Death After Death

Chapter 107: Burning Questions

As the strange memory that wasn’t his own faded, Simon found himself alone on the dark floor of the cave. He wanted to thank Helades, but the goddess that had given him such terrible, brutal insight was gone, and he was, along with his self-loathing, for not having done more to make Freya happy.

The whole thing had ripped open the infected wound that was her passing, and right now, it hurt almost as much as it did in that terrible moment. That it might heal cleanly this time did nothing to stop the sobs that wracked him for the next few minutes as all the emotion and the poison poured out of him in the privacy of that foul cave, with nothing but the sightless eyes of the dead ogre to see his shame.

He might have lingered there for hours, wallowing in his self-pity, but eventually, the minor wounds on his back that had been inflicted by the spray of stone and bone shrapnel began to ache, and he was forced to speak a few words of minor healing to address them.

That one small act was enough to remind him of where and who he was. He had infinity to mope if he wanted to, but that wouldn’t get him out of the Pit.

“Just what, seventy levels to go?” he muttered as he forced himself to his feet. “I fuckin’ wish. More like eighty I think. Maybe ninety. It’s hard to say.”

As Simon groped his way toward the light, he vowed to make a proper accounting on his next trip down through the levels and use the mirror to make sure that he knew exactly how many levels he’d completed, even if that seemed to be occasionally subject to change.

Still - he was pretty sure he’d completed at least ten percent of them. That was something, right? Thirty percent explored, ten percent completed? Yeah, he could live with that.

As Simon got closer to the entrance, he could see the dried gore and half-devoured corpses that decorated the place and took solace that the monster he’d killed, however crudely, would never trouble these people again. He wondered what people would make of the stone-entombed corpse when he found it, but that was a riddle for someone else.

“I probably should have checked for treasure or something,” he mused as he approached the entrance, but he just shrugged the idea off. A careful search of that place would be disgusting. And he wanted no part of that. Fresh air was the real treasure as far as he was concerned.

Not having a sword wasn’t a good feeling, of course, but he could deal with that later. Even though his throat burned, he was good for at least a couple more words of power if push came to shove.

Outside of the cave was a steep slope and a pine forest, with only a single winding road climbing up the side of the mountain to indicate that civilization had ever reached this far. There were no threats, though, beyond the chill in the air, and his lack of any equipment.

He paused for a moment, both because he was pretty sure that this was the boundary to level 31 and because the smart move here would probably be to go back and pick through the corpses of the dead to look for useful supplies. For whatever reason, Helades loved to put the entrances and exits close to the goal. Sometimes confusingly so, and cave mouths and doorways seemed to be her favorites.

He wasn’t going to go back, though, only forward. So if he got caught it a snow storm, or whatever, and died, it was what it was. So, after a few minutes, he started down the slope, and careful to mind the poor footing, he slowly made his way down to the road.

When he was far enough away, he looked back up and decided that this was definitely the next level. “There’s no way that giant ogre was crawling in and out of this tiny ass entrance every time he got hungry,” he said to himself as he worked through the thought.

When he reached the trail, he examined the signs of foot traffic. It was clear to Simon that despite being deserted now, this road saw a lot of use, or at least it had recently. It was a sandy thing that didn’t hold prints well, but he could see that most of the traffic had gone uphill and sighed at that. He’d been hoping for a walk downhill.

After an hour, he missed his water skin more than anything, and his scratchy throat began to eat at him. After two, he was forced to deviate from his path just to devour the thin trickle that was a mountain stream coming from somewhere high above him on the slope. It wasn’t much, and he had to use a word of lesser cure afterward just to make sure he hadn’t just poisoned himself with Giardia or worse.

Two hours later, though, there was nothing to slake his thirst, and until he smelled the faint hint of wood smoke, he’d given real thought to casting the word of ice just to have something to drink as it melted. Simon spent the day regretting his thought that the portals were always so close together. Clearly, Helades had heard that and decided to punish him for that little irony.

Even if that was true, though, he still couldn’t be mad at her. He was still too grateful for the closure she’d given him after all this time.

Despite being reduced to his boots, the clothes on his back, and only a few remaining coins in his pouch he felt freer than he had in a long time, but it was tenuous thread, and he was very conscious that some orcs or beast men suddenly rampaging down the slope would be more than enough to put a quick end to him.

He didn’t find the village until nightfall, and it was the lights and sounds of the town’s inn that lead him there down the dark mountain road. The whole thing was nestled in a valley that he couldn’t see much off, but given everything else he’d seen that day, he was sure that was nice.

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Simon had been expecting to get stares when he showed up looking like a vagrant, or when he paid for a drink with gold, but he didn’t even make it that far. The inn was packed. It was overflowing. Men were drinking in the courtyard. People were sitting on the porch, the horse railing, and even sleeping in the hayloft of the stables.

