Death After Death

Simon spent most of that afternoon beating himself up. It wasn’t even about the sword after a while. It was about being fat, the way he’d left things with Elthena, the mystery of his evil twin, starting over again in the Pit, and even the fact that he’d spent 40 lives with so little to show for it. Somehow, despite all the progress he’d made so far, he couldn’t help but feel sorry for himself as he considered how pointless all of this was.

It’s not like you have a limit, he grumbled at himself as he packed and prepared to do this all again. You can do this a million more times if you have to.

Though true, those thoughts didn’t help. Living the same life a million more times was not exactly the silver lining he’d hoped it would be when he’d thought of it. It certainly didn’t help with the idea that he was going to have to face down a vampire and a dragon sometime soon.

Either one was terrifying, and though the dragon would at least end in a quick death. With the vampire, he didn’t even have that guarantee. He was going to need more than stakes to fight such a monster. He needed to come up with one hell of a plan for that.

“Not this run, though,” he reassured himself. “First, I'll deal with the mess I left behind last time; then, I'll deal with future levels.”

Those words rang hollow to him as he considered his plan for what he needed to do next. “What I need to do is not fuck up the timeline!” he said to himself glumly as he considered how easy it would be to do just that while he went out for a walk.

“If I fight the wrong guy… hell, if I kill anybody,” Simon sighed. “Even saving people will have some repercussions. What am I supposed to do for half a decade that doesn’t save or kill anyone?” He wasn’t sure, but he needed to think of something.

Eventually, after a couple of hours, he decided that the best he could do was distance. He could stick to the big cities far from Ionar as he could and just do his best to blend in. “Maybe I’ll become a scribe or a mapmaker or something,” he told himself, trying to find alternatives to the mercenary and healer paths that had been his favorite for so long.

With that decided, he kept himself busy until sunset. That night, in bed, he tossed and turned rather than getting any real sleep. So, eventually, sometime after midnight, he got up and dressed silently in the dark. He could stay here for days, but there wasn’t any point to that. Not when he knew where he was going next.

When Simon was ready, he skipped the torch and spoke a word of lesser light, making his flanged mace glow a pale blue-white, not unlike a glow stick. Then he descended through the trapdoor. It used to lead under this house to some point in the future where he would have to deal with the rats, but now that level was gone, and instead, it led to the skeleton crypt.

This was a place he knew well. There were always some minor variations, but thanks to his struggles with the Blackheart, he had a pretty good idea of where he was in the timeline, and he knew exactly where he was in the wider world. He was about six years before the volcano exploded and about three before the old version of him went to Ionar, directly beneath the graveyard at Kawsburl.

It wasn’t the nicest place, but that didn’t really matter to Simon. He wasn’t staying long.

Once he was on the stairs, he closed the trapdoor behind him. Then, once he was satisfied that the portal that had brought him here had dissipated, he tried to reopen it. It was stuck pretty good. For a moment, he thought he would have to blow a word of force on it, even though the very last thing he wanted was to leave the entrance gaping open for anyone to find. That will definitely screw up the timeline, he reminded himself.

However, after a few tries, it opened in a shower of earth to reveal the short shaft he remembered from his last visit. The house hadn’t yet been built over the top of it, so instead, he gazed out into the sunlit sky.

He closed it immediately. Not only did he not want to leave until dark to avoid drawing attention, but he also had no money. That meant he needed to gather what gold and silver he could from the baubles and relics in the tomb.

“Cheer up,” he told himself as he turned back around and descended the stairs, “This is what you’re going to have to do every time until you find a better source of cash.”

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When Simon started to kill the dead warriors in this room this time, he didn’t try to set a new speed record. He didn’t even do his best to be graceful and efficient. Instead, he just used it as a particularly vicious game of whack-a-mole to work out his frustrations as he turned the lesser skeletons into bone dust and splinters.

When the death knight finally arose, Simon didn’t even bother to draw his sword like he usually did. Instead, he parried a few of the blows, and then when the knight got a little overextended, he tripped it, pushing the monstrosity down to the floor and crushing his head with his boot.

