Death After Death Ch. 90 and 91 (Patreon)

Ch. 90 - How You Say It

The grimoire’s cover was burned badly enough to be unrecognizable, but the pages were barely singed at the edges, so the whole thing was readable. Simon breathed a sigh of relief at that, and using the minor word of light, he briefly inspected a few passages to see if anything had changed, but it looked the same as he remembered it.

Once he was satisfied with that, he investigated the golem’s runes. And found them to be largely readable but not completely comprehensible. The thing seemed to be powered by a large compound word that he didn’t truly understand and couldn’t quite bring himself to pronounce. It was very similar in that respect to the unidentified rune that powered the icy sword on his hip.

They weren’t the same, though. Simon spent several minutes comparing the two to make sure that was the case. Both of them were several times larger than any of the other runes on either object and resembled a knot that was like a long compound word, but it was hard to say for sure. He just…

Simon shook his head to clear it. Then he looked through the smaller runes for any words he didn’t already know. There was Zyvon, which was what transferred the power from whatever the large rune was to the spell itself, and these were connecting runes that didn’t have a direct literary meaning. This one he couldn’t say, but he knew it regulated the strength of the mana going through it. It was a mess. He would have thought that something this complicated would use much different pieces than he was used to, but instead, it seemed to use the same parts in a much more complex way.

The part that he found most interesting was the Hyakk rune, though. It was central to the whole thing, but in his experience, it had always meant healing. Here, though, in the context it was being used, the rune meant life more literally.

“Just how much are these things open to interpretation?” he asked himself in annoyance. “A circuit board or a line of code doesn’t need to be read in context, but if these things are more like a haiku, then I’m fucked.”

Every time he felt like he was starting to understand the magic system of this place more, he came across some new wrinkle that had put him back on his heels. Now, at least one rune in his collection could be used in multiple ways but were there more lessons to be learned here.

Apparently so, he decided. After going through the larger chunks of rocks he’d shattered off of the golem’s rune circuit on the floor, he found an entirely new rune he didn’t have in his collection. Vosden, huh? An earth rune? That’s interesting.

He traced it several times in the dust to be sure he was getting it right from the three chunks of limestone, and it was only then that he whispered, “Aufvarum Vosden,” as he touched his drawing of the rune. It instantly carved itself into the floor like it had been done by a craftsman with finger paints. It wasn’t the cleanest, and he could have probably done a better job with a chisel, but it was interesting, that was for sure.

What he wanted to do immediately was summon the mirror and record all of this, but his water skin was empty, and there was nothing else that was reflective in there.

“I could make a pool of my own blood and then heal myself,” he said with obvious distaste. “That’s what a real warlock would do, but fuck that.”

Instead of becoming a ghoulish weirdo, he found some scorched wood and copied the golem’s sigils into a blank page in the warlock’s tome. When he did so, he was careful not to actually connect them all. He didn’t think he could actually bring the book to life by accident, but he wasn’t about to risk it.

Once that was done, he took a lunch break and reflected on all that he had learned or thought he had learned, and then made his way up the stairs to see what awaited him.

“Is it going to be a re-do of the swamp or the desert, or will it be something brand new?” he asked as he opened the door and came face to face with a graveyard.

“Yeah, that’s definitely new.” He tried to imagine how the ice level might look unfrozen or the swamp level might look if someone had drained it and built a city in its place, but neither seemed to be the case. Instead, he was now in a place he’d never been before. “Welcome to level twenty-one!”

He stepped out of the dusty cavern into the chilly night and took it all in. Above him, the sky was partially cloudy, but he could see enough stars to spot a few familiar constellations along with the sliver of a waning moon. It was nice, refreshing even.

The scenery was less so. In the distance, he could see the silhouettes of some large houses in one direction that suggested that he was in some sort of city, but the ground nearer to him was full of grave markers and mausoleums. These weren’t small tombs, either. Some of them were ornate marble things the size of an SUV.

