DWinchester
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Death After Death Ch. 84 and 85
🕑 Added 2024-01-29 14:58:01 +0000 UTCAt long last, we have arrived in the promised land! Two chapters (but still no answers. Sorry about that.)
Ch. 84 - Special Delivery
“Well, I’m never doing that again.” Those were Simon's first words when he opened his eyes to stare at the ceiling. Charging the drawbridge had been awesome in the heat of the moment, but maybe daring the enemy to fight him twenty or thirty-on-one hadn’t been the best idea.
“Mirror, show me my experience and make a note that I shouldn’t forget about the boiling tar in Liepzen castle again.”
‘Of course,’ it replied as Simon sat up and reached for the same tired bottle of wine as he reviewed the new data.
‘Experience Points: -987,341’
“So last time it was 2,000 experience points in a couple of months, and this time it was 4,000 experience in close to six months,” Benjamin said to himself as he considered the number. “Not exactly linear, is it?”
The mirror didn’t respond to that question, but he continued to mull it as he started getting ready. A lot of his time had been used in very similar ways in both cases. So, did that mean that the war was bad for experience or simply less good than leading a quieter life?
It might not have been either, he realized. He might have simply gotten more from saving Gregor, and the rest had been a wash. The only way he’d ever really know for sure would be to conduct very controlled experiments where he went and lived the same month over and over again and compared the results, and that sounded truly awful.
At least this time, what he had to do wasn’t in doubt. Well, whether or not he’d give the whole try-to-stop-a-war thing another shot was up for debate. That seemed to be a complete waste of time. One thing that wasn’t, though, was that there were some people who needed to be fed, and he knew just where to get some food.
Simon dispatched the rats on the first level, and then, one bag at a time, he transferred the remainder through the door to the trap floor. Once that was done, he stopped and tried to decide if it was really worth it. 4 trips through the levels to carry all this, and then somehow he’d have to drag it through the snow?
“Maybe just one would be enough,” he said to himself, but he knew it wouldn’t. There was at least a month before the snows melted, and something like 40 mouths to feed in that village. They’d need every scrap of food he could bring them and more, probably.
So grudgingly, Simon killed all the bats and tripped all the traps before he brought each bag of lumpy potatoes and moldering turnips to the goblin cave. That gave the little beasties ample warning that something was amiss, and fighting them took twice as long as usual, but Simon got through it with no more than a couple scrapes and one nasty cut.
After that was harder. With no more than the rope he carried and a small hatchet, he had to turn a couple small pine saplings into a sledge so he could drag all of these supplies uphill to Maritin. In theory, that seemed simple enough, but between the unexpected goblin attack that night and actually trying to build something that was way outside of his meager experience, it quickly turned into three days of his life he’d never get back.
Simon didn’t mind fighting goblins at this point. It was kind of fun even when it was on a familiar playing field, but to do it when woken up from a sound sleep because one of the fuckers was trying to rip his throat out in the night? That was awful, and he made sure to sleep with the bonfire between him and the tunnel deeper into the cave after he’d finished crushing their mushy little skulls.
To make matters worse, by the time he was finally ready, the snow storm arrived, so by the time he was finally ready, he was forced to spend another day in that cave waiting for another attack that never came.
Simon took advantage of that time as best he could, and by the time the weather cleared up, he’d made himself a rough set of snowshoes out of green pine branches. They helped somewhat, but dragging his sledge full of potatoes to the starving village was still awful in his bloated, out-of-shape body, and in the end, he opted to take a shortcut across the frozen lake just to make it that much easier as he huffed and gasped across the snowy ground.
“If I hear it cracking, I can just refreeze it,” he told himself.
Really, he didn’t care if he died this way. It would probably be easier than hauling the damn potatoes. He definitely wasn’t going to do that again.
He didn’t think he’d have to, of course. He was pretty sure his extra night in the cave had flushed out the remaining goblins, and that had been the missing piece of the puzzle. Well, Either that was the missing piece, or this food was. He was increasingly sure that the King’s death and the war had nothing to do with it.
Maritin was even bleaker than it had been the first time under the new blanket of snow. This time, when he came into town, there was no one to greet him. That didn’t stop him from going up to the old man who had done the cooking last time and pounding on the door.
“Brannin, get out here and start boiling some water,” he said, shoving a crust of bread in the man’s face. “This soup isn’t going to make itself.”
Simon went hunting just like before, and this time, he was able to find a fine stag that was practically waiting for him when he went looking for those mountain goats again. Simon brought it down with a shot through the lungs and then cursed his luck for having to drag it a quarter mile back to the village. Still, it was easier than the sledge had been.
The subdued villagers were more lively when he returned, and food loosened their tongues the same as it did the first time. “After the late snow, I thought we was done for,” Vermina explained as she greedily slurped her bowl before filling up another one for her oldest.
He was celebrated as a hero, but he still didn’t plan on staying more than a night. He was sure that a hundred pounds of root vegetables and almost as much venison would be enough to last them until that wretched pass thawed open.
That night, Benjamin stayed on Brannin’s floor, where he put his bedroll down near the man’s fire. Several of the villagers had offered him their bed, and Vermina had offered him her children’s bed, but he declined. Instead, he lay awake on the hard wooden floor, wondering what he should do.
Honestly, he was getting pretty tired of causing new and more interesting wars and wasn’t sure he had it in him to do that one more time. He certainly wasn’t assassinating the Duke or tricking the Prince again. Not only had both experiences left a bad taste in his mouth, but neither had made things any better.
By morning, he decided he had to do something, though, and then he had to go save Gregor one more time. If he really had solved this level by killing the goblins, then how could he lock in such an awful fate for his young friend.
He’d already tried to tip the scales in favor of both sides to avoid conflict, without success. What was he supposed to do now. Simon pondered that long and hard on his trip through the pass, but it wasn’t until he’d repurchased his nag and decided that he should make her a little faster that he finally knew what it was he should try next.
The best answer would of course be the King’s survival. No death, would mean no power struggle. He’d considered healing the man initially, but magic could only do so much where old age was concerned, at least, that’s what he’d thought at the time. Just because he cured whatever ailed the man this time didn’t mean he wouldn’t die of pneumonia next month.
Age, not illness, was the root of the problem; he was sure of it, and now he had a tool if he wanted to use it. Simon spent the afternoon waiting to decide what the consequences of that might be, but in the end, he decided to go for it. The Prince would certainly make for a poor ruler in a few years, but would he do more damage than a war for the crown would do? That didn’t seem likely. Even Nero would do less damage than burning the kingdom down and starting from scratch.
Besides, he reasoned as he got ready to breach the castle come nightfall, perhaps if the boy had his father a little longer, he’d grow up into a better ruler one day and surprise them all.
Breaking into the castle was easier to do the second time than it had been the first. A light drizzle made the guards loathe to leave their little shelters, and Simon easily made his way to the King’s quarters, which were on the same floor as his son’s but on the opposite side of the building.
The harder part was actually getting the king alone. Some things like healing worked much better with touch, but he wasn’t climbing through the window as long as the doctors and servants were fussing with the comatose man, who was practically a corpse already.
Simon shivered out there in the rain for hours, and at one point, he was almost caught when someone came over and opened the window. Once it became apparent that he hadn’t been seen, and Simon could smell the man, he almost vomited.
The cloying scent of flowers and incense billowed out of the room, and beneath that, there was a sickly sweetness that was absolutely repellant. One did not cover up the other; it merely magnified it by contrast, and Simon wondered if his initial thesis had been correct. Was the man simply old, or was this a longer-term health problem, like diabetes or gout? Simon didn’t know. He also didn’t know how well his magic would work on chronic conditions. He hadn't had to learn about such things since health class, a long, long time ago.
Shortly before dawn, Simon finally got his chance, as the footman who had been watching him for the last few hours slipped away for a break. Simon darted into the room and peeled back the blankets to reveal infected wounds that had almost certainly been caused by physicians who had decided that bleeding the dying man was the best treatment, along with open bed sores and worse.
He dealt with each of these in turn with a few whispered words of minor healing, but even once his body was whole, Simon still didn’t like the rattling sound of the man’s breathing. He used the words of both cure and healing on the King after that, but the man's pallor and breathing improved only marginally.
“Old age it is, then,” Simon muttered, watching the gray-haired man stir in his sleep.
With the sounds of distant footsteps echoing up the hallway, Simon decided to go for a word of greater transfer. “Gervuul Zyvon,” he intoned quietly for the first time, noting that the words hurt worse than usual as he felt energy flood out of his body, leaving him weak in the knees.
Helades told him that a greater word cost him a year of his life, but to be honest, it felt like more than that this time. Still, whatever it had cost Simon was worth it. After all, he was only a death away from getting it all back again.
