Death After Death Ch. 52-53 (Patreon)

Alright - with this update Death After Death is now 10 chapters ahead!!! Took long enough, right?

This week I will be launching a new 20 chapter ahead tier for Tenebroum (because 80% of my patrons are here for Tenebroum,) BUT I noticed today that Simon is developing a small following himself, and we are getting close to 10 patrons on Death After Death. So I may have to add a [Death After Death PLUS] tier as well. What do you guys think? Any interest in that?

Ch. 52 - The Death of a Dream

Simon felt the fury rising in him, but it was premature, so he held it in check. Everything happened at once in that instant, and it was impossible to completely hold back his anger as the world turned red and shrank to a single point of focus. He felt the rage that his wife would cheat on him, only to watch in slow motion as Freya used the distraction his entrance had provided to wrest her right hand free and stab Varten in the belly with the dagger Simon had given her so recently.

“Simon, this isn’t what it— Fucking bitch!” Varten’s excuses were interrupted by his scream of pain as he cuffed Simon’s wife, sending her careening off on the wooden table before she fell to the floor as limp as a rag doll.

“Gods, I’m fucking bleeding,” he muttered to himself as he pulled the dagger out and tossed it on the ground. “That bitch fucking stabbed me…”

Varten was a practiced duelist, but he only faced foes weaker than himself, so he was always the one doing the wounding and not all used to the sight of his own blood. Simon’s lip curled in pleasure at that. For better or worse, he’d been on the wrong side of a blade dozens of times now. That realization didn’t stop him from advancing on the man with murder in his eyes.

“You’re supposed to be some kind of miracle worker, right?” the noble babbled. “Heal me as the men claimed you’ve healed them, or my father will hear of this!”

For a moment, Simon let that fantasy play out in his mind. He thought of how easy it would be to touch the other man’s bleeding shirt and whisper the magic words that would end his suffering. They weren’t the healing words he knew but the words of destruction. He imagined filling that gaping wound that his wife had left behind with molten pain that consumed the awful young man until his prattling was finally ended forever, and he was reduced to ashes.

Those idle thoughts all ended when he looked to Freya and saw the blood pooling by his wife’s head where she lay on the floor. That was the only thing that saved Vatren as he walked past him to get to her.

“Get out,” he said coldly, not even bothering to look at the man that had done this as he cradled his wife. He could have Varten’s corpse any time he wanted it. So, at this moment, she was all that mattered.

The noble took the opportunity and bolted immediately. That show of cowardice would have made Simon smile if things weren’t so grim. It wasn’t like he could get away. There was, after all, no place in any world that the young Raithewait could go to escape for what was coming for him after he’d hurt the only woman that Simon had ever loved.

“Ä̴̮̦̯́̅ű̸̡̙̩͛f̶͈̦́̃v̸͚̬̀̕ả̷̩͙̼r̶̦̀͊ú̶̪̮̉͝m̷͔͔̃͋ ̷̩̯̈́Ḣ̸̲̗̲̽̚j̸̺͔̓͘͜a̸̢̘̎̋k̶̞̀k̴̤͇̏̑̈́” he whispered, instantly closing the wound on her forehead like it had never been there. Once that was done, he stroked her blood-matted hair as he cried softly. She stirred almost immediately but weakly. Her eyes fluttered open and then closed again, bringing to mind the painful lessons he’d learned after his battles in the last few months: closing the most obvious part of the wound didn’t necessarily solve the problem.

A couple months ago, a man in Simon’s unit had died after his stomach had been ripped open in a battle with goblins. Simon had even healed the man, though it didn’t seem to matter, and it had been a slow, painful death, and Simon was sure that all his magic had done was prolong the man’s suffering. At first, Simon thought it had been caused by internal bleeding. Still, even after a second round of healing, his belly continued to swell. Eventually, they’d had to put him out of his misery because some vital organ was punctured, and Simon didn’t know enough about it to fix it.

“It’s going to be okay, baby,” he said soothingly as he picked up Freya and set her on the bed. “I’m going to find out what’s wrong, and I’m going to fix you. I promise.”

