Death After Death PLUS 376-378

Ch. 376 - Getting Used to Anything

In the days that followed, Simon’s new situation stabilized and quickly became normal, and every interaction reinforced what he’d already suspected: that his initiation had been anything but normal. He saw it in the way that other knights looked at him during meals, and whispered about him as he passed. He might be Sir Enis, but the word was pronounced with a sneer half the time it was spoken to him. 

Simon didn’t pick any fights over it, choosing instead to be amused by it while he bided his time. There were a lot more valuable things to do than get into fist fights. Those first few days, he spent a lot of time with an armorer, getting fitted for something more appropriate than his beat-up leathers. 

Simon had worn chainmail in only a few lives, and he’d almost never worn a breastplate, let alone a helmet, spaulders, and everything else that went with it. For him, heavy armor had mostly been a vehicle to work on various fire resistance spells rather than anything, but that was going to change now. 

“It still slows me down quite a bit,” he complained to the smith as he showed up for his second fitting after a few days to see how the ensemble was coming. 

“Aye, it will do that,” the man agreed, “But that doesn’t mean it don’t fit right. A little practice and you’ll have the way of things.”

“Plate has never really been my style,” Simon admitted, flexing his arms and studying where he’d lost any range of motion. “It gets in the way, and used properly, a shield is almost as effective anyway.”

“Well, that might be true for the blows you see coming, but the ones you don’t?” the smith said with a smile, “Now you’ll be fighting monsters, not men, and I think you’ll be glad for the added protection when you see their teeth and talons.”

Simon didn’t need any reminding there. He’d been torn apart by all sorts of beasts. Most recently, a troll and an owlbear had done him the most harm, and while there was no denying that a steel shell would have aided him against the bird, he was less convinced that it would help against the troll. Chainmain might have stopped it from ripping off his limbs, but it would do nothing to stop the ten-foot-tall monster from pounding him into mincemeat. 

Simon didn’t complain, though. He’d chosen this path. Instead, he asked the smith for advice in an attempt to curry favor. He didn’t expect to learn anything of value, and indeed the man’s advice was largely, “Just practice as often as you can and you’ll soon get the hang of it.”

“That might be hard without a squire or the cooperation of my brothers,” Simon admitted with a sigh. Inside, he smiled. This was exactly where he wanted the conversation to go.

“Aye,” the smith nodded as he rearranged his tools uncomfortably. “Well, you’re a bit unusual, you might say, but you’re a sworn member of the brotherhood, so I’m sure they’ll warm to you in time.”

“I’ve heard that, but I’m afraid I have no context,” Simon confessed. “What does usual look like?”

There, the smith was more helpful. While talking about Simon specifically seemed to be a bit touchy, talking about the Unspoken in general was safer ground, and instead of rushing Simon out, he sat on a rough wooden stool after lighting a pipe from his forge and pontificated for a bit. 

“Truth be told, the Unspoken almost never recruit anyone old enough to shave,” he explained. “A sixteen-year-old, or maybe even an eighteen-year-old, might get the chance to be a squire if they’re promising, but after that… Well, you know. As for making someone a brother without watching them like a hawk for a few years as a squire, it's damn near unheard of.”

Technically, I was a squire for a while, he almost said. It wasn’t the fact that it was a lie that stopped him, though, but that he knew the smith would clam up.

Instead, he said, “I can see that. I’m sure it takes a long time to train a witch hunter.”

“A lifetime,” the smith agreed. “First you have to find men of good character, uncorrupted by the world, and then you have to spend years and decades teaching them what’s what, knowing good and well that most of them will die before they live to be as old as me.”

“Hunting witches and demons is dangerous,” Simon agreed noncommittally, earning a scornful look.

“You shouldn’t talk so easily about things you know nothing about,” the smith answered. “It won’t win you any friends among the veterans.”

I actually fought a demon once, but I was a sort of vampire at the time, and I’ve summoned them before, too, his mind whispered. Instead, he offered the much more sane answer. “All I ask for is a chance. I know my circumstances here are… unique, but those aren’t my fault either, are they? I have no idea why the Unspoken would allow me to break so many rules to join them.”

