Death After Death Ch. 94 and 95 (Patreon)

Ch. 94 - The Long Way

Some part of him considered killing himself right there on the peer as he watched the ship sail off into the distance. A Quick reset would definitely be faster than waiting around to catch the next ship, he told himself. Still, he resisted, grinding his teeth in frustration as he stormed his way back down the docks to get a drink in the tiny, overpriced tavern.

“Miss your ship?” the barkeep asked as he poured Simon a pint. “The view from up top is good, but maybe not that good.”

“It’s fine,” Simon grumbled. “Now you get a paying customer, and I get a week to enjoy it.”

“A week?” The old man laughed, walking off to chat with some of the locals at the other end of the bar. “At least!”

Simon ignored the man. Instead, he kicked himself for his cockiness. He’d been so sure that he’d been in Helades head about this that he’d walked straight to the damn arch that had taken him to the owl bear level, and there he’d found nothing but a throne room that had long since been picked clean of anything of value, and evidence that someone occasionally used it as a sheep pen. He’d spend hours scouring the grounds and other nearby buildings, looking for an arch that contained a portal.

It was only when he’d walked outside and seen the ship raising its sails that he realized how long his wild goose chase had taken. A quick run down the mountain, which resulted in a close call at one of the sharper corners on the path, got him down the cliffside in ten minutes instead of the hour it had taken him to hike up it, and he arrived at the pier just a few minutes too late.

Even as he watched the thing lumber toward the mouth of the harbor, he was sure he could have made it with the judicious use of force magic. He also knew that wouldn’t have ended well. At night, he might have risked it, but in broad daylight? Well, there was no way people would miss that.

So, instead, he was stuck waiting for the next ship, whenever that was, but he had no idea what he would do from there. All he knew now was that the portal wasn’t here, so it was either at his destination or on the ship he’d just been on. The ship seemed to be the more likely choice, of course, but the world was a big place. He might never catch the ship again.

“Does that mean I’m stuck here the rest of my life?” he muttered to himself.

“Probably not the rest of your life,” the sailor sitting two stools down from him said with a laugh. “But certainly longer than you want! Me, I’ve wanted off that tub for too damn long, and Ionar is as good a place as any for a break. Figure I’ll crew up for the next ship that is not run by Captain Darnis and make my fortune elsewhere.”

“What’s wrong with the Captain?” Simon asked. The only thing he was the least bit interested in was changing topics, but a little insight into the man wouldn't hurt.

“The man’s a bloody fool,” the drunken sailor roared. “Who takes refugees instead of paying cargo? Huh? Answer me that. Women at sea, too! Mark my words, that kind-hearted Captain will run the Sea Seraph aground any day now. This voyage or next will be the last that that fine ship ever takes.”

“Bold words,” Simon said, not knowing how much of any of it to believe.

“Indeed,” the man said, treating his skepticism like a toast. “To bold words and the bold men that wield them. You ask me, you’re lucky you missed that ship. What is it you do anyway, stranger? You look a little well-fed for a mercenary and a little too tough to be a merchant.”

“Simon,” he volunteered. “I do a little of this and a little of that. Let’s just say I come from a distant land, and I’m learning more about the area.”

“Well, met Simon. I’m Arrion, and there ain’t much to be learned around here,” the sailor answered. “If you want to see interesting sights you should stay north in places like Brin or Nigh. Or maybe across the seas in distant Thay. Lots of places more interesting than these parts.”

“If this area’s so boring, then why are you here?” Simon asked, mildly curious.

“Hey - I’m not here for excitement. That’s you,” Arrion answered as he finished his drink and waved for another one. “I grew up on Orvan, and on that little island, there’s only two kinds of professions: those that involve sheep and those that involve the sea. Sailing across the shallows and through the straits under a good captain - that’s more than enough excitement for my life, but there ain't much in the way of stories there.”

“Well,” Simon answered, draining his tankard and opting not to get another for now as he stood. “Never say never.”

That conversation set the tone for his hopefully brief stay at the small port community. Simon had known that this place had fallen pretty far, but to go from the capital of the Kingdom of Ionia to a ghost town of less than two hundred people in a single evening was terrifying.

Simon could see many of the wrecked or abandoned villas in the upper city. Their blue tile roofs and whitewashed walls were forever stained with soot, but at least they weren’t buried under feet of hardened black lava like the rest of the place. The people here had gone from a palace and a constant supply of ships from distant lands to a well, a bar, and a harbor that was slowly filling with silt. Other than the handful of herders and fishermen, the place was just a place to stop on the way to go somewhere else now.

It was sad, but it was sadder still when seen across the sweep of history, and it forced Simon to consider whether or not he might go so far forward as he went down layer by layer that eventually places he knew much better than this one was nothing but ruins. It was a sobering thought.