Simon spent the next few minutes studying his beloved, looking for anything that might offer a clue as to what was wrong with her. At first, he thought it might be blood loss because she’d always been a little anemic, and it had only gotten worse after she started to show. Freya’s pulse was steady, though, and it didn’t seem like her neck was broken. It was only when he peeled open her eyelid and saw her pupils were of wildly different sizes that he realized it might be a concussion or something like that.

“Those aren’t fatal, though, are they?” Simon struggled to remember anything he could about his brief exposure to first aid treatment. All he could remember was to keep her hydrated and cover her with a blanket to prevent shock.

After she hadn’t shown any additional signs of recovery for an hour, Simon decided to risk trying to heal her brain directly. A concussion was supposed to be like a bruise on the brain after all, and bruises he could fix, but he felt certain he wasn’t qualified to be poking around in anyone’s brain, and as he whispered. “Ä̴̮̦̯́̅ű̸̡̙̩͛f̶͈̦́̃v̸͚̬̀̕ả̷̩͙̼r̶̦̀͊ú̶̪̮̉͝m̷͔͔̃͋ ̷̩̯̈́Ḣ̸̲̗̲̽̚j̸̺͔̓͘͜a̸̢̘̎̋k̶̞̀k̴̤͇̏̑̈́” he was extremely cognizant that he could make things worse.

A moment later, she opened her eyes again. “Simon… I’m so sorry,” she whispered weakly. “I didn’t but… but he wouldn’t stop, he said that…”

“Shhhhh,” he soothed her, squeezing her hand tighter. “I know this isn’t your fault, baby. I know. It’s going to be okay.”

“The baby,” she said suddenly, trying to sit up, “Oh gods, the baby, is it…”

“It’s fine,” Simon said, trying to keep her calm. “Everything is going to be just fine.”

“It isn’t,” she said, starting to cry. “Simon, I have to tell you... I can’t… I’m not…”

That Freya seemed to be having trouble holding on to what she was trying to say concerned Simon to no end, but he tried to keep the worry off his face. He didn’t know if he’d done something to make things worse or if there was some other internal injury he hadn’t discovered, but it felt like with every word she spoke, she was expending a small part of her rapidly waning strength.

“Be still, darling,” he said, no longer able to hold back his tears as they cascaded silently down his face. “Don’t speak. Save your strength.”

“I didn’t want to, Simon…” she whispered, ignoring his caution, “but I always loved you…”

She smiled lopsidedly after that, but eventually, her eyelids closed again, and no matter what Simon did or said, he couldn’t make them reopen. “Freya. Can you hear me?” he pleaded, panic seeping into his voice. “Answer me, please!”

“Ä̴̮̦̯́̅ű̸̡̙̩͛f̶͈̦́̃v̸͚̬̀̕ả̷̩͙̼r̶̦̀͊ú̶̪̮̉͝m̷͔͔̃͋ ̷̩̯̈́Ḣ̸̲̗̲̽̚j̸̺͔̓͘͜a̸̢̘̎̋k̶̞̀k̴̤͇̏̑̈́” he said again, louder this time, trying to will her delicate mind to return to life one more time, but even that only made her eyelids flicker briefly before they were still once more.

“Please, Helades - just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. Just tell me how I can fix this, and I promise I’ll do whatever you ask of me,” he prayed quietly. “Just let me save my family. Please!”

The goddess gave him no answer, though, so all he could do was sit there, crying over Freya’s body. Her heart still beat, and her flesh was still warm, but he was increasingly certain she’d suffer some kind of stroke that was beyond his ability to fix, and now she was little more than a corpse.

An hour ago, he’d been full of adrenaline and pride that he’d managed to save everyone from the orcs, but right here, right now, none of that mattered. He felt certain that he’d failed to save his wife and his unborn child now, so everything else was meaningless. What use was a city that still stood if the only life that he wanted to save was ebbing out in front of him?

Simon didn’t leave her side for the rest of the day. He tried twice more to heal her without result, and it was just after sunset when he noticed that she’d stopped breathing. He held her one last time, and then he took the ugly, primitive-looking ring from her hand and tied it to a thong around his neck. Then he wrapped her in the blanket we’d spent the last few months knitting for them, picked her up, and took her outside to bury her.