“Well, I’ve heard it whispered that you’re destined for greater things. I can’t see auras anything like you can,” the smith admitted after a moment of hesitation, “But some say you might be the chosen one that would fulfill the prophecy.”

“Oh?” Simon asked, trying and failing not to seem too interested. “I’m not sure I’d say I’m anyone special, but if there’s a prophecy about Enis the Great, I’d love to read it.”

“I don’t rightly recall,” the smith lied. “I ain’t much for reading, and well, if it don’t involve the forge, my memory ain’t what it used to be.”

Simon nodded and pivoted back to discussing the squires. It wasn’t a very detailed answer, but it was an answer to his question. In time, he’d get a better one. 

They talked for a while longer, but after the silence became uncomfortable, he made his excuses and went to eat lunch. Then, when he was finished eating and being gossiped about, Simon returned to the library to continue his studies. The smith wasn’t wrong about that. It took a long time to train members of the Unspoken, and the powers that be, most specifically the knight he reported to, had him spending every afternoon here reading. 

He supposed any other knight would have been annoyed at Sir Kulthen for that, but Simon only feigned weariness when the old knight would come here to quiz Simon from behind his thick gray mustache. Simon had gone through all of this to learn, and he would have happily read for eight or ten hours a day even if it hadn’t been required of him. 

He burned through a few candles a day for a while there as he slogged through volume after volume of cleansed, compressed lore that had already been carefully vetted by the silent archivists that he only ever saw in passing. Their appearance always reminded him of just how much was missing from the books he read, but that was a trade-off he was going to have to live with. 

Many of the books were filled with information he already knew. Simon could have written his own book on combat within goblin warrens or battling centaurs. Even so, he learned a few things about beastmen and ogres, and he was still happy to read the sections where he learned nothing new.

Just imagine if we put all of this together in one volume and printed a thousand copies, he often thought. We could put one in every village between here and Ionia and make countless lives better. 

He wasn’t about to try to convince the Whitecloaks to build a printing press, of course. They were the last people who should be in charge of deciding what was and wasn’t publicly accessible. Still, they had a lot of knowledge to share with the world, and over the following week he read a thin tome on judging the age of a dragon and therefore threat by size and color, a book on the evil spirits in foreign lands, one that mentioned the Magi even though it didn’t offer much in the way of details, and three books on identifying witches. 

Even though those last three had more in common than they differed from each other, Simon spent several days comparing and contrasting them, as if he were preparing for a book report or a presentation. He would have taken notes, but that wasn’t permitted. 

“A member of the brotherhood should be able to memorize every book on these shelves and recite them on command,” Sir Kulthen had said without a hint of irony when Simon asked. He would have recorded the most important bits with a mirror, but he was sure he was being watched, so for now he just trusted his memory. 

Foltrim’s Razor, The Book of Black Souls, and Burning Words weren’t so different that he needed to record every last detail. None of them gave him practical advice on what he wanted to learn most, which was to shield his soul from magical attacks. He found a few prayers and charms that were purported to work, but from the way they were written, they seemed to be mostly placebos for the masses after their community had been purged of evil.. 

True members of the Unspoken were told to rely on meaningless platitudes, like “Use your righteousness as a shield and you will never be overcome.” That was disappointingly useless, but Simon wasn’t discouraged. He still had a whole library to read through over the next year or ten.

Besides, on the whole, they were well written. If someone synthesized all of them into a single volume of witch lore, Simon felt like he would have agreed with two-thirds or even three-quarters of what was presented in those pages. 

There were even a few references to witch marks, which would have been valuable information a few lifetimes back. The chapter in question didn’t even hint that the marks were associated with words of power, unfortunately, though Simon thought that was genuine ignorance rather than any attempt to obscure key details. It only noted, “Those affected by the witch’s dark powers are often afflicted by these dark blemishes, which are inimical to life. Though they can be removed from innocents by fire and blade, they will often lose power, or fade entirely when the witch who has so marked them has been dealt with.”

Simon didn’t agree with that entirely, nor did he agree that witches had the power to hide their dark auras. He’d long wondered how it was that those who saw the truth of things could kill good people as well as bad for what amounted to superficial signs, like a knowledge of herbalism, and the answer was what Foltrim’s Razor referred to as ‘the shroud.’