He was getting some distinctly New Orleans vibes from the whole place. “Yeah, nothing could go wrong here,” he whispered to himself as he stepped onto the stone path that wound its way through the place and started looking for the way out.

There were dozens of larger tombs scattered around him, but probably not hundreds and each one of them could just as easily be the reason he was here as it was the exit. Simon was undecided on whether he wanted to solve this one on his first go. His first priority right now was to go deeper. So, he would just have to see how it went.

He checked out a few of the tombs along the way toward the main gate. Some had beautiful statues or carvings, and all of them had a family name somewhere on them. He saw more than a few ‘loving husbands’ and ‘departed wife and mothers’ along with enough dates that were small enough to suggest an infant or child to last a lifetime, but he saw nothing suspicious. Each of them was locked up tight, and there didn’t seem to be any zombies or vampires lurking about.

Somewhere in the city that lay beyond the cemetery, he heard the sound of a bell tolling, and he stopped to count the chimes. “Midnight, huh? That should be just about the time…”

Simon’s words trailed off as the fog started to boil up right on cue. If this was the witching hour, and he was in an evil graveyard, then he would have expected something like this to happen pretty much exactly. When the fog grew thick enough for groping limbs and haunted faces to become visible, though, he took a step back and drew his sword.

Stepping back didn’t do any good, of course. The fog was boiling up from every grave, and he was surrounded by it. It stayed mostly clear of the path, and he continued to back slowly toward the gate, but as it got thicker, it began to spill over, and soon, there were tendrils of mist in the shape of groping hands that he found himself stepping carefully over as he turned and moved more quickly. The gate was in sight now, and with luck, he could escape this before whatever this was noticed him.

That only worked for a few more minutes, though. The longer he walked, the slower he was forced to go as he stepped between the grasping, vaporous limbs. However, it was only when his foot disrupted one that everything changed. The hand he accidentally stepped on disappeared in a puff of vapor like it had never been.

He saw the change in the surrounding fog almost instantly, though. Until now, the eyes had simply been staring blindly as the faces appeared and disappeared in the ebb and flow of the mist. Now those blind eyes were searching, and the hands pulled back into the fog banks on either side of the path. When they returned, though, they were larger grasping limbs that looked somehow more substantial, and they were reaching toward him.

Simon lashed out with his icy blade, but the limbs that he dissipated only vanished for a moment before more extended out from the growing fog banks that nearly surrounded him. The roiling grey mist was almost to his chest now, and it was clear that it was drawn to life somehow.

“Meiren,” he barked, sending a broad wave of fire at the nearest wall to him. It had been slowly coalescing into a giant, hideous skull, and Simon wasn’t at all interested in seeing what would happen after that.

The fire temporarily worked wonders. Everything that had been about to assault him from that side of the path vanished as though it had never been. However, seconds later new fog was already boiling up to replace it. As he watched that in real concern, he never even noticed the blow from behind that struck at his right arm.

The cold sensation that traveled through his bones then was painful, and his arm went so numb that the strike caused him to drop his blade as he cried out in pain.

“Barom!” he yelled, surrounding himself in a bright white light. This was enough to force the limb that had grabbed onto him to let go, but not much more than that.

The mist didn’t try to touch him through the fog, but it also didn’t stay nearly as far away as it should have, and worse, Simon noticed as he examined his arm and flexed his fingers that the light was fading a lot faster than it should have. A word of light should have lasted for the better part of an hour, but this one would be gone in less than a minute at the rate it was dimming.

That was when he decided to run. Neither fire nor light worked on this thing, and the forms that were surfacing in the sea of mist that surrounded him were only becoming more terrifying. He needed to bounce until he had a better plan of attack than ‘get my soul ripped out of my body and die in terror.’

So he left his sword where it lay, and he ran. He used fire twice more on his way to the gate to give himself some breathing room, but each time he dissipated the mist, it came back faster than before.

It’s probably feeding on the magic itself, he realized, but there was nothing for it. If he used no magic, he would die. If he used magic, he would die later. That was as complicated as it needed to be.