Even hours after the victory over the orcs, the streets were still full of revelers and people celebrating the impossibility of what they’d done. When people saw Simon approaching, they cheered, but as he walked past them and they felt his aura of despair, they fell silent in his wake.

He walked to the graveyard just outside the north gate, and then he located a shovel and began to dig. Several people approached him, including the gravedigger, with offers of help, but he refused all of them. This single-minded focus was the only thing that could keep his mind off the rage and despair that warred within him.

Was this really all his life was now, he wondered? A constant stream of disappointments? Was he just supposed to find the girl again, only to lose her? What sort of life was that?

Simon was in better shape than he’d been in his whole life. He was even more fit than when he spared with Gregor almost every day after being her in Crowvar for almost a year, but even so, digging down foot after foot into the clay soil was backbreaking work, and the exhaustion was all that kept him from breaking down into wracking sobs.

When the hole was at last deep enough, sometime after midnight, Simon arranged her into the pit and stood staring at it for a long time before he could bring himself to fill it in with dirt. He couldn’t help it. He was paralyzed by all the happy memories they’d shared together, and putting that first shovelful of earth on top of her would truly be saying goodbye for the last time

.

It wouldn’t be the last time, of course. He knew that. He could just kill himself and go find her again. He could kill himself a hundred times if that’s what it took to locate her again. But it wouldn’t be this Freya or this life, and as tempted as he was to just lie down in that grave beside her, he gripped their ring that now hung around his neck, and he knew that he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t give in to despair.

So he filled in her grave and then impaled his sword in the earth as a crude grave marker. There was nothing fancy about the steel blade, but any one of the Baron’s men could look at it and see that it was his. Perhaps one of them would make something a little nicer for her in the days to come, he thought, exhausted.

Simon vowed that if he survived what was to come that he would, use the rest of their gold to hire a mason to build a grand monument to her, though he doubted that he’d ever be around to see it. He lay there on the cold, wet earth in a vain attempt to be close to her one last time, and he slept, knowing that some small, vital piece of who he was had been buried in that grave with her.

Ch. 53 - Someone to Blame

Simon awoke from his troubled dreams shivering from the cold in the pre-dawn light. His sadness wasn’t gone, but now it was overwhelmed by something else. His need for vengeance. That need had invaded his dreams, too, and he’d fought barehanded through an entire army of orcs led by the Baron to keep him from getting his due.

Simon regretted letting the murderer escape, but that was only in retrospect. If those precious seconds had let him save her, then he would have counted himself among the luckiest men ever to live. It hadn’t been enough, though, so he was a fool for not leaving his Lord a body of his own to bury.

He doubted that Baron Raithewait would make what had to happen to his heir next very easy, but Simon wasn’t worried. Not only was Varten likely to pass away from the gut wound he already possessed in this primitive world like this, but there wasn’t a force in this world that could keep him from ripping the man’s head off with his bare hands. Simon wanted to watch the light leave his eyes.

So, he rose and stretched and started walking back toward the North gate. It was there he found his way barred.

“I’m sorry, Simon, but I have orders from the Baron,” the night watch commander said, “He said that your services are no longer necessary and that you are free to depart in peace. He also gave me the order that if you try to force the issue, I’m to have you arrested and hanged without delay on the charge of assaulting his son and heir, Varten Raithewait.”

Simon stood there momentarily, considering the words and deciding how best to proceed, so the commander continued. “That can’t be true though, can it? You just saved the city, so there has to be some kind of mistake, right? Heat of battle? Something like that?”

The night watch commander was a good man. Simon had learned that much over the past week while they’d worked hand in gauntlet to prepare the city’s defenses. He had no wish to strike him down, but fortunately, he lacked a sword just now, which reduced the temptation.

“Actually, it isn’t true,” Simon said, letting the other man breathe a sigh of relief before he continued loudly enough that everyone on watch near the gate could hear. “My wife stabbed that lowlife son of a bitch while he was trying to rape her. I just happened to interrupt.”

“That’s terrible,” the older man said, shaking his head sadly. “Well then, surely she can go before the Baron and—”

“She’s dead,” Simon said flatly. “Head wound. Nothing I could do.”

