Death After Death Ch. 153-154

Ch. 153 - A Nice View

Simon’s recovery was slow, only compared to everything else he’d been through. He was used to healing or dying almost immediately, and there had been only a few instances where he’d been forced to actually let his body mend, the most notable of which had been ages ago when he’d fought with the orcs. There, he’d been afraid of scrambling his brains with the wrong healing spell, and he’d been forced to spend weeks in bed, letting the concussion heal on its own. 

The view from his sickbed in Rivenwood wasn’t half so lovely as his view from the palace’s guest room, though, and the Queen was much nicer to him than the shrew that saw only Simon’s evil aura and not the man behind it. He paused for a moment to try to remember the village wise woman’s name but found that he couldn’t. He was still glad that he’d saved her, of course, but happy not to think of her most of the time. Still, Simon wondered what she might say about him with his steadily improving aura.

Though he enjoyed time to think about this and other topics and frequently used a borrowed hand mirror to ask questions of it from his growing pile of notes, Simon was back on his feet in less than two weeks. There was simply only so much laying in bed he could take. Those first steps were halting, and only across the room to use the chamber pot or to go outside and stand on the balcony, taking in the sea air and the commanding view of the ocean that surrounded the city on three sides. 

What it didn’t show him was the volcano, though. Simon was unsure if that was on purpose or a happy accident, but the one direction he most wanted to look in, he couldn’t. He didn’t dwell on it, though. He could tell from the smell of the air and the manner of servants that it wasn’t still erupting. So, if there was no danger, everything else could wait.  

The Queen continued to visit him often. It wasn’t daily. She was a busy woman. Still, every two or three days, she would come to his room and bring him a book to read or an expensive piece of fruit to savor. Whether she was attempting to subtly remind him of his place in the pecking order with these luxuries or just giving him rewards worthy of a hero, he couldn’t say. That’s just the way she was. One moment, she was so dignified that she bordered on the formal, and the next, she was just a woman, and the illusion of formality fell apart as she laughed at some joke or beamed when she saw him standing for the first time.

She was a canny woman, though, and even when she was being friendly or even flirtatious, she was still probing him and looking for answers to her questions. What was he really doing here? How did he really slay Brogan? How did Simon know to slay the giant if he didn’t know who that was?

Simon’s protests and memory lapses only went so far, but eventually, he got enough information about the cursed land of Ionia to make up a suitable story. As they talked, she told him of how her great-grandfather, Andus, carved out a vast country from these rocky slopes by killing or sealing away each of the monsters that plagued it. “He stole the north from the harpy queen and sealed away Brogan the burning to build Ionar, among other terrible beasts. For a generation, everything was perfect until the curse.”

Apparently, an oracle had prophesied that his reign would spell only doom for the world and that every time one of his progeny got married, one of the monsters Andus sealed away would return to torment his descendants. It was a crazy story, and Simon was extremely skeptical, at least until the Queen said, “No one was really sure it was true until my mother remarried, almost 50 years after her father’s death. She fell to love, despite all the warnings. That’s when the basilisk returned and destroyed the city of Ozioptin.”

A chill went through Simon at those words. He’d never known the name of the city, but he’d been there before. He’d been there longer than he’d ever been anywhere else. “Ozioptin?” He asked, his mouth suddenly dry. “Could you show me that on a map?”

“A world traveler like you doesn’t know about the city of stone?” she asked with a sad smile. “Did your prophecy not have enough room for two doomed cities?”

“All I know is that if Ionar falls, trade will halt, and wars will start,” Simon said, “So I came to see what I could do to stop that.”

She pursed her lips but said nothing. Instead, she had a servant bring her a map of the kingdom. Simon admired its workmanship immediately, even if he wasn’t sure about some of the choices the author had made distance-wise. Still, it was nice to see Ionia laid out so neatly, pinned between the Raiden Mountains and the Grekan Sea. There were some islands off the shore he hadn’t known about, and there, on the other side of the mountains, was the desert he’d passed through more than once and neatly marked not so far away from the mountain range. 

Oziopin. Just seeing that was almost enough to give Simon flashbacks. He’d stared at that range for lifetimes. He could draw it in his sleep. He didn’t say any of that, though. Instead, he asked, “Why was there a city built in such an out-of-the-way place, in the desert?”