This supposed magic technique “blinded the true eye, making villains look like anyone else to all but the most perceptive of seers. When dealing with common criminals, you must trust your gaze, but when dealing with warlocks, diabolists, and witches, you must use what you have been taught more than anything else.

That made Simon roll his eyes. Who are you going to believe? The Unspoken or your own lying eyes?

Still, it was probably better than them knowing the truth. If they did, they’d go around branding everyone to prevent anyone from using magic. They were zealots like that. 

Ch. 377 - An Outing

Simon continued like that, focusing largely on studying supernatural threats until his armor was done. When the smith finally pronounced it complete, he took to the practice yard to grow into it, but even on nice days, it was hard to find many takers. 

“Why would I waste my time with the oldest squire in the history of the order?” was something he heard often, but he didn’t let that get to him. He just stopped approaching people who had envy flashing through their aura and focused on his own drills as he tried to return his formerly fluid movements to their natural state. 

Exercising with thirty pounds of extra weight took its toll. There were a few nights early on where he’d overdone it, and he even skipped reading, but after a month of building up his endurance and building up some new muscles, he was back in the library every night reading about all sorts of things. After a while, the most interesting part of that particular exercise wasn’t the monsters he knew of, but those he’d never seen before. 

He could accept the idea of ghosts, spirits, and fae creatures, of course. He’d summoned the dead and seen fire spirits during his volcano battles. The world was a very magical place, though it often took ideal conditions to reveal it. 

The interesting part was that there were so many stories by supposedly reputable knights about encountering fae in the wild places. These weren’t the elves that dominated the fantasy games he’d consumed in his first life, either. These were the trickster fae that would bewitch a man and make him fall in love with his reflection, or make him fall asleep for years. 

While Simon was certain that some of the stories had been invented to cover up passing out drunk and other similar derelictions of duty, he found it difficult to believe that all of them had simply been made up. However, he had no idea which one was more likely. 

How many mythological creatures are out there that I haven’t met? He asked himself on occasion. I mean, I’ve seen harpy bones, a giant spider, and what might have been dwarven ruins, and none of those are mentioned here. The closest things to dwarves in this book are kobolds, and they don’t live underground; they live in the ground. 

Simon took it all in, but was unaffected by it. The truth was that the Unspoken only covered a couple of countries on a large continent. They barely knew who the Magi were, and almost nothing about what happened in Montain, but Simon was only in a better position by degree. He’d seen most of the continent, but any reasonable world would have more continents. There had to be, he’d seen trade routes that extended out past Ionia, and others that terminated in Abresse. He just hadn’t been there yet. 

There might be a Rome or an Africa out there waiting for him. 

Granted, at this point, he couldn’t remember if Africa was the continent with the lions or the kangaroos. Either way, though, it was going to be very different than Brin. 

He stayed busy, but the whole time, he expected a mission of some sort to come down with his name on it. Still, it took longer than Simon would have thought for the Unspoken to send him beyond the walls of the Broken Tower. He could almost hear the arguments about him taking place in dark rooms, and dearly wished he had the resources to scry on such occasions. 

He was given no such insight. Instead, one day out of the blue, when he was finishing up at the library to go to dinner, Sir Kulthen cornered him, and after quizzing him on the difference between demons and devils, the most common signs that werewolves were plaguing a community, and where an ogre was likely to create a lair, he ordered him to meet with someone. 

“Ask for Sir Rozman,” the old knight said. “He’s assembling a small team for, well, I’ll let him tell you. I expect you’ll be in the field for some time.”

Simon considered asking for more information, but knew he wouldn’t get it after that response. Sir Kulthen enjoyed feeling high-handed too much to help him out, so rather than give the man the chance, Simon saluted and thanked the man, then hurried to the mess hall.

Sir Rozman wasn’t a name that he recognized, but after obtaining a thick slice of pork roast and boiled potatoes half drowned in brown gravy and a length of crusty bread, he asked around until he found him. He was instantly relieved to see the redheaded knight wasn’t one of the men who had been giving him a hard time. He was dismayed only slightly when he sat down at the table and realized that several of the other men there were. There was nothing for it, though, so rather than stress it, Simon introduced himself and extended his hand as soon as he’d set down his meal. 

