Death After Death Ch. 155-156

Ch. 155 - Turning of the Years

Simon spent most of the next few weeks and months in the library. He started going on longer and longer walks, and eventually, he went to the gym. That was mostly for the restorative hot springs, though he did eventually try to spar with men he’d once been able to beat handily. 

The results of those bouts were ugly, and when his opponents asked him what had happened to him, Simon told them a story about being set upon by a small pack of orcs while he was out gathering herbs one day. In the broad strokes, the lie was perfectly adequate; he’d fought more than his share, and few men alive knew more about the sheer unrestrained power of the brutes than he did. Still, all of the details were outlandish without the use of magic to back them up. 

Eventually, he stopped going to the baths when his scars got a bit too much attention. Curiosity he could handle, but open disgust… well, Simon already thought little enough of his body, so he didn’t exactly need that. 

The Queen noticed that, though, and eventually offered to let him use the Royal Baths. They were not so large as the public baths, but they were about a hundred times nicer, with white glazed tiles and marble statues. Either way, the water did him good, but after a couple mix-ups where he almost walked in on the Queen while she was using them, he decided that maybe he’d healed enough that he didn’t need that magic warmth for his joints anymore. 

Magic wasn’t something he was doing a lot of these days. That wasn’t because the Queen's Vizer was supposedly keeping an eye on him, either. It was because he wasn’t sure what to fix after all the work he’d already done on himself. 

In his games, when you drank a potion or you cast a healing spell, you were restored to full hit points and were as good as new. In this world, though, he still suffered from any number of aches and pains, even after the last bandages were removed and the last wound was closed.

He’d cast a few lesser healing spells to fix the cartilage in his knees when that had started to bother him. That had seemed to work well enough, but other problems were less easy to quantify. Was his poor balance brain damage, or was a bone that had healed crooked, or a muscle that had gotten weak during all this bed rest. He had no idea. 

Simon had a couple options that he thought would fix that. The first would be to drain the life out of some miscreants or vermin. He knew from experience that definitely made everything feel better. He also knew how addictive that was, though. 

He considered trying to filter lesser transfer through a sword or a dagger to see if that would mitigate that problem, but that solution had the same problem as the other one he wanted to try: he simply lacked the privacy for complicated magic in the palace. Whether this mysterious visor or anyone else was actually watching him didn’t matter. 

There was always a servant or an official walking through the room, no matter which room he was in. Now that Simon was out of his sick bed, he was quite popular, which meant that unless he was going to lock himself away, real, complicated works of magic were out of the question. 

That was a pity, too, because he thought that if he tried the same sort of ritual he’d tried with Freya, he might just be able to draw the power necessary to fuel the spell from the world around him instead of from an unwilling donor. Hell, I could probably fuel that sort of ritual with the heat of the volcano, he thought as he looked up at the still-smoldering mountain. Too bad there’s no way I’m climbing that thing right now. 

All told Simon was pretty sure he’d only used up a handful of years in that fight. This life was getting a little long, though, at least for him. With everything he’d done, plus some of the magic he’d used before he even arrived in Ionar, he was pretty sure he was pushing 40. Only a couple of those years had been lived, but… well, either way, he wasn’t old enough to be this ineffectual and weak just yet. He had at least 10 or 15 good years left in this life, and he was determined not to waste them.

Between books, Simon continued to work on his map, using the accounts he read to fill in the missing areas that he hadn’t yet explored. When it was all done, it was very impressive, showing off tens of thousands of square miles with relatively high levels of detail. That’s only a state or two, he reminded himself as he looked over the way the mountains and rivers were laid out. 

The Kingdoms of Ionia and Brin were the most detailed by far. That was both because those were the places that Simon had been the most often and because that was what the Queen's library contained the most information about. 

Charia was what interested him the most, though. The rugged mountains seemed to forbid explorers and historians from talking about them, and there were huge blank spots Simon was going to need to dig through. At least one of those belonged to the dragon, and he was pretty sure he’d be meeting it again soon, but the others? He had no idea. 

“When you are done with it, I shall hang it in my study,” the Queen told him. “Outside of a few sea captains' hands, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a map half so fine.”

“Well, it's easy to work on the details when you have nothing but time on your hands,” Simon answered. “I ain’t exactly moving around a lot these days.”

“Nonsense,” the Queen declared, “You’re getting better every day.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Better at walking around the garden.”

They both laughed at that. She was right, of course. He was getting better. Just not fast enough. That was silly since anyone else would have been in a wheelchair for the rest of their life after what happened, but he didn’t accept that. After all, wheelchairs hadn’t been invented yet. 

He continued to spend as much time with her as ever, though after he was there for almost a year, she insisted that he started calling her by her given name rather than her title, at least when no one was around. “It’s Elthena, please,” she insisted in one of their many conversations. “I do not let my friends call me by my title unless we are in public.”

“So I’ve graduated from guest to friend?” Simon asked. “It sure took long enough.”

“Well, you’ve been a very demanding guest,” she answered with a smile. “Troublesome to no end! You should hear what my physician says about you!”

“I’m sure,” Simon smirked. “The man can’t shut up about what a miracle worker he is after saving my life. He should be paying me for all the free advertising I’ve given him.”

It was a lame joke, and it landed flatly, both because of that and because she probably didn’t even know what advertising meant. It was a mistake he still made sometimes, even after all these years. Still, there was a moment there that hung between them as she tried to think of the right response where he was sure he could have kissed her without getting slapped. 

There’d been a growing tension between them of some sort ever since he’d gotten out of bed. He avoided it for his own reasons, of course, but also because he knew getting involved with someone who was literal royalty was a terrible idea. 

The moment passed almost as quickly as he noticed it, but after that, he made an effort to keep a little more distance between the two of them so as not to complicate things further. He made other friends among the courtiers, or at least people who spent time with him to ask him about his travels. In the right mood, those were almost the same thing. 

Even living in a palace could become monotonous when one yearned to get back on the open road, though. Injuries notwithstanding, this was as fine a life as Simon had enjoyed during his time in the Pit. He had all he could eat, a comfortable bed, and more knowledge about the world of Erden than he could have hoped for in any of his previous life. Still, after a while, it did not satisfy him. 

He longed to get back to being a hero. He didn’t so much crave finishing off more levels in the Pit as he did just finding wrongs to right. Just because those good deeds would be erased with his death didn’t mean that they weren’t worth doing. 

At one point, Simon spent weeks making elaborate plans to go all the way back to Blackwater to see if the portal was still there. He decided the best routes, made lists of supplies, and decided what he would do on subsequent levels if he made it that far. 

He didn’t go, though. As long as he couldn’t hike to the base of the volcano or wield a sword like he meant to use it, spending any serious time on the road was a terrible idea.

Instead, he let first two, then three years, pass by in relative comfort. Things might have continued on that way for months or years more if he hadn’t had a bit too much to drink one night while he was having dinner with the Queen… or rather, Elthena. He didn’t remember quite how it happened the next day. Why should he? That was the least memorable part of the whole evening. 

The two of them had been sharing a private dinner in one of the small rooms, and the wine had flowed freely enough that the kissing, along with everything else, quickly followed. That he never made it back to his chambers. Instead, he woke up in hers with her curled against him. 

Simon hadn’t meant to end up there, of course, but in the morning, he did not exactly regret it either. Certainly not enough to stop her from starting things all over again when she woke shortly after dawn, despite the painful protests from parts of his body. 

“Should we be doing this?” he asked, finally, when they were both spent. 

“Well, I can ask my physician if you like, but you certainly seem healthy to me,” she answered with a smirk. 

“That’s not what I mean,” he said after a moment, appreciating the view. “You’re—”

“An unwed woman?” she asked. “It’s true. I am, and I think you’ve been playing hard to get quite long enough.” 

“You’re also the Queen…” he said. “Won’t this cause problems?”

“Simon, I’m a queen that’s forbidden to marry lest she bring about the doom of her people,” she said with a smile. “The only perk of that arrangement is that I can take a lover whenever it suits me without regard to such things. After all, I can’t exactly marry you, can I?”

“We can’t get married,” he said, feigning shock. “Whatever will we do?”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll think of something,” she teased.

Simon smiled. There were a lot of things he could think of, but right now, none of them mattered half so much as the beautiful, dark haired woman whose bed he was sharing.

Ch. 156 - Telling the Truth

Simon expected that his little liaison with Elthena would have been a one-time thing, even though he hoped it might become at least a sometimes thing, but the Queen made no effort to hide their relationship. Soon, he became known as Her Highness’s consort on an official level. 

That felt strange to Simon. It was a fact that was both widely known and also rarely mentioned by anyone to him directly, though some of his friends would tell him about the rumors sometimes. 

“Have you heard the latest,” Aikolas asked him one day when they were strolling through the city together. “They say that the queen was forced to offer her hand to a monster to save the city?”

Simon laughed at that. “So I’m a monster now?”

“In the eyes of some, all foreigners are,” Aikolas answered, making Simon laugh all the harder. 

He’d been expecting to be told how his scars made him unacceptable to royalty, but the truth was, he could be the prettiest guy in the world, but since he wasn’t Ionian, some of the locals would still turn their noses up at him past a certain point. Not all of them were like that, but the residents could be very clannish.

They weren’t rude about it, mostly. They were happy to sell him things or buy his medicines when he’d been a doctor and herbalist. Some of the poorer families would have even let him marry their daughters on the account of his success before all this happened, but even if he’d been proclaimed a hero in public, he doubted the nobility of the city would have ever come to see him as one of their own. In truth, he’d probably never entirely understand the customs of Ionar as a foreigner.

That was fine; Simon could stay here for a dozen more lifetimes, and he doubted he’d ever think of it as home either. Right now his only true home was the road, and the only reason he stayed here was because of what a delightful woman Elthena was, with or without clothes. 

He often sat in on her court sessions now, not in any official capacity, of course. He just watched as she handed out justice and took petitions from clients, aristocrats, and sometimes the governors of other cities. It was deadly dull most days, but sometimes it could get interesting. Once, after she’d turned down the request of a powerful trader prince for more favorable tariffs and a monopoly related to certain imported goods, he’d been forced to stop an assassination attempt. 

In the moment, it had been terrifying, but he reacted on instinct and sprang into action even before he was quite sure what was happening. Honestly, in the aftermath, he had to admit to himself that it was the most fun he’d had all year. 

One moment, he’d been naked in bed with the Queen, and the next, he’d been fighting off two armed men who crept in through the window. They both wore black armor that marked them as some kind of professional assassins in his eyes, and they both wielded long curved knives. 

He fought the first one off with a particularly heavy candle stick while Elthena screamed for help. He mostly parried that strike, turning it from a death blow into something more glancing before he brained the bastard. 

However, the second one was too far away and moving too quickly for him to repeat that performance. So, instead, he took the man’s head off with a whispered word of force, sending him tumbling to the floor before the assassin could reach his target. 

He had a knife now, and it was dark. He planned to tell her he’d done it with the first assassin's weapon. After all, in the chaos of the moment, everything happened at once. No one could say who did what exactly. By the time the guards arrived, it was already over. 

Simon was bleeding, and apparently, based on the slow numbing sensation spreading across his chest. So, while the Queen ordered the guards to wake the palace and put everyone on alert, he took care of that with a word of lesser cure. 

Slow down there, Simon, he joked to himself. Two spells in two minutes. You aren’t as young as you used to be. 

He cured the poison, but he didn’t bother to heal the wound. That would have been too obvious. Instead, he waited for the palace physician to arrive in his nightgown and stitch Simon up one more time. 

“You just can’t take care of yourself, can you,” the man muttered good-naturedly as he closed the long, shallow wound one stitch at a time. 

“He took care of me, and that’s all that mattered,” the Queen answered peevishly. She was worried as she summoned her ministers and issued orders, but Simon could tell that she was worried about him more than the assassination attempt. 

“Of course, this means war,” she told her chancellor as they discussed the events and asked her what she was going to do about this. 

Elthena was many things, but indecisive was not one of them. Still, the talk of war made Simon cringe. The last thing he wanted to do was see more violence come to this place. Still, it wasn’t his place to contradict her, at least not while there were people around. That discussion could wait until they were by themselves. 