“That would be a good question, except that it wasn’t always desert,” she answered with a shake of her head as she traced out a line on the map with her finger, briefly touching his. “It's true that the Wantari wastes have been there forever, but Oziopin was built in the midst of a fertile valley. There was even a beautiful lake there once. It was only when the curse came that the water fled, and the beast appeared. They say that the place will stay that way until someone manages to strike down the monster. That’s a cruel prophecy since no one can beat it, of course, but it’s there just the same.”

“No one can beat it?” Simon asked, suddenly putting a lot less stock in this talk about curses and prophecies since he’d already beaten it a few years in the future. “How do you know someone hasn’t struck it down already.”

“Because no one can,”  she answered with a shake of her head. “Every year, another young hero tries, or a merchant caravan that strays too close disappears. The thing is a true monster. ‘No hero of Ionar or any other kingdom of the known world shall ever be able to slay this beast, and it will squat over Ionar until the impossible happens.’” 

She spoke, reciting the prophecy from memory and making his blood run cold. She clearly interpreted the thing to mean forever, but as someone who had killed the basilisk, he knew that simply wasn’t so, but he knew something else too. He wasn’t exactly from around here. Suddenly, he very much wanted to meet whoever had prophesied all of this or at least read their other work for clues about what else might happen in the future. 

“Who was it that said all these things, and why do you believe them anyway?” Simon asked, rolling up the map. “The future can be whatever it is you want it to be.”

“I only wish that were so,” the Queen sighed, “But the Oracle is never wrong.”

“Never wrong?” he asked skeptically. “Didn’t your evil lava monster wake up recently despite the fact that you hadn’t violated your Grandfather’s prophecy?”

“Yes,” she agreed. “But you stopped it before it could doom the city. Clearly, you were always intended to be a part of that destiny, so she still wasn’t wrong.”

“Wasn’t wrong?” he asked, flabbergasted. She’d been wrong in every single life except for this one so far. Before he could protest that, though, she continued. 

“Don’t you see? It's all part of the plan, and just like you, if we all do our part, then we can make the world a better place, one life at a time.” As the Queen spoke, she took the map back from him, touching his hand, before she rolled it up. She left him then with a lot to think about. 

Oracular magic might hint at some new aspect of magic he did not yet understand, and being able to predict what was going to happen would certainly be useful. “More than useful,” he said to himself as he carefully stretched. “It would be OP as fuck.” Still, the idea of fate made him nervous. He didn’t like the idea that whatever he was doing had already been taken into account by someone, somewhere. 

Helades had shown practically unlimited power and at least a limited knowledge of what he was mostly likely to do, but he didn’t believe that even she was omnipotent. He was sure he’d surprised her more than once or twice so far. So, while the idea that someone less than her could know such things was unlikely, he couldn’t rule it out entirely. 

Simon used words of healing twice more after that. Once to fix the tibia in his left leg that had been set crooked, and again to regrow his big toe when he discovered that the balance problems of losing it were just too big to compensate for. Despite his best efforts, the digit was an ugly, misshapen thing. It looked like a mutated version of a toe as drawn by a kindergartener. The new toe did the job and moved in roughly the way a toe should move, but it dispelled any notions about him replacing his fingers when he left. The only way he’d do that is if he bought some nice gloves and never stopped wearing them. At least he didn’t have to look at his feet as long as he kept his boots on.

Slowly, piece by piece, Simon put himself back together again. He didn’t think he’d be fighting with a sword anytime soon, but he was pretty sure in a few weeks, he wouldn’t need a servant or a wall to lean on if he wanted to move further than a few steps. That didn’t make him any prettier in the mirror, though. The frostbite his armor had inflicted on him had given him gnarly scars across his arms and legs especially. His face was mostly fine, fortunately. It hadn’t been in direct contact with any cold metal. At least not until he’d hit the ground. All in all, he considered this to be a success. He didn’t know how much, though, until they finally brought him his armor. 

It was only when he saw how mangled it was that Simon understood how lucky he was to be alive. Cooled magma clung to the outside of several pieces, and the way the leg plates were bent pointed to some very bad breaks. Without magic, Simon would certainly have been dead by now.