The man shook it without hesitation, but answered. “Oh, I think everyone knows who you are by now. The prodigy, or the prodigal, depending on who’s doing the talking.” There were a few snickers at that, which made Simon feel like the butt of a joke he didn’t understand. 

Rather than dwell on it, he shrugged it off and said, “I’m just glad to be getting out there and doing some good. Where are we going, and what are we taking care of?” while he picked up his knife and fork and dug into his meal.

“Well, the where is easy enough,” the knight answered. “The town’s name is Daramoore. It’s a smallish settlement toward the center of the kingdom, a few days ride from here, just off the main trade road.”

Simon had never been there, but he’d been near it enough times, and it was on his map, since he’d copied many other sources onto it. While he couldn’t say precisely what they did, he suspected woodcraft and farming more than herding, giving the lay of the land. It could just as easily be mining or trade, depending on a number of factors. Still, he’d heard no evil rumors about the place, so he wasn’t expecting much, which turned out to be wrong. 

“As to why, well, I can’t tell you,” he continued. Simon thought this was going to be the opportunity to give him a hard time that he’d been waiting for, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, he leaned in and said, “Because everyone who was supposed to be there simply disappeared.”

As Simon took that in, someone else at the table said, “You’re the smart one in the library to all hours, why don’t you tell the rest of us who the most likely culprit is?”

While Sir Rozman hadn’t been trying to be rude, this was certainly a jab, but that didn’t make the question any less valid. Still, he didn’t rise to the bait. “That depends entirely on the evidence left behind,” Simon answered. “How did we find out about this? How long ago did it happen? What else did they mention about the situation besides the missing people?”

It wasn’t a good situation in any sense, of course, but such a mystery could have been caused by goblins or zombies as much as by a witch. For a moment, a memory of all those merchant caravans being dragged away into the dark by the necromancer’s undead minions so they could spend the rest of their unnatural existence mining for gold surfaced, but he pushed it off with a shiver. 

There was silence then, even from the ginger knight in charge of the group. It took Simon a moment to realize that the lack of explanation wasn’t just a lull in the conversation while people ate.

“There weren’t any other signs reported, were there?” he said, making the man in charge smile wider. 

He turned to the dark-haired knight on his left and said, “And you thought this one would be slow, Harvin. Look at him, he already has the situation well in hand.”

Simon didn’t smile. He waited for the man to turn back toward him.

Sir Rozman continued. “The first man to find the town empty was a tinkerer who claims to have been through there only a few weeks before. I expect he and his kind have half looted the place of anything valuable, so by the time we get there, there really might be nothing. Still, he said there wasn’t a soul to speak of, or any evidence of violence, which rules out a lot.”

“It does,” Simon agreed, extending a finger each time he named a possibility he was no longer considering. “I doubt we’ll find bandits, orcs, zombies, goblins, or any other kind of monster.” 

“I didn’t ask what it was that didn’t do it,” the knight that had been harassing him earlier sneered. “I ask what you think did.”

A number of options flashed through his mind before he retorted, “Witchcraft. As unnatural as this sounds, it's the only answer.”

The response was met with quiet ridicule and muffled laughter by some. Sir Rozman kept it more professional. “While that is certainly a possibility, Enis," he agreed, “Something this mysterious, in such a heavily wooded area, points to the fae as the most likely culprit.”

Simon nodded as if he agreed, even though he didn’t. He let the other men explain to him how he was wrong. They brought up a number of stories, like the Watcher in the Wood and the Bucket Full of Echoes, but even so, Simon wasn’t convinced. He’d never run into a fae spirit before, and wasn’t even sure how they’d fit into his magical paradigm. Magic run amok was much more likely. 

Right or wrong, this wasn’t a question they could answer from the Broken Tower, and eventually their leader told them all to go to bed. “We leave tomorrow at first light,” he ordered. “Be ready or explain to the Grandmaster why you were left behind.”