All the men on duty tightened their grip on their swords when they heard that, but none dared draw on him, and they were surprised when Simon walked away.

“Where are you going?” The watch commander called out after Simon.

“I’m not in the mood for further bloodshed right now, so I figure I’ll try the south gate,” Simon lied.

It was still dark enough that climbing the eastern part of the wall in one of the places most damaged by orcs would be child’s play, and that’s exactly what Simon aimed to do. There he found plenty of men staking up bodies of the fallen so they could be burned before they rotted, and he greeted several that he recognized as he walked past. Obviously, the news about him wasn’t widespread because he either got a smile and a congratulations or a few words of condolences, depending on whether they’d seen him carry Freya’s body out to the cemetery.

No one expected him to climb the wall, and Simon was over the top and down the other side in just a few seconds. Only then did he pull his cloak up over his head to hide his face. He’d been in Crowvar long enough for it to start feeling like home, but now it was enemy territory.

The first guard to confront him was a man named Mitchel, whom Simon had never cared for. He was one of Varten’s men and bore a long ragged scar along his jawline.

“You there, halt!” he ordered Simon as he drew his sword. Simon stepped inside the other man’s guard, tripped him, and then stomped on his throat. Then Simon left him in the darkness near the well before helping himself to the man’s long sword and leaving him to suffocate.

Then he walked to the Baron’s keep, where Vartel would certainly be hiding until they were sure Simon was gone. Because the alarm had not been raised, the heavy wooden portcullis was still raised, but he noted that the watch had been doubled to six men. Raithewait keep was an ancient structure built when the centaur Khans still ruled this area, so it was fairly small. It had a four-story tower covered in arrow slits to fire on those that might attack. Still, its fifteen-foot walls protected only a small courtyard and a few sturdy stone structures.

It wouldn’t be enough to save them from what came next.

Chatting with each other, none of the guards noticed Simon until he was almost upon them. “Halt,” one of them yelled, and Simon obeyed, drawing his sword as he stood near the wench and pawl for the portcullis.

Everyone else immediately drew their swords as well. However, some looked less happy or certain about it than others.

“He’s here!” Keldin shouted. “Sound the alarm. He’s in the keep!”

“If I’ve ever saved your life or fought beside you against the goblins or the centaurs, you’re free to leave now,” Simon said without malice. There was plenty of killing to be done, and he didn’t want to add more to that list than he had to.

A few shifted nervously at his offer, but when he added, “Lest you forget, I do have my miracles, and they aren’t just used to save lives.”

“He’s bluffing,” Marill said, though Simon noticed that he was too afraid of the idea to actually take a swing. Bluff or not, Tim took off out of the gate at that point, sheathing his sword as he ran.

“What about you, Garrek?” Simon asked, “You’ve got a family. You don’t need to die here.”

“I’m standing here because I have a family,” Garrek answered with sadness in his voice. “You know the last thing I want to do is fight you.”

As they spoke, the other five men were starting to spread out, and Simon knew if he waited any longer, he’d lose his shot. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said genuinely before shouting. “G̴̝̈́͒͠ḛ̷͕̮̕͘r̵̛̫̮̔͠ͅv̴̿̀͠ͅu̷̝͚̜̎u̴͚͈̎ḻ̸̣̈́ ̸̦̟̜̈́̍M̷̪̹̪̓̓͒e̴̪̎i̴͓̗̔̔͆ͅr̸̹͓͚͐̅è̵̛͇̱̾n̴̩̜̍”

For a minute, Simon had seemed totally prepared and outnumbered, but he quickly reversed those odds by turning all five of the men that were arrayed against him into bonfires as fire rippled out from his free hand to engulf them. Then, with a swift chop, he mercifully beheaded Garrek, leaving the other four men to burn to death before he lifted the pawl on the portcullis ratchet sending the thing crashing down to the ground.

The fortress was a hive of activity now, but no one was quite sure what was happening. Simon used that to charge through the side door into the Raithewait home as they started to bar the main door and send crossbowmen up on the walls looking for who was attacking them.