Simon ran toward the main gate and the small temple that adjoined that, still carrying his grimoire, and reached the gate ahead of a growing tide of evil that was swelling behind him and rattled the locked bars. Part of him wanted to knock the thing down or cut through the chain with a word of force, but another part of him said that unleashing this thing into the city where people were sleeping was incredibly dangerous.

Instead, with another blast of fire to open the path, he darted toward the side gate that connected to the temple. Getting off the main path was an obviously bad idea, but it was his hope that at least at the temple, there would be some sort of holy effect, or maybe some hallowed ground that would hold back the tide of ghosts or evil, or whatever it was that was assaulting him.

He was in luck. Around the temple, there were indeed a dozen or so feet of grassy earth that was almost completely vapor-free, and he leaped for it even as the mist tried to grasp his feet. When Simon landed, he darted for the door. He’d been prepared to body slam it open if need be, but it wasn’t locked, and the heavy wooden thing opened into a dark room with a loud creak.

He ran inside and slammed it shut without looking back, and then, after looking around to make sure that nothing else was going to eat him, he slumped to the ground with his back to the door, and with great heaving breaths, he forced himself to calm down.

It was only after he’d done that for several minutes that he noticed something strange. Faintly, in the distance, he could hear a sound he hadn’t heard in a long time: music.

Ch. 91 - Uninvited Guest

Distantly, just loud enough that he could hear it over the sound of his heavy breathing, Simon heard chamber music. Or something like that, anyway. Classical music had never been his thing, but he could make out a couple different stringed instruments and realized that there had to be some kind of ceremony or event going on in this building.

Is it the cause of the fog, he wondered. If it's not, I probably need to warn them, but music in the middle of the night in a creepy old temple? It can’t be a coincidence.

Slowly, he rose to his feet and began to look around. What he really needed was a window so he could look around the city and see if it was somewhere he knew or somewhere else entirely. He didn’t get that, though. Instead, the room was pitch black, and he was forced to use a word of minor light just to get across the room without tripping over furniture.

The building he’d broken into had been a temple, but this looked like an anteroom or a small hall more than anything. “Maybe this is where they view the corpses before they bury them,” he said with a shrug as he moved to the door.

The music was definitely louder when he put his ear to it, but not so loud that he thought it was directly on the other side. So he wanted a minute for his light to fade out in case someone was on the other side, and then he cracked it open to take a peek.

Simon’s caution turned out to be completely unwarranted. On the other side of the door was an empty hallway with several other doors branching off from it. It had clean stone floors and paintings on both walls of rich people dressed in their finest. It definitely wasn’t a dungeon or anything like that, so there probably wasn’t anything nefarious happening.

He breathed a sigh of relief and quietly shut the door behind him as he stepped into the hallway and moved toward the next door. “If I just…” he mumbled to himself.

“Can I help you?” someone asked.

Simon whirled at the sound of the unfamiliar voice and found someone thirty feet away near the other end of the hallway. He’d been expecting a guard, and though his hand was on the hilt of his mundane longsword, he’d refrained from drawing it. That proved to be a good move because instead of a guard, it turned out to be a manservant.

“Oh, I was just…” Simon started to say before trailing off. What was he trying to do? What excuse would keep this from escalating further? He had no idea and eventually settled on “I was just lost and—”

“Oh, you’re one of the party guests,” the man said with a knowing smile. “Do try not to stray from the main rooms then, sir. The rest of the guests are right this way.”

The servant gestured with a bow and then escorted Simon the opposite way down the hallway as he decided the best thing to do was play along. He had no idea where he was being taken, but since the most dangerous thing the man escorting him had was a silver tray, he went with it.

With every door that opened, his worldview shifted. This probably wasn’t the same building he’d started in, he realized. It was too big and too nice for a temple. Where does that put me then? He wondered to himself. Am I on level 22?

Before he could decide one way or the other, the footman opened the third door on their trek, revealing a large ballroom. That was full of people. Well, strangely dressed people.