Ch. 154 - Small Indulgences

Almost a month after his fall, Simon was walking around outside. Mostly, he limited himself to short walks in the garden, but in time, he found he could wander a bit around the upper city, too. He was more than aware of the eyes on him then, though that seemed to be the scars more than anything. 

The first time a child pointed at him and said, “Look, mommy, a leper,” he decided there and then that he would get some new shirts made to cover the scarring as much as possible and that he would get some gloves to hide the bits of fingers he’d lost. 

The Queen was happy to help him with that, and soon thereafter, tailors had arrived to make him clothes finer than he’d worn in several lifetimes. However, it was only when he noticed how the otherwise businesslike tailor shuddered when he touched Simon that he realized that he might be a little more hideous than he thought. 

That night, he stared long and hard at himself in the mirror, trying to decide if he should try to ameliorate the scars, but he decided against it. They didn’t really bother him, and when he got some clothes that had been cut with this problem in mind, they wouldn’t bother anyone else, either. After all, it wasn’t like anyone was going to see him naked any time soon. 

When Simon was finally healthy enough, he made the long walk up to where he’d almost died with the help of a walking stick. He shouldn’t have done it. He was still too weak for a mile walk, but he couldn’t help it. It was something I needed to see.

When he got close enough to see the giant statue, he thought for a moment that someone was carving something to commemorate the occasion. It took him far too long to realize that what he was seeing wasn’t a statue. It was the remains of the monster he’d been fighting, frozen in stone. 

Several thoughts hit Simon at once after that. The first one was that the thing wasn’t dead. It was just frozen in a statue like he’d once been so long ago. The second realization dispelled any sympathy from the first one, though. 

The statue was on one knee, with its hands raised in the air and its two fists balled together like it was about to deliver the final blow. In that moment Simon could see what he must have looked like. There he was, lying where the ossified lava monster had been about to strike, broken beyond any measure. He could see his battered armor and the way it failed to hide the unnatural way his legs were bent. He could even see the fog of cold rising from him while the still-molten Brogan shimmered with heat. 

The monster was going to end me, but it ran out of steam before it could, he thought to himself as he returned to his senses and sat back down before he fell over. 

He stayed there for some time, looking at how little separated life and death. “I never would have known if it had succeeded,” he thought with a shrug, trying to put everything in its proper context. “I would have just come back and tried all of this again. So, it's not like any of this matters.” 

It did, though. It mattered to him. He could die, and if he did, he’d come back, but the amount of deaths he was wracking up was starting to weigh on him. He stayed there long enough to think about how hard it was going to be to get back to the palace. Fortunately, someone had thought of that and sent a curtained palanquin to retrieve him. When he asked the guard in charge about that, he just said, “The Queen decided that you were in no fit shape to return under your own power but that you were stubborn enough that you needed to find that out for yourself.”

Simon grinned at that, but he did not disagree. He spent the next two days in bed as a result of his expedition, but every day after that was easier. There were only a couple occasions where he was tempted to find something to drain the life force from something to speed the process, but he resisted. Instead, he took up drinking once more, but only for the pain. He wasn’t much of a fan of white wine when he started, but by the end of the twice or thrice-weekly benders, he had to admit it wasn’t so bad. 

Instead, he stopped and smelled the roses, literally and figuratively. The palace made it clear he was welcome to stay as an honored guest for as long as he liked, and even if some of the nobility were not pleased to see a foreigner held in such high esteem, they said nothing to him at least. 

So, Simon drew, read voraciously through the palace library, and worked on his map. The resources they had for that were impressive but entirely understandable, given their position as a trade hub.  

Even more than the maps, though, he found himself spending more and more time amongst the books. This was the first opportunity Simon had really had a chance to read for pleasure since his life back on Earth, and he basked in it. At first, he tried to pick books and scrolls that seemed the most practical. He looked for history books and treatises on geography to help tie the world together better in his mind. Eventually, though, he grew tired of those and focused on books for pleasure. He read children’s stories and books of epic poetry. He read anything that interested him while he waited for his body to heal, and he enjoyed it immensely. 

Truthfully, aside from the grimoire he’d spent weeks studying once upon a time, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d read anything this substantial since a binge through the walkthroughs of a particularly challenging game he’d had trouble with when it came out. 

