Death After Death

Chapter 113: Into the Fire

When he’d heard Festuvian try and fail to set off the magical equivalent of a fuel-air bomb, Simon had thought that it was dumb, but deep down, he knew he’d have to use it someday; he just didn’t expect it to be so soon.

He knew that it would be hard on him, even at full strength, but truthfully, he’d been entirely unprepared. Using greater twice in a row had filled him with such tension that he was barely able to get the familiar word of fire out of his mouth. It was a force of will to do so, and he felt like every syllable cost him.

He wouldn’t know how much for a while yet, though. Not until the spell ran his course. Instead, he collapsed there as he imagined a fiery nova rippling outward away from him to burn away the dark.

That’s exactly what happened, fire tore through the darkness turning night into day, and burning away the massed wall of spirits that had been chasing him like the vengeful hand of god. They evaporated in an instant, with no more than silent screams to mark their passing.

For a moment, the world was awash in heat and light, and to Simon, it felt like the end of the world. To him, it might be, he realized. Even as he watched the magic he’d unleashed echo outwards, igniting grass of fire and knocking over tombstones, his consciousness began to fade.

Simon tried to force himself to stay awake, but he couldn’t even make himself stand and slipped off into the blissful embrace of unconsciousness.

Simon had expected to never wake up at all or perhaps to wake up back in his cabin. Instead, he woke sometime later, laying there at the center of a crater that he’d made while the stars still twinkled in the sky above him.

The graveyard was a mess, but he couldn’t do much more than turn his head. Even reaching for his sword was exhausting, and for several long minutes, he lay there simply gauging his pain and exhaustion.

It took much longer than it should to wonder where the fog had gone. “That can’t be it,” he croaked, regretting it instantly.

Simon spent the next half minute coughing up a lung, and when he moved his hand from his mouth he saw fresh blood. It wasn’t a good sign.

While he lay there, he wondered just how many years he’d used in that little blast. If a greater word uses a year, it’s unlikely that two greater words use just two, though, he thought to himself. It might even be ten. Blowing a decade on a spell seemed kind of insane to him, but he wouldn’t put it past Helades. Not when he felt this bad.

With some effort, Simon rolled onto his back and looked up at the stars in the sky as they began to fade. The idea that he’d solved the level with a single explosion seemed unlikely, but the fact that he wasn’t being torn apart made it seem possible.

If it had been so easy, though, then why hadn’t the townspeople done it ages ago? A few bonfires would have been more than enough to erode them to nothing, wouldn’t it?

There were too many questions, and eventually, he got tired of asking them. Eventually, he pulled himself to his feet, sheathed his sword, and walked toward the door to the next level. It was only when he got there that he stopped. “I’m in no shape to fight off a—” he rasped before a rasping cough stole the rest of his words.

His exhausted brain had been leading him on autopilot to the next destination, but there was no way that was going to happen. So, instead, he staggered past it and toward the cemetery gate, where he left himself out into the unfamiliar city. It was a large place, though perhaps not quite so large as Liepzen. There was an empty market square, a large temple, and most of the buildings in the area seemed to be two stories. All told it was quite nice. Most of the streets were even cobblestone instead of mud, and there were even gutters along the main thoroughfares.

Slowly, Simon made his way to the inn, but the door was locked for the night. He should have pounded on the door, but he was too weak to yell, so instead, he just sat there on the stoop and waited for dawn.

He was only woken up once during the night when a vagrant seemed like he was about to roll Simon’s unconscious body for whatever he could steal, but the moment Simon started to draw his blade, the other man apologized and ran for his life. That was just as well because there was no way that Simon had the energy to actually fight someone right now. He was as weak as he’d ever been, probably since he had to spend a week sleeping off his head injury from the orc raid.

It wasn’t until morning that he understood why, though. Eventually, the innkeeper opened up for breakfast, and traveling guests left to get on the road. Simon skipped meals and gossip. Instead, he had a couple tankards of beer to take the edge off, and then he paid for a room so he could sleep the day away.

It was only when he was stripping and setting his things aside that he noticed how differently he looked in his tiny mirror. Though not quite wrinkled, his face was certainly etched by years he hadn’t lived, and there was a sprinkling of gray amidst his normally dark hair.

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His weakness persisted even after he woke up. His voice was still shot, too. He tried to use a word of lesser healing to fix that, at least, but just the idea of starting to speak words of power gave him vertigo, and he decided against it. He had definitely screwed himself up pretty well with what he’d done, and both his body and his soul were unhappy with him.