Simon did some exploring while he waited for another ship and even walked up to the volcano caldera one day to see if there were any clues behind the eruption since it was the one topic that no one in Ionar would talk about. He’d been hoping to find the temple of some elemental god, but instead, all he found were a few steam vents and some bubbling mud.

Nine days after Simon arrived, a galleon named Spindrift Strider made a port call, and both he and Arrion found their way aboard. This ship had much more cargo and many fewer people than the last one, which Arrion assured him was utterly normal for cargo ships of this sort, and once they were underway, they made good time to Abrese. Six days later, and almost two full weeks behind the Sea Serph’s pace, they found the large port town they’d been looking for.

It was a gloomy day, and there was a pall of smoke over the town, which was apparently not unusual given the foundries and forges that were always running, but when they got closer, even before Simon noticed the ship he was searching for listing by the quay, he knew something was wrong. They all did.

“Something bad has happened here,” the first mate said, and after a brief conference with the Captain, they decided they would not be docking after all. Instead, they would go east and inform the powers that be that something terrible had taken hold in the city.

It’s a smart decision, Simon told himself as he started to strip down out of his armor. Normally, he’d applaud it. Some sort of evil was definitely in the town, and whether it was magical in nature or something more mundane like the plague, the streets were all but empty.

But he couldn’t stay away. He needed to get to the ship or die trying.

Simon didn't take much with him when he jumped overboard. His clothes, along with his boots, dagger, and coin purse bundled in a sack, were all he thought he could manage to swim with for such a long distance. He felt naked without his armor, of course, but there was no way he was swimming in tight leather armor.

People thought he was crazy, and one sailor, whom Simon suspected was Arrion, tried to throw him a line, but Simon continued on, and a few minutes later, he was dragging himself up the ladder of the closest pier, exhausted and halfway drowned.

“I’ve really got to work on my swimming,” he said as he coughed up water and caught his breath.

As he made his way down to the Sea Seraph, no one challenged him. There were other boats at the dock, and some of them had obvious crews aboard, but those did not have a gangway down, and they menaced him with weapons as he walked by as if he might try to come aboard.

“What happened here!” Simon yelled. “Where is everyone!”

“If you don’t know yet, then you best jump back in the water and start swimming,” an old sailor yelled. “Because the bloody pox will infect you just the same!”

“Great, another fucking plague,” Simon said to himself as he kept walking. That was no danger to him, of course, but he couldn’t exactly spend weeks or months healing thousands of people as it worked its way through the city.

Why does it always have to be diseases, Simon wondered.

Honestly, it was a dumb question, and he knew it as soon as he thought about it. Disease and war were pretty much what drove all of history, and he was probably going to see a lot more levels related to those things than little caves filled with goblins.

As he crept on board the abandoned boat, he realized his mistake, though. That ship, or someone on it, was almost certainly the cause of this. If Helades had wanted him to deal with the plague or the aftermath, she would have sent him here. She sent him to the ship, which pretty much had to mean he’d had a chance to save all these people, and he’d blown it.

With a sigh, Simon navigated his way across the slightly leaning deck toward the Captain’s cabin. There were bodies here and there, and the smell from the hold was even more foul than it had been before. The Captain’s cabin door opened without issue, and as usual, it unfortunately contained no portal. Instead, it showed him Captain Darnis's well-appointed cabin. The man had died and was lying face down in his logbook.

Despite the gross red sores on the man’s arms, Simon picked him up off the book to see if there were any clues to be gleaned about what might have happened, but the pages were blurred and fused by pus and blood that had leaked out of the slowly putrifying body. The man had been dead for days.

“But I was on here for three days and saw nothing like this,” Simon told himself as he looked around in the room in confusion to see if there was anything else he could scavenge.

Thinking back, a couple of the kids did have small red sores on their bodies, but Simon had merely assumed that those were lice or something similar. Had he inadvertently cured the most advanced cases with fevers but left a Typhoid Mary or two left to spread whatever this pox was far and wide?

He wasn’t sure, but as he borrowed the Captain’s cutlass, he decided it was a decent operating theory to start with. Next time he came through here, he’d be more diligent.

Simon moved to the door. He’d decided that he’d go out into the city and do what he could while he looked for the way to the next level. That’s not what happened. Instead, the door opened to reveal a shadowy forest.

He sighed. “So the portal only appears here if you approach it from this side, or does it only appear if the boat is moored here. Make up your damn mind!”