“What in the hell is going on here?” Simon asked a couple of decent enough looking guys who looked halfway to plastered after he’d taken it all in.

“Oh, you’re not here for the hunt?” the mustached one grinned, leaning forward.

“Course he ain't,” the dark-haired man sitting next to him said, burping loudly. “You think by this point you don’t recognize every single member of Anias’s entourage, even the bloody whores?”

“Sorry about that. Don’t worry; this is just one last celebration before we’re off. We’ll be heading out in the morning, and you can have your sleepy little village all to yourself again.”

“What hunt?” Simon asked. If they thought he was from wherever this was, then so much the better. He had no intention of correcting him.

“What, hunt, he says,” the first man laughed. “Anias? Sir Anias? The Red? How can you not know what it is we’re hunting when you hear a name as storied as that.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” Simon answered truthfully with a shrug.

“Bah! Country bumpkins, the lot of you!” the second man said, gesturing so wildly that some of his beer escaped his glass, sloshing on the ground and reminding Simon how thirsty he was. “How could anyone not have heard the story of the Red Knight!”

They spent the next hour regaling him with stories of the man and his bold tactics that had seen him kill any number of monsters, including an honest-to-God dragon. That was interesting, and Simon would love to meet the man to determine just what sort of magic it was he was wielding to make that possible. Even more than the dragon, or the knight, or even what it was they were doing here, he was interested in getting a drink, so when the waitress came around and handed him off a tankard, he was basically a captive audience.

He let them talk and talk about how their patron was here to slay the verdigris scaled wyrm at the top of the Scrinver’s peak, but when Simon asked the men why they needed so many people to face a single dragon they laughed again.

“Oh, not many of us are crazy enough to take on Ice Fang. A few of the guys will actually go into her lair with Sir Anais of course. Kediv, Brannon, a couple of the others.” as he spoke, the mustached man said pointed a few of the others out. “But you can’t just slay a dragon!”

“You can’t?” Simon asked, confused.

“No!” the dark-haired man answered loudly enough for people to give them a look. “You’ve got to hand butchers to slaughter it, skinners and tanners to cure the hide properly, and then, of course - it’s horde. All of that is going to need porters and teamsters, too. Dragon slaying is a whole enterprise, not a one-man show!”

To Simon, it kind of sounded like they were describing whaling without a ship, but he didn’t comment on it, he just nodded along and kept agreeing where it seemed right to as he enjoyed the free beer. The party continued until almost midnight, and it was only after it finally wound down that Simon found a bit of the floor in the common room and crashed out.

As promised, the caravan mobilized and left in the morning. He stole a bit of porridge from the large kettle and watched the men slowly boil out of the inn. In the end, he stopped counting at 50 as the long train of wagons and mules began to decamp and worm their way past the village to the higher foothills that lay beyond them.

The villages wished them well, but as soon as the dragon hunters were gone and they realized Simon wasn’t part of their crazy enterprise, the innkeeper and his family immediately talked about how crazy the whole thing was.

“Crazy’s okay,” the greybeared proprietor said. “You know, as long as they pay well. That’s all that really matters.”

“That’s all that really matters unless they wake that monster up and fail to strike it down!” his wife said shrilly, but neither of them said any more after that. It was obviously an old argument.

What mattered more than anything was that they were more than happy to take Simon’s coin and rent him a room for a few nights. “Meals are going to be a little sparse on the account of… well, you know,” the innkeeper said, waving his hand, “But I can promise you lamb and beer tonight at the very least.”

“That and a warm bath is all I really need,” Simon said pleasantly. He spent that evening soaking in the small wooden tub until the water was filthy and cold. After that he enjoyed a warm meal in the common room, then spent the wee hours sewing the holes in his clothes with a needle and thread he’d borrowed while he muttered into a mirror about everything he’d seen in the last few levels.

The mirror was able to answer some of the questions he’d answered about the level with the black swarm where he’d first met Aaric. The mirror couldn’t say if the boy’s story had been true, because it didn’t know how magic worked. It wasn’t too frustrating, though, and it felt good to get all that off of his chest.

He passed the next two days in a similar way, and on the fourth day, he finally started to consider following after the dragon slayers. It was obvious that was what he was here for, after all. Most levels involved a monster, and nothing was more monstrous than a dragon.

Part way through, a story that the innkeeper was telling him about the beast, though. The world erupted in flames. Simon was indoors, so he wasn’t able to see a wider view of things, Instead the north wall of the inn caved in, and the roof collapsed on them as a wall of flame literally mowed down the building, and made himself, the innkeeper, and anyone else unlucky enough to find themselves ignite like a candle.

“Gervuul Hyakk!”Simon managed to croak, instantly regenerating all of his crisping and melting skin.

That didn’t save him, though. Even as his skin healed, it began to burn again, and as soon as he inhaled to speak again, he burned his lungs badly enough to make further speech impossible. As a result, he died in agony less than a minute later.