Fortunately, the proprietor was happy to take his silver and keep Simon in food and beer for as long as he felt the urge to lie around and recover. Honestly, for the next few weeks, it wasn’t a bad life. All he did was sleep and self-medicate with alcohol for the first few days, but after that, when his voice had recovered to some degree, he started to be social with the other guests who came and went in the evenings.

He learned that he was in a city called Darndelle. It wasn’t a place he’d been to before, but he was fairly sure that it was somewhere near the black swarmer level, though he wasn’t exactly sure where that was either. Talking to people he heard the names of lots of familiar places, but he didn’t pick up a lot. Not right away at least. All the details just swam together.

Over time, he learned that Darndelle was the capital of the Kingdom of Montain and that it was just to the south of the Kingdom of Brin. Things fell together a little better after that. He could imagine Schwarzenbruck somewhere far to the northwest, Leipzig to the north, and Crowvar somewhere between the two. Ionar was probably to his south or maybe his southwest. He wasn’t sure, and he vowed to find a map to better understand the layout of the world as soon as he was feeling better.

Getting better didn’t come quickly, though. It was two more weeks before he felt well enough to even heal his voice. Once that was done, he waited a few days before he chanced a word of healing on his body, but even that left him feeling weak and considering more drastic steps.

He took some walks among the ocher brick buildings that dominated the city when the weather was nice, but even that felt like an exertion for far too long. At least I’m finally losing weight, he thought one day when he saw his reflection in the mirror. Sadly, unlike the last few times he’d shed the pounds, he wasn’t gaining a lot of muscles to go with it. This left him looking somewhat melted and sallow looking, and he couldn’t decide how much of that was the magical damage he’d inflicted on himself and how much was just lying around for weeks and weeks.

Simon stayed at the Blind Owl long enough to eat all of their dishes, and to grow tired of most of them before he looked for work. He’d burned years of his life, but laying in bed indefinitely and getting drunk every other night at the bar wouldn’t fix that. Especially not after he heard the rumor that the fog in the graveyard had returned.

Two weeks after his stay, he’d heard about the curse being lifted, but it had taken him some time to put the facts together. Apparently, the graveyard was cursed and had been unsafe to enter by night for decades. Simon had solved that problem, but only for a month or so. Then they’d found a widow stone cold not far from the grave of her husband. She’d stayed there after dark and apparently paid the price for it.

That was what finally got his ass into gear as he started to move among the people of the city and learn what the hell was going on. He tried and failed to gain employment as a caravan guard and even a mercenary for the city watch. He couldn’t fault them, he supposed. He did have a bit of an evil look about him right now.

It wasn’t until he was returning to the inn one night after attempting to gather clues about the cemetery’s history that all that changed. Two muggers suddenly flanked him on a narrow side street and gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse at knifepoint. “What’s it going to be, man, your coin purse or your life?”

Simon considered drawing his blade, but he didn’t like his odds against both of them. He was probably good for a normal word of power, but he didn’t really want to cause a commotion that would force him to leave this city, not when he was making progress in understanding the nature of the mist and the curse of Darndelle.

So instead, he moved to hand the first man a heavy purse with a shaking hand, but as the rogue reached for it and grinned, Simon dropped it and whispered, “Gervuul Zyvon,” as he grabbed the man’s hand.

A greater word was a bad idea. He knew that, still, there was no resistance or hesitation, and it flowed effortlessly from his lips even as the face of the other man went pale. For a moment, Simon could feel pieces of the other man’s life flowing into his own. He could feel his hunger and his desperation. More than that, though, he could feel the mugger’s youth and vitality flowing in to him.

In that moment, Simon felt strong for the first time in over a month, and even as the other man fell backward and scrambled to get away, Simon turned to face his friend. The man lunged at Simon with his dagger, but now that he no longer felt like he was in the body of a geriatric old man, Simon had no trouble gripping his wrist and twisting it hard enough to break the thief’s arm before using the leverage to swing the man face-first into the brick wall.

The would-be mugger went limp from the force of the blow and left a bloody smear on the bricks. Simon wasn’t sure if he was dead, but he didn’t really care. He just gloried in being able to move again before he stooped to pick up the dagger that the man had dropped as he turned to face the first man again.

He was already staggering away from Simon, of course, and normally, Simon would have been willing to let him go, but he couldn’t help but notice that the man had scooped up Simon’s coin purse before making himself scarce. That was enough for him to throw the dagger, making it spin end over end into the other man’s thigh, sending him tumbling to the ground.

“Please, mercy,” the man said, rolling over and tossing Simon the purse.

He looked down at it, hefted it for weight, and then stepped over the man and continued on his way. By the time he reached the main street, a tune had sprung to his lips, and he was whistling merrily away. He didn’t need to take the thief’s life; sepsis would do that fine all on its own.