That left Simon entirely free to approach the bedrooms of the Baron and his boys. On his way, he only encountered a single guard who was smart enough to shoot Simon as soon as he saw him coming but not smart enough to draw his sword as Simon staggered forward with an arrow in his shoulder and ran him through.

“You never get enough time to shoot twice with one of those things,” Simon grunted as he yanked the quarrel out and healed himself.

Once he’d regained the use of both of his arms, Simon reloaded the weapon and continued down the hall. Shortly before reaching Varten’s room, he found the Baron standing in his sleeping gown, holding a dagger.

“I understand that you’re angry, Simon, and I’m willing to pay to smooth over this misunderstanding,” the old Baron said calmly like he was negotiating a business deal. “But if you want to kill my son, you’re going to have to go through me, and—Uhhnnnn.”

“I’m surprisingly okay with that,” Simon said, pulling the trigger and releasing the bolt into the Baron’s chest.

He would probably have killed the old man anyway, but listening to him talk about how gold might be used to clear the slate after what his son had done just stoked the fires of Simon’s fury that much higher.

The Baron’s weapon clattered to the stone hallway, and his body would have joined it, but the quarrel had pinned the slender old man to the wooden door behind him. He weighed too little to break the shaft, so he hung there painfully, gasping for breath.

“You should have just let me kill him,” Simon said as he walked to the Baron and moved to open the door. “Son or not, you know he deserves this.”

Predictably, the door was barred from the inside, so Simon shouted. “Come out, Varten! You can’t save yourself, but you can still save your father. If you surrender, I’ll heal him up good as new.”

“Go on, old man,” Simon said as he moved further down the hall to fetch a battle axe mounted on the wall that he could use to cut through the door. “Convince him to save your life; maybe he’ll listen.”

All Baron Raithewait could do was cough up blood as he gasped. The man’s mouth moved, but no words came out. Simon didn’t care either way. He just started hacking into the door jamb with the unfamiliar weapon. Trying to cut through the door itself would take longer than he had, but cutting through just enough to create a gap he could shove his sword through to lift the bar was doable.

“Here’s Johnny!” Simon shouted as he finally damaged the door enough to force it open. No one but him would get the joke, but he didn’t care. He laughed grimly as he found Varten lying in bed. The man was still bleeding, but he held his sword in his hand.

“Your bitch of a wife cut too deep for me to be able to fight you properly, I’m afraid, but if you’d like to heal me, I’d gladly allow you to join her in death,” the spoiled young noble spat.

“If that were an option, I would, but I don’t want to fight you; I want to murder you in cold blood just like you killed Freya, you fucking prick,” Simon said as he raised his axe and moved purposefully toward the bed.

“She wanted it, you know,” Varten said, smiling like the snake he was. He didn’t even bother to lift his sword because he knew it wouldn’t do any good. “We were at it all the time while you were away. In fact, the baby probably wasn’t—”

The noble’s cruel words were cut off abruptly as Simon buried eight inches of steel axe blade in the other man’s skull while he yelled in rage. His scream continued even after he let go of the handle, and Simon was surprised to find that his act of righteous vengeance brought him no comfort. For a moment, he considered pulling the axe out and healing him just to kill him again. However, he realized that would be too far and stopped himself from seriously considering it.

Instead, satisfied or not, that’s when he turned around and found Varten’s younger brother standing there in his night clothes with a sword drawn. On instinct, Simon moved his hand to the hilt of his sword but stopped himself. In all the time he’d been here, Erik had seemed the least cruel of all the Raithewaits. He was also only sixteen, so there was absolutely no reason to kill him.

“Are you going to murder me next,” the boy asked him with a trembling voice as he looked like he was about to piss himself.

“Nah,” Simon sighed, “I feel like I’ve done enough killing today. How about this. You escort me to the gate, so none of your guards decide to be brave, and then after that, you can rule the city of Crowvar however you want. Sound fair?”

“My guards?” the boy asked in confusion. “So I’m to be a hostage?”

“If you like,” Simon said, moving toward the shell-shocked young man and carefully taking his sword. “But after that, you’ll be the Baron of the whole region. Maybe you can do a better job than your brother would have.”