Color returned to the King’s cheeks, and his breathing eased, but thankfully, his gray hair and wrinkles remained. Suddenly becoming young might have been rather hard to explain. The man began to stir as the servant approached the door, but Simon had already retreated to the window and was bounding off into the last shadows of twilight. With any luck, he could get back to his inn before dawn and snag a few hours of sleep before he had to start riding to Slany.
Ch. 85 - A Quiet Life
Simon arrived in Slany on the very day that Gregor and the fop of a mercenary that had almost gotten him killed the last time were heading into the mine, and he only heard about that because the man was bragging in the inn about all the silvers he was going to get for letting the young boy do all the work.
“Never get paid to work if you can get paid for someone else to do the heavy lifting for you!” he bragged. “That’s what my dad taught me, and it’s worked out pretty great so far.”
Essentially, he was already too late, and his heart sank. “Maybe you should try smoking 'em out,” Simon suggested helpfully after he introduced himself and bought the man a drink to try to get on his good side.
“Nah,” Nedden said with a shrug as he downed the mug in two quick swallows. “Hauling that much firewood is too much trouble for a handful of gobs, you know?”
“Well, the boy is inexperienced,” Simon continued, “It might be safer if you—”
“Bah!” the other mercenary said, wiping the foam from his mouth with a dirty sleeve. “The boy’s got bloody plate mail - greenskins ain't about to get through that, now, are they?”
The mercenary looked around, and the other men who were in there at that time of morning gave him grudging support. There were a few nods, but Simon couldn’t help but see some of his worse features in the mercenary. Not only was he fat enough that he obviously had trouble squeezing into his breastplate, but he was overwhelmingly confident, and it didn’t seem to have any basis.
Simon dropped the subject, not sure what he should do. Murdering this asshole before he caused any real harm would probably be the best answer, but that would have been wrong, even if Simon was quite sure that no one would miss him. Well, that and some part of him felt sympathy for a man that was obviously more talk than walk.
After another few moments, he resolved to get the man too drunk to fight. So, he ordered a round for the bar as he regaled all of them with stories about goblin shamans that were so connected to the forces of evil that they could use fire magic.
“I’ve heard that before,” one of the farmers chimed in. “But I don’t know anyone that claims to have seen it with their own eyes or nothing.”
Simon was about to brag about that when the boy and a couple of his father's men came into the bar, foiling Simon’s plan. While it was painful to see the eyes of someone he knew so well slide off him as if he was nothing but a stranger, it was less painful than realizing that he hadn’t seen either of the young men who were accompanying Gregor in the timeline where he’d healed his arm.
Suddenly, the whole story clicked into place. The uninjured man standing with the noose around his throat, the young mortality injured boy, and two missing guards. The only one that was going to survive this was the coward, and he wouldn’t survive this for long. Everyone else was walking into a trap with a fraud that they thought was an expert.
Simon cringed at how closely that description fit his first visit to town. If Simon had gone into the silver mine with his charge or accepted the Baron’s men, history very well could have played out in exactly the same way, with an adventurer who didn’t know as much as they claimed to leading the boy to his doom.
There were probably reflections to be made there on the nature of reality and time travel, but Simon didn’t have time for that just now. Instead, he turned to the group of men leaving the bar and said, “If you need one more sword, I’m game.”
“Four is more than sufficient, I would think,” Nedden said quickly. He might have acted confident, but Simon could see in his eyes that this was all about the silver, and he didn’t want to cut anyone else in.
He wanted to say he’d do it for free, but when Gregor appraised Simon for a moment, he froze up. The boy didn’t know him, but for a moment, it seemed like he did, but then it was over. Gregor was barely 16, and Simon had to admit he probably looked like shit at the pace he’d been traveling. So, instead of taking him seriously, he deferred to the man his father had hired, then he turned and left.
That only complicated things further. Trying to chase after them would only make Simon look pathetic, which was definitely not how he wanted to start their relationship. So he didn’t. He sat there, nursing a beer while he tried to figure out what to do next while the men around him gossiped about how, they didn’t think this was going to end well.
“Grown men die to goblins all the time,” the barkeep said, “I don’t see why the Baron is letting his son face them.”
“The boy’s got to grow up sooner or later,” another man said. “He can’t grow up to be half the man his Grandfather was if Lord Corwin coddles him.”
As the discussion grew more heated, Simon could almost see where this was going, and a few more things fell into place. The only way that the Viscount would survive or that anyone would know that the warrior who was supposed to guard him had fled was if a few men got riled up enough to go check on them. In a couple of hours, there would be a mob of aging farmers and out-of-work miners heading down to handle things, but that would already be too late. They might save his young friend’s life, but everything else…
Simon slammed his glass down and stormed out of the bar. He started following the group discreetly from a distance. He wasn’t planning to accompany them to the mine, though. Instead, he cut into the woods and watched as they got closer.
Then, once they were inside the mine, he waited. Simon had been all over these woods in the past few lives. While he might not know every inch, he certainly knew where the ventilation shafts were, and he waited at the first one for signs of the group’s approach.
There was the sound of battle once, but it was over quickly, and by the time they passed the ventilation shaft, they were still in good shape. So Simon followed them slowly toward the second, a couple of hundred yards further on.
It was there he heard the sounds of a real fight. Even knowing that charging into battle in an unfamiliar place was a terrible idea, he still didn’t hesitate. As soon as he heard the first human scream, he leaped down into the darkness.
Simon lit the torch with a word in midair as he pulled out his dagger with the other. Trying to draw his long sword in the tight confines of the vertical shaft would have been very ill-advised; it would have been impossible.
Instead, he did the best with what he had and whispered “Aufvarum Oonbetit,” and used the words of lesser force to slow his fall so that he landed smoothly in the dusty mining tunnel that had been built to follow a winding vein 30 feet below ground, and it just so happened that there where three goblins directly under him when he landed.
Simon crushed one beneath his boots, narrowly dodging the upright spear that had almost impaled him. Then, without hesitating, he drove his dagger deep into the skull on his right, jabbed his torch in the face of the goblin on his left, and then, stepping back, drew his sword and looked for his next opponent.
There were other goblins here. Loads of them, but there were neither the people he was looking for nor their corpses, which meant that the Viscount’s party hadn’t made it this far.
Simon grinned at that. If there was no one around to see, then he could still use magic, and even though the goblins licked their lips as they saw the easy target they’d found, he unleashed his first spell.
“Gervuul Vrazig!” he barked, sending a streak of blue chain lighting through the majority of the enemies he faced with a greater word.
Everywhere his magic struck, the goblins flopped over or sank bonelessly to the floor, but even as those that were still living looked around in alarm, he was charging them with his sword in hand. Just like that, what should have been a sure thing for the greenskins became a complete rout.
Simon was stabbed a couple of times, but the little bastards didn’t hit anything serious, and soon enough, the cavern was empty save for the corpses of his opponents. Only then, when he’d broken their spirit and stopped the trickle that would have no doubt become a flood, did he turn to look for Gregor’s party.
He found them 50 yards back toward the exit, where Gregor and one of his father’s men faced off against four remaining goblins. The other soldier lay on the ground along with the corpses of a dozen green skins, though Simon couldn’t determine if the man was living or dead, and there was no trace of the Nedden, who had almost certainly fled as soon as his cakewalk turned into a rout.
Simon dispatched two of the ugly buggers before they even knew he was there. The remaining two quickly found themselves outnumbered and unable to flee, and had messy deaths that were quicker than they deserved.
Once all that was done, Simon began to order the two of them around. “You there, watch my back while I see what we can do for your friend!” he ordered the soldier, “And you, Viscount—”
“Wha- why are you here?” Gregor asked. “We left you at the tavern because Nedden said we didn’t need you. Why did you come anyway?”
“Later,” Simon said. “I need to see what can be done for this man, so you make sure nothing is coming from the other side.”
He was concerned there might be more goblin attacks, of course, but that wasn’t the reason he pointed the two remaining men in opposite directions. It was so that neither of them would be looking at him as he probed the wounds.
The guard had been stabbed in several places and was covered in blood, but his pulse was still strong. So Simon muttered a few words of lesser healing to partially close the man’s wounds and a word of cure to reduce the chance that infection would take him out, and then they made a crude litter from a cloak and goblin spears and dragged the unconscious man to safety.
They were halfway to town before they met the mob that Simon had predicted that morning. Honestly, I thought they would come earlier, he thought to himself, but he said nothing. Instead, he let Gregor do the talking.