Ch. 95 - Into the Dark

The portal in front of Simon led into a dark wood. Well, he thought it was a dark wood. As soon as he whispered the words of lesser light, though, he saw it was something else. They weren’t trees he was walking through. They were stone pillars, and what he’d thought was leaf clutter, and branches were actually long spiderwebs. He wasn’t even outside, he figured out after a few minutes of walking. There was no breeze.

That means I have to be, what, underground? He wondered.

“I guess that means I finally get to find my first fantasy race?” he whispered to himself as he tried to search out any signs that these were, in fact, dwarvish and not human structures. He found nothing that said that definitively, though, besides the strange location. There were human sized doors in the structures, and the bones he saw seemed to be about the right size for men. All he could say for certain was that he was lost in a dark place with only dusty ruins and spider webs to keep him company.

Most of the webs that obscured the details of the structures were thin, gauzy things that he could push through easily, but some of the major strands that anchored the larger webs were thicker than a pencil, and a few of the largest ones were thicker than his fingers. He shuddered at that, but it wasn’t enough to make him panic.

Indeed, after a couple of minutes, it became clear this would be an easy level to bypass, at least, if that’s what he wanted to do. This whole place seemed to be a tomb, and in the distance, he could see the bright light of an illuminated doorway. While it was possible that such a thing was a way to the surface or an occupied building of some kind, in Simon’s mind, it was almost certainly the portal to the next level.

While he was still too far away to say for sure, he hoped that would be the case. A nice daylight level would do him some good after all the creepy dark places the Goddess had been sending him for the last few levels.

Still, none of those pleasant thoughts were enough to take his mind off of just how dangerous this place felt. Here and there, he saw desiccated corpses hanging in cocoons, and occasionally, he would hear distant noises that might be the sound of giant spiders skittering across their enormous web.

In his tiny receding bubble of light, though, Simon was alone as he made his way toward the light. Halfway there, he recast minor light, and when he was close enough to see waving stalks of grain through the portal, he smiled. It looked like a nice day, and it had been a while since he’d had one of those.

That was also about the spot where the larger strands started to get really thick. The first two times he went down a ruined street that was blocked with more strands than he could maneuver between, he went back and circled around until he found a clearer route.

Simon tried to tell himself that he had nothing to worry about, but the no matter how well he kept his cool, he could feel his heart beating faster, and he had no desire to find out what would happen if he touched one of these things, and got something’s attention.

I just gotta stay fast and quiet, he told himself as he made his way toward the light.

Eventually, that wasn’t an option, though. Eventually, less than 50 yards from the door, he found a wall of thick webbing that was knotted, ugly, and nearly impenetrable.

Simon thought about burning it, but that seemed likely to attract even more attention than cutting one of the strands. So, after a few more seconds of study, he sliced through the smallest section that would allow him to squeeze his fat all through.

The blade cut through it soundlessly, but as the strand whipped up and out of the way, it sent a warbling sympathetic vibration through this whole section of the web. This, in turn, sent a chill down his spine and triggered a whole cacophony of other skittering and chittering. He’d definitely gotten someone’s attention with that.

Simon bolted toward the door, closing the distance recklessly. It almost cost him his life when a desk-sized spider pounced, landing close enough to knock Simon off his feet.

He didn’t try to get up immediately. There wasn’t time. Instead, he rolled over, thrusting the cutlass up and slicing through the thing's soft belly and cutting it in half all the way to its mandibles even as it tried to bite him.

“Holy shit,” Simon said, unable to rise for a moment as he lay there covered in spider guts as he contemplated the horror of what just happened.

Laying there, it was impossible to see the flickers of movement further into the darkness, so without thinking, he used a flamethrower. “Gervuul Meiren,” he spat, using the words of greater fire to lay down a huge curtain of flame to keep back anything that might be looking to take a bite out of him as he struggled to his feet on the slick ground.

He heard the screeches of pain and the sound of monsters crisping and popping from the heat as he moved to the door, but he didn’t bother to turn around and look until he was actually standing in the gateway.

The view from there made his jaw drop as he watched the scale of the destruction he’d unleashed. Simon had spent more time than anyone would care to admit watching the subsubsubgenre of videos on all of the various apps that he people called ‘oddly satisfying.’ He’d watched people powerwash concrete, knock over dominos, get unlikely hole-in-ones, and every other sort of inane activity there was, but he’d never watched a city burn.

He hadn’t given it a moment’s thought, but it turned out that the spiderwebs that decorated every surface of the cavern and buildings within were extremely flammable, and the fire traveled across them like a spreading wave, burning them off of every surface as it slowly crawled forward in an orange and yellow line of death.

Not his death, though, but the spiders. They couldn’t move fast enough, and he watched dozens burst into flames in sizes that ranged from dogs to cars.