The entire room was full of men and women dancing or milling about in small knots, drinking glasses of sparkling white wine. At first, he feared he’d stick out like a sore thumb, but it was only after he took it all in that he realized why the servant had made the mistake that he did. Everyone was wearing a costume.

Though famous historical figures he didn’t recognize dominated most of the crowd in the form of heroic warriors wearing paper machete armor and beautiful queens wearing a bit too much makeup, there were monsters, too. Simon saw a few orcs, a couple of zombies, and one particularly good werewolf, but all in all, nothing to worry him.

Those closest to the door glanced at him briefly and then quickly turned back to their own conversations. He might be dressed in dirty armor with a handful of weapons, but here in this place, that looked more like a clumsy disguise than an actual threat.

The people here didn’t seem too concerned about any danger, and as he snagged a wine glass from one of the servants who walked past him, he studied the room as much as the people.

The dresses were lavish, the costumes were decadent, and though he could hear many conversations as he walked through the room, he could only understand a few bits and pieces because of the noise, and they didn’t tell him very much. The fact that he understood every language made it harder at times like this. He could understand every word, but it took a great deal of effort to figure out if those words were even part of the same language.

So, it all blended together, and in the end, he got more information from the room’s decor than the people. One of the portraits on the wall was of old King Wilden. It wasn’t as large as some of the other pictures, which made him think that he might not be the monarch here, wherever he was.

No, Simon realized as he looked again at the mammoth four-foot wide portrait, it wasn’t Wilden the first. It was Wilden the second. The same boy he’d once pretended to be the grim reaper for had not just grown. He’d grown old. Though he bore a definite resemblance to his father, he had more than a little gray in his beard now. Simon had no way of knowing how old this painting was, of course, so the man was likely older still by now. In fact, it was entirely possible that he’d already died of old age.

Simon tried to do the math as he stood there. It had to be at least forty or fifty years since level 3, so if he was on level 21 or 22 now, that was… what, 2 years a level? More? It probably wasn’t that simple, of course, but it was interesting to think that when he got to level 99, he’d probably be 200 years in the future.

I’m a time traveler, he thought to himself as he toasted to no one in particular.

“Oh?” a woman said, walking to his left elbow, “A man dressed as a bandit drinking to the King? Now I have seen everything.”

“I’m not a bandit. I’m more of an adventurer, really,” he said, not looking at her immediately.

“Oh? Hunting for big game perhaps?” she laughed, “The court of Varbaria is a strange place for such things, but then the room is full of more monsters than usual.”

“Monsters, huh? Then what does that make you?” He asked as he started to turn around. He realized then that he’d seen her somewhere.

“Wait, have we met?” he asked as he studied her.

The woman was a little older than him, with dark hair and a mischievous smile. She was dressed as a nymph or a wood spirit or something like that, and her green makeup matched her dress. For the life of him, he couldn’t think of who the woman might be, but still, he couldn’t shake the feeling.

Could she have been a girl in Schwarzenbruck during the zombies? He wondered. Wait, there were no zombies in this timeline. Then who…

“A monster, obviously. As to making your acquaintance, I really can’t say,” she asked in a tone that all but told him he was right. “Somehow, I always thought I’d see you again, but in the same outfit, without aging a day? That’s wild.”

“Listen,” he said, suddenly on the back foot. “I can explain that, it’s just that—”

“Later,” she said. “You keep standing in this room, and you’re going to have a really bad day, okay? We can catch up on old times after what happens next.”

The way she was dragging Simon through the room toward the nearest exit. “Bad day, huh?” he asked. “What’s going to happen.”

Whether she was familiar or not suddenly became less important; if she was up to no good, then he needed to figure out what she was going to do and stop it. When he pulled on her hand to bring her to a stop in front of the open door, her slender fingers slipped free of his grip.

“It’s your choice, Simon,” she smiled. “You can either come with me and find out who I am or stay here and find out what happens next. It’s entirely up to you.”

Then, without a backward glance, she turned and started to walk away, showing off the sinuous way her hips moved beneath her sheer green dress with every step. For a moment, he was torn, and as he stood there, the doorman started to shut the large double doors again.