The following morning, the group met at first light, and Simon joined to find that nearly all of the logistics for their mission had already been handled. That didn’t surprise him. The Unspoken had substantial resources, and beyond asking the stablemaster for a mount, Simon had to do very little before they were on their way. 

The group was larger than he was used to traveling with. They made five knights, three squires, and four teamsters and porters to help the rest travel quickly and comfortably. 

Riding across the plains away from the Broken Tower was a lot more comfortable than his half-delirious walk to the place with Sir Derinholt’s corpse. After sitting around for so long, it was a nice change of pace, but even as their mounts ate up the miles and he endured the occasional muffled joke from someone nearby, the question of what it was they were riding toward haunted him. 

At least once a day, he tried to calm his soul enough that the thread showing him where his current destiny lay might offer him some clues, but that did no good. The line that should have pointed to the city he was definitely going to next kept pointing randomly to other locations on either side of their route, like a broken compass needle. 

Just how many of me are running around in the world at the same time right now? He wondered. 

Those experiments gave him more patience for the men he rode beside than he’d had at the start. Presumably, every single one could see his snarled, twisting aura, and that probably wasn’t a comfortable view that any of them were used to seeing. 

In such a large group, no one troubled them, and except for one rainy day, they made good time. When they arrived, days later, Simon was unsurprised to find that the town was exactly as described. It had once been a community of several hundred souls. Now it was entirely empty, and other than the mess that had been made of someone looting the first home he peeked inside, it would have been easy to believe. 

“Alright, everyone,” Sir Rozman called out, dismounting and tying off his horse’s reins to a hitching post, “Spread out and find me an answer. I want to be out of here well before dark, just in case.”

Simon couldn’t fault him there. Even with the sun hanging high in the sky, this place gave him the creeps, though he had yet to figure out why. 

Ch. 378 - Hidden in the Shadows

At first, Simon thought his discomfort was vampire-related memories he tried hard to suppress. Even though he knew logically that they were very messy eaters that would be easy to spot, his mind filled in this place's gaps with his own personal demons easily enough.

Freya is not lurking out there to retake you, he told himself. She doesn’t even exist as that person anymore. She’s a barmaid in Schwarzenbruck, nothing more.

It was less plausible than the far-fetched theories that everyone had been discussing. Still, those worries were enough to make his vision blur enough so that it scarcely showed him anything, and it took an act of will to restore that clarity. 

When he did, he looked at the village again with his second sight, but little had changed. Places were much harder to taint than people, and so there were no obvious auras to show what the problem might be at first. 

That first day, they stayed only a few hours. That was enough to find some answers, but not enough to explain what might have happened. Instead, they only deepened the mystery. For one thing, the farm animals were still around, and except in cases where they’d been penned in and starved to death in their stalls like the horses, they seemed to be doing quite well. 

There was also the complete lack of blood or other evidence of violence. Evidence of thievery was obvious in every home, but that was expected. What was less expected was the lack of footprints and even spoiled food. Small animals might have explained both of those, but auras or not, something about the whole situation put Simon's teeth on edge, but that was more true after Sir Harvin found the tinkerer’s wagon and blew a horn to call everyone over. 

“Well, I think we found our thief,” the knight said as everyone gathered around the wagon. 

“And the man who got the word out about the situation, if the story can be believed,” Sir Rozman said, taking the situation in. “At least what’s left of him.”

In truth, there was nothing left of the man who had piled the wagon high with valuables stolen from the rest of the ghost town. It might not even be the same peddler, Simon cautioned himself, but deep down he thought that it probably was. He could definitely see someone like that getting spooked enough to flee and tell the story, only to come back and press his luck a little too far. 

“The question is how he got himself killed,” Simon said out loud, drawing a few looks. “I mean, if he knew there was danger, and he still got caught unawares, that says something about our own precariousness, doesn’t it?”

His conclusion was strong enough that, for once, no one mocked him for it. Instead, they all slowly looked around, searching for a threat they could neither understand nor see. 

“I want everyone ready to go an hour before sunset today,” their leader told them finally, even though that would be in twenty or thirty minutes. “There’s no need for us to solve this on our first day. We will take no chances.”

Simon saw no problem with that. There was too much they didn’t know. Instead of exploring any more buