with a sigh. “If I were you, I’d think real hard about going back the way you came.”

“We might do that,” Simon answered. “We just need to rest a few nights after such a long trip.”

Simon had planned to stay there for three nights, but in the end, they only stayed two. In the end, it wasn’t the lumpy bed or the mediocre food that the place served. It wasn’t even that Freya was acting a little distant. It was that on their second night there, during dinner, one of the newly arrived merchants had a seizure and began to spasm and tremble at the table near the door before he suddenly rose again as a flesh-hungry monster.

Fortunately, Simon was prepared, and no sooner had the creature started trying to tear the throat out of their neighbor than Simon was there to crush the thing’s skull with his mace. He ended up doing the same thing to the man that had been bitten, even as everyone looked on in horror like he was the murderer.

“What?” he said defensively. “You get bit, you become one of them. Those are the rules.”

“How could you possibly know that?” someone gasped.

“Like you learn anything important: the hard way,” Simon shot back as he cleaned his mace on the deadman’s clothes before he grabbed Freya by the hand and pulled her away from the table. “Come on. We’re getting out of here. Who knows how many more of those things are close by.”

The fear in the woman’s face as she relived everything that had happened to her before made resistance impossible. “Where will we go?” she asked meekly.

“Away is the only direction that matters,” he said as they went upstairs to pack their meager belongings.

Simon had considered swiping the dead man’s coin purse, but he thought people might react badly. Once they were out of the inn, though, he had no problems swiping the wagon that the man had come in on, though. Simon had been sitting on the porch enjoying the breeze and the sunset when the merchant had come in earlier.

At the time, the man had seemed a little off, but not I’ve-been-bitten-and-you’re-all-gonna-die off. Simon needed Freya’s help to put the merchant’s horse back in the harness, but after that, they were on their way. She had some qualms about stealing someone else’s property to her credit, but it was this, or walk through the night, and Simon wanted to get away as far and as fast as they could.

“You know, it’s funny,” he said as they started to ride down the dark road to whatever horror awaited them next, “I always thought that in a med… In the midst of a place full of swords and axes, zombies wouldn’t be much of an issue, but it appears I was wrong.”

He’d almost said ‘medieval world,’ which would have been a mistake that was hard to correct.

“Simon,” she sighed. “Even if everyone in that room was armed, you were the only killer there. Most people just want to live. They don’t go around looking for things to fight like you.”

It was an interesting statement, and a few lives ago, he probably wouldn’t have gotten what she was saying, but now, he definitely did.