Simon eventually pushed past him, though, and jogged to catch up to his mystery woman. She knew his name. Something like that had never happened before. Not in the entire time he’d been in the pit, and he had to find out who she was.

If something terrible happened to him, well - he’d just have to stop it, like always. Isn’t something terrible kind of guaranteed to happen, though? He wondered. That was kind of why he was here.

He did a double-take at that and blurted out, “Wait, the terrible things usually happen before I get there, don’t they?”

“If you say so,” she murmured, taking her hand in both of his and resting her head on his shoulder as they continued walking down the hall. “As far as I’m concerned, terrible things have been happening for far too long. I’d hoped that we would have left that behind in Adonan, but I suppose that was never Eddek’s lot in life.”

“Adonan? Eddek?” Simon murmured to himself as he thought about what she was saying. He’d definitely heard both words before. One was a place he’d never been, and the other was a name, probably. Then, in a flash of inspiration, he figured it out, but before he could speak, she interrupted him.

“And to think I thought you were the bad guy when we met on that road so long ago,” she laughed, escorting him out into the courtyard and then further out into the night. "But it turns out that not all monsters have dark shadows, and not all those with more than their share of darkness are monsters. Isn’t that interesting?”

He didn’t know where she was taking him, but at least he knew a little more about where they were. They were in some kind of large manor house or small palace that was either just outside of a larger city or had grounds so large that it might as well be surrounded by wilderness. It was hard to say.

Either way, all the places she was mentioning were to the east of the places he was more used to in the Kingdom of Brin, like Slany and Liepzen. He still hadn’t mapped where all the levels were in relation to each other, but it was a goal of his when he had the time and the resources.

“All this would be a lot more interesting to me if I knew what was going on, Kaylee,” he said, trying to redirect the conversation. “What are we celebrating, and why wouldn’t I want to stick around and find out?”

“Simon, I only meant that that wasn’t your crowd, and if they’d figured out you weren’t a noble, they might have done something harsh to you,” she lied. “After all, I should know. I’m just a maid in a borrowed dress, after all.”

“A borrowed dress, huh?” he said, not relaxing. She was clearly up to something. “Look - I’d love to catch up with you, but you need to be straight with me. You’re going to hurt those people, aren’t you? What did they do to you?”

“Me? I’m just a poor, insignificant maid. I would never dream of trying to hurt my betters,” she laughed as she sat down on a stone bench with a commanding view of the grounds. From here, they could see the lights of the party through the giant picture windows on the front of the house. “I’m glad you could be here to share this moment with me, though. Eddek would have liked that. He spoke about you often in the years after you rescued us, you know. You made a big impression on his life.”

“That’s always nice to hear,” Simon answered numbly as he tried to figure out what was going on here. The grounds were lovely, and he’d love to spend a few hours just looking at the starlit gardens and hearing this woman’s story, but he had a feeling that time was of the essence, and they’d already wasted twenty minutes of it. “So, did these nobles wrong you, or…”

“They wrong everyone,” she shrugged. “That’s their nature. Still - if they hadn’t murdered my beloved Master during one of their little intrigues, it probably never would have come to this.”

“Come to what?” he asked. As if to answer his question, he heard a scream from somewhere inside the party, and as he looked over at the building, he could see flames climbing one of the tapestries inside.

“I was never strong. Not like you or Eddek, but you don’t need to be strong to turn a key and let the wrong person in, now do you?”

Simon recoiled from the woman. In the outfit she was wearing, Kaylee was more than lovely, but whatever had happened to her had long since poisoned her soul and made her some kind of monster.

“I can’t just stand by and let this happen,” he told her as he got to his feet and pulled out his sword.

“And I can’t stop you,” she said with a shrug. “Eddek wouldn’t have wanted that. Go off and play the hero if you like. That does seem to be your role in all this…” She might have kept talking after that, but he couldn’t hear her over the sound of crunching gravel as he ran back toward the manor house and whatever butchery was happening there.