As it turned out, they had started marshaling together as soon as the stable boy caught Nedden trying to skip town. That mental image was enough to make Simon laugh, but he held back, trying not to undermine the seriousness of the situation.
When all of them returned to Slany, And things were explained to Baron Corwin, the man embraced Simon publicly and told him, “You saved my son. You can have any reward you choose. You have but to name it.”
“Dinner sounds good,” Simon said, causing a gale of disbelieving laughter. “I’m just glad we could save everyone this time.”
“I’m not sure that everyone is going to live,” the Baron said, shaking his head. “There’s no reason I can think of to spare that cowardly mercenary’s life.”
“No?” Simon asked. “Not even to celebrate your son’s safe return? I would think that the greatest punishment of all we could offer a man like that would be letting him live with the knowledge of what he’s done.”
That wasn’t the real reason that Simon wanted to spare him, though. It was because it was very easy for him to look at Nedden and see the man he’d once been, and he wasn’t particularly inclined to be too harsh on himself from two dozen lives ago.
Baron Corwin was initially unconvinced, but eventually, after he calmed down, he agreed that branding the man a coward and exiling him from Corwin lands would be punishment. After that, Simon’s time on this level played out much as it did before for the next few weeks. Simon spent a great deal of time with young Gregor, and though his father quickly banished Nedden from his lands, the Lord kept Simon around to do odd jobs for Baron Corwin.
He mostly kept to himself, though, focusing on studying what little he knew of the words of power and his experiments. He was mostly just biding his time to see how the impending civil war would play out, but surprisingly, it never did. Simon waited for the other shoe to drop, first for weeks and then for months, but the rumors that came to town were more about gossip and scandal than wars on the horizon. The King’s renewed health dispelled them completely.
After six months, Simon started to think that he should move on, but by then, he’d started a flirtation with Trinna, the baker. She was a cute, motherly woman who’d lost her husband years before when they were both young. There was just something about her sad beauty that struck him just right, long after the charm of her wonderful bread had faded into the background.
It was the last thing he’d meant to happen, but somehow, it felt right. He still loved Freya, of course, but it had been many years and several deaths since he’d seen his beloved last, and something about reliving the same life over and over had started to dull those sharp edges.
So, instead, he stayed. He bought a plot of land, intent on becoming a part of Slany’s little community, and then he set about building himself a house and a livelihood. They weren’t exactly an item or anything. Not yet. Dating wasn’t quite a thing here, but despite the cloud that still hovered over him, he thought he might propose to her anyway.
The other levels would always be there, of course. He could do those any day, but he was fairly sure this would be the last time he’d get to watch Gregor grow up, thanks to all of his hard work.
Sadly, that wasn’t how it worked out. Though, the war never came, and Simon stayed. He experimented with magic, he practiced swordplay with his friends, and he learned lots of things he’d never known before, like how to split fence rails, tie knots, and of course bake bread. Unfortunately, all of that was cut short when he died two years later while he was hauling logs from the forest when a skittish mule he hadn’t been paying enough attention to kicked him hard in the side of his head, instantly ending his well-earned break.
Comments
Kitty Lee
I loved this chapter and this entire trying to fix the kingdom + trying to help Gregor arc finally got me to subscribe 🍿 TFTC
D. Winchester
Indeed. I imagine the feeling of immortality would inspire loads of consequences. Eventually he will be far more afraid of having to restart whatever his current project is than actually dying.
Henry
I enjoy the trend of his deaths being caused by him having a reckless feeling of immortality and impatience even after spending years chilling. "Yeah, I can totally charge into 30 soldiers on my own and win." "I don't need to prepare for betrayal, I'll be fine." "I don't need to be mindful of skittish animals that can kill with a single kick, I'm a super-adventurer." Woops turns out he never got more hit points and his body is still made of squishy fragile goo. Imagine if he made himself an item that could detect incoming kinetic force and automatically apply a lesser force barrier in the way.
D. Winchester
I get that. In time we shall have a fuller picture.
Njumkiy
I just wish he would experiment with magic a bit more. There is something more to it, perhaps a way to offset the drain it has. If all magic simply consumed lifeforce, then the basilisk would have died eventually. There are other magic users, as shown when he was killed as a zombie, so I seriously doubt they would be lobbing fireballs like artillery which can be rather inaccurate when you could simply use a catapult.
Immortal ZoDD
Great death indeed. Thought a tree fell on him when you said he was hauling wood. Too bad he didn't propose to miss baker