Unfortunately, alone was a long time coming that day. Even though the attack had occurred just after midnight, it was only when they finally stopped the maelstrom of activity long enough for breakfast a few hours after sunrise that she dismissed everyone. By then, the harbor had been locked down, people had been arrested, and all manner of other preparations had taken place. 

“First you save the city, and then you save me,” she said unexpectedly between bites of her eggs. “Tell me, Simon, how exactly did you do that? I know you're a fine warrior, but wasn't the second one a bit too far away, even for you?”

He was supposed to tell her about the knife. He wanted to tell her. That would have been the smart thing to do. He couldn't bring himself to lie to this woman, though. He wasn’t sure if he loved her, but he certainly respected her too much for that. So, instead, he said, “Magic. It was the only way.”

She nodded and said, “My Vizer tells me that no magic occurred on the palace grounds tonight, but I thought as much. There was too much distance for anything else, and the only sword you had on you, well…” She chuckled at that, taking the news a lot better than he thought she would. 

Simon smiled back, not sure what to say about that exactly, so she continued. “Why do you think he cannot see the spells you cast?”

It seemed strange to him that Elthena was more concerned about that than his admission that he’d done such an awful thing by her society's standards, but he ignored that for the moment and answered her honestly. “I doubt very much that he has such an ability. I haven’t come across a lot of mages in my time, but the ones I have—”

“Oh, Simon, stop,” she said, “I appreciate the honesty, but you make it sound like you’ve done battle with dozens of warlocks, and you’re not that much older than me.”

“I’m not in this life,” he agreed. Once he started with honesty, all the rest started to leak out of him. 

“I’ve lived many lives and fought many battles,” he answered, “but only a few of them were warlocks. They’re pretty rare.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” she said after a moment of silence. 

“I am,” he agreed. 

Telling anyone everything he’d been through was a bad idea, but Simon had lived dozens of lives now without really telling anything. It was all bottled up inside him now and at this point. He had to tell someone. So, it might as well be her. 

They spent hours on the balcony that morning as he let it all pour out of him. He didn’t tell her everything, but only because it would complicate things even more. He didn’t tell her about the time loop or the fact that her city had been buried beneath lava more times than he could count. He didn’t tell her about the basilisk or the fact that it had turned him to stone for decades. 

But he did tell her about all the endless killing and about how when he died, the gods brought him back to keep doing it. He told her about his time as a zombie, along with the wars and revolutions and everything else he participated in. When it was all over, the most surprising thing of all happened. She hugged him. 

When he’d even hinted at this stuff with Freya, she’d been cold and distant for days while she processed it, but the Queen of Ionar was a much more confident woman, and she simply accepted it and him for who he was. Simon was reasonably certain she would have done the same thing if he hadn’t just saved her life, but it certainly helped. 

“So, were you sent here to save the city, then?” she asked. “Did you know about the assassination? Is that why you stuck around?”

“I knew about the volcano,” Simon answered with a shake of his head. “Everything else… well, even if I was in better shape, I would have stuck around for you anyway.”

Emotions overwhelmed Elthena then, and she teared up even as she kissed him. It was only after they’d finished that discussion, that they finally got to questions of war and all the rest. Simon argued she should find a more peaceful solution and that many would die if they took this route, but she wouldn’t relent. 

“My hands are tied here,” she sighed. “If Alfonsic wants a fight, then I shall give them one. They are nothing but a tiny island, and I can’t see why they think they could best our Triremes at sea, but—”

“But don’t you see, that’s exactly what they want, or at least someone does,” Simon answered. “This was provoked for this outcome.”

“Maybe,” she agreed doubtfully. “But there isn’t much I can do.”

They didn’t talk about the subject anymore after that. Instead, the Queen called for a war council and left Simon to rest. Some part of him couldn’t shake the feeling that all of this was a very bad idea. “There’s more at work here than I’m seeing,” he told himself as he finally cast heal lesser wounds on his gash. He didn’t think he was in any danger if he didn’t; of course, they just hadn’t invented painkillers in Ionia yet, and the way that the freshly stitched wound throbbed painfully, he couldn’t think straight.