I probably haven’t read for fun since I was a boy, he reflected, wondering why he’d ever given it up. 

Some days, the doctor would check on him, though those visits were less and less frequent now. He spent more time bragging about how he’d saved Simon’s life than he did trying to understand why Simon had survived, which was good because digging too deeply in that regard would not end well for him. 

Other days, the Queen made an appearance. She asked most regularly about his choice in books and what he had learned. She no longer asked how he was doing, though. Instead, she simply chatted with him between her official duties. 

Simon was honored, but whenever he tried to protest, she simply said, “Nonsense, for the hero of Ionar, this is the very least I can do.”

“Well, if I’m such a hero, then why does no one mention what happened,” he shot back one day when he grew tired of the statement. 

That gave her pause before she said, “Simon, why do you think it’s a good idea that the less anyone knows about what really happened, the better?”

“Because it might cause a panic?” he guessed, feeling certain he knew the real answer. 

“It might. Anyone might walk up to the foot of the volcano and see the statue you left there, though,” she answered with a shrug. “The rumors have spread far and wide by now, and the shrine to placate it is heavy with flowers and other offerings. I don’t think there’s any hiding that something supernatural happened; I just think maybe who did it might be a secret better left forgotten.”

“Because it would take tremendous strength to defeat such a foe,” he hazarded, trying again. 

This made her laugh. “Simon, do you know what temperature your armor was when the first guards found your broken body?”

Simon’s heart sank. All this time, he thought he was hiding the important things, but she knew the truth already. “I imagine it was quite cold,” he said finally. 

“It was,” she agreed. “It was colder than ice. That’s quite something under normal circumstances, but when there’s still smoldering lava clinging to it… well, I think that’s quite remarkable.”

“I can explain,” he started to answer, but she ignored him.

“My Vizer says that the armor is quite well made and that he doesn’t recognize all of the runes that were used to make it,” she continued. “He recommended that we should kill you in your sleep just in case that someone was you. Was it?”

“It was,” Simon answered, tired of lying to the people who had saved his life. “I put that armor together for the express purpose of this eruption.”

“Impressive,” she answered, leaning forward to rest her chin on her interwoven hands. “But how precisely did you know that Mount Karkosia was going to erupt?”

“That’s more complicated,” Simon said after only a short pause. 

“More complicated than making magical armor or fighting a monster of legend?” she answered with a smirk. “More complicated than knowing several terrible words or confessing all of these facts to the Queen of Ionar? You are a strange man, Mister Simon. I look forward to finding out the rest of your story.”

“I can leave if you prefer,” he said finally. 

“Why would I want you to leave after I’ve spent so much time hiding your secret for you?” she asked.

“Well, your Vizer—” he started to say.

“Refuses to meet with you, but he has promised me that he will strike you down the moment you even think of using magic. Is that understood?” she asked, suddenly serious.

“It is,” Simon said, suppressing a grin. He’d used half a dozen spells since he’d been here, and the man hadn’t done a thing to him, which meant he had no better way of detecting magic than Simon did: watching it happen. 

“Good, then there’s no reason for you to leave any time soon,” she smiled. 

“I do plan to leave when I’ve recovered, though,” he told her. “There’s more I need to do.”

“More volcanoes to fight, are there?” she asked, with glittering eyes. 

“Next on my list is a dragon, actually,” he said with a smile that made it impossible to tell that he was being serious.

“A dragon?” she laughed again. “Now that is impressive. If you told me you’d slain a dragon before, I’d almost believe it.”

“I haven’t,” he admitted. “A wyvern, a troll, a ba… a batch of goblins like you wouldn’t believe, and a few other things. ”

He cringed as he realized he’d almost told her about the basilisk. That had been too close. 

“Oh, I look forward to these stories,” she answered, leaning back and stretching just enough to show off her figure before she rose. “But if you try to crib from any of these books and pass them off as your own exploits, I’ll know. I’ve read nearly every book in here.”

“Nearly?” he asked. 

“Well, except for the boring ones,” she agreed. They both laughed at that.

The Queen left him then, but he continued to smile long after she was gone. It was the first time in a long time that someone had gotten a hint of who he really was without shying away at all. He liked that and hoped that would continue if he worked up the nerve to tell her more.