I’m done with the level, he told himself. I can just leave now. He couldn’t, though. The image was too captivating. It gave him a sense of scale about where he was for the first time, and he watched building after building briefly illuminate before the crawling fire moved on, he was left wondering what it was that had happened here. It had clearly been a large city at some point, and even though they were obviously underground, it wasn’t how he imagined that people would build things underground.

It was only when he heard a roar that sounded like it belonged in a Godzilla movie that he looked up. There, he saw something that sent a spike of terror right through his soul. There were many pillars scattered throughout the city that didn’t seem to have a purpose, but it turned out that the 8 largest weren’t pillars at all. They were attached to a giant fucking spider that was the size of an office building, and even as he watched it, it turned its eight red eyes on him and began to turn slowly, one step at a time, in his direction.

Simon slammed the door shut on what turned out to be a small shed. He staggered back in terror. Moments later, a young man wielding a hoe like a club came around the corner and yelled, “I found him, Pa!”

Simon let his gory sword fall from his hand onto the yellowed grass as he raised his hands in a show of surrender. “I’m not here to cause any trouble; I just—” he started to say.

“What in the hells are you doing on our farm, creep?” the boy demanded as he looked at him suspiciously. “If you think you’re getting any more of our chickens, you can—”

“Aaric, that’s enough,” an older man said, coming out from behind the other side of the building. He was only wielding a pitchfork, but unlike his son, he looked like he knew how to do some damage with it. “Don’t antagonize men with swords. Besides, he doesn’t look like the chicken stealing type.”

“You’re right,” Simon said. Slowly raising himself to his feet but leaving his sword where it lay. “I was following some goblin tracks, and I took a good chunk out of one, but he got away from me, and I was just making sure it hadn’t taken to hiding in any of your outbuildings.”

“Goblins?” the man asked, raising an eyebrow. “I haven’t seen any around here in years.”

“Me either,” Simon said, gesturing to his gory outfit. “I forgot how messy the little bastards can be, honestly.”

“Well, pick up your sword. I’ll open the door, and we can—” the farmer said, reaching for the door.

“No, no, no, that’s okay. I already checked and…” Simon protested, imagining that giant dread spider lurking just behind the thin wall of wood, even though he was like 99% sure the portal was closed now.

The man gave him a strange look and opened the door anyway. It was a tense moment for both of them, for different reasons, but the small shed proved to be empty. Instead of goblins or vengeful spider gods, there were just some shovels and other tools that had been decorated with rust and cobwebs.

“Looks like it must have given me the slip,” Simon said lamely.

“Well, we can’t just leave it out there. One goblin turns to ten before you turn around, and we have more than enough problems on this farm anyway,” the man answered as Simon sheathed his sword in a scabbard that was a little too big for it to fit right.

If either of them noticed, they said nothing. Instead, the three of them spent the next hour on a fruitless search for an imaginary goblin while Simon made up a story about being a part-time mercenary and a full-time monster hunter. “Most lords will pay at least a couple pence an ear. More if the people are in a panic,” he assured them.

It was a waste of everyone’s time, but he did get to see the area at least. They traipsed through a nearby wood and several meadows looking for goblin sign, and Simon saw that they had many neighbors scattered along the mild sloping plains with similar sized farms decorated with similarly thatched roofs.

Eventually, when they couldn’t track the little bastard down, Millen had his boy Aaric lead Simon to a nearby pond so he could wash the spider goo off. By then, Simon’s stories had won the young man over, and while he scrubbed and dried his armor and weapon, the boy peppered him with questions about the wider world.

“I’d love to become a warrior and fight for the King, but Father would never allow it,” Aaric confessed. “It’s not like my sisters could do all the chores in my absence anyway. Not with everything there is to do around here on the farm, anyway.”

Both the boy and his father seemed relatively down on the farm’s prospects, but to Simon, everything looked great. The wheat seemed ready to harvest, the soil looked dark and fertile, and both the surrounding forests and the more distant mountains bordered on the picturesque.

They were near cities called Darndell and Mietere, which meant nothing to Simon, but based on the way they’d reacted when he’d mentioned Liepzen, they were a fair distance away from the places he’d explored most.

Still, to him, this looked like a good life, and once he was all cleaned up, and he was invited to stay for supper, that only reaffirmed his earlier observation. Millen’s wife and daughters were lovely, and even though the meal they shared with him was nothing but thin soup and dark course bread, it was as picturesque a family as he’d found in the pit.

That night, they let Simon sleep in the barn, though he found out he had to go in through the side door because the main door led to a spooky nighttime forest when he opened it.

At least I found the gateway, Simon thought as he lay down in the hayloft and tried to decide what he could do to pay his hosts back for their hospitality. He fell asleep before he’d decided on the right answer.