“Thanks for the sword,” Simon taunted as the thing ceased moving. “It worked great.”

For a moment, he really wanted to rip open the thing’s breastplate and crush the Blackheart, too, but he didn’t. At a minimum, that would reset a couple of levels. It might reset half of them. It was something that he needed to do eventually, but not until he’d resolved things in Ionar.

None of this was the hard part of the level, though. He’d beaten these guys dozens of times now. Now, he needed to use lesser words of earth to scrape off the thin lairs of gilding on the grave goods of the men he’d just killed for the second time.

That wasn’t hard. It only took a few minutes of searching before he had a handful of coin-looking objects, even if they lacked the details. The only problem was that those weren’t going to be enough.

Simon didn’t have to find enough cash to live the rest of his life on down here, but he needed enough to travel and establish himself. That wasn’t just going to happen on its own. I’m going to need more, he eventually decided as he looked at the locked gate. He knew exactly where he was going to get it; he just didn’t know how he was going to get there.

He stood there for several moments contemplating how best to do that. His first option was to use a word of greater earth to try to dig around it. It seemed straightforward. It might require several spells, though, and I don’t want to sleep here to recover if I don’t have to, he argued.

Instead, after examining the rusted wrought iron bars, he decided that simply knocking the gate over might work. “The portal is in the doorway itself,” he reasoned. “So if I push that aside, along with the partition it's attached to… well, that’s not going through the portal, now is it.”

Simon smiled at that, feeling like he’d outsmarted something. Then, he gave it a shot. “Gervuul Oonbetit!” he shouted, visualizing the force focused around the edge of the thing, where it was anchored into the stone of the cavern. The whole thing gave like crumpled tinfoil and landed in a heap on the dusty stone with a terrible racket.

Simon paused a moment to see if that triggered any further dead to rise, or worse, for human watchmen to see what had happened, but only silence lingered. While he stood there, he realized that he had what was effectively a working gate that he could transfer anywhere now if he so desired. For a moment, Simon thought about taking it with him but laughed when he imagined dragging the thing around the world.

“What would I even use it for?” he chuckled as he stepped over it.

Simon descended into the lower level, curious if the men that were buried here would rise to fight him as well. They hadn’t last time, but then, when he’d discovered this last time, the Blackheart had been long gone.

He didn’t have to wait long for the answer. As soon as he pulled a gold chain off the body of a dead man, he started to rise. Simon responded in kind and put him right back down with his mace. He then spent the next few minutes doing the same with everybody in there.

None of them had a tenth of the strength of the knight upstairs, and he moved to put all of them down without a second thought. Unfortunately, his endurance was no longer what it had been a few days ago. Even as an old man, he had more steel in his spine than the original version of Simon, and as the fight went on, he started to slow down visibly.

I should have rested, first, he cursed himself as his swings became more desperate, and his few remaining enemies started to close in.

Eventually, it was only his shield that was keeping his head on his shoulders since blocking required much less effort than dodging with his current weight. For a minute there, he thought these guys might take him out. It was only the embarrassment at the idea that allowed him to power through the last few enemies. Afterward he all but collapsed onto a sarcophagus to sit and rest, chest heaving from the effort. After that, he began to gather more of the spoils.

Simon felt a little bad robbing the graves of brave warriors, but he knew they weren’t going to be doing anything with it. He had a much better idea of how the afterlife worked than most, and these souls had long since moved on to what he hoped was a better place.

Simon spent hours in the crypt, but only because he didn’t have anything better to do. He’d already searched this whole place for secrets, so he wasn’t too concerned with those. He just wanted to make sure he didn’t leave behind anything that was useful.

When he checked on his situation hours later, it was night, so he rose up from the crypt as quietly as he could and covered up the entrance with soil to hide it. Then he headed off south. He’d originally been planning to head off north, but after remembering what poor shape he was in, Darndelle seemed to be the better option for now. He was much closer to it. He could spend some time there, at the city on the crossroads, and then go north once he’d finished searching their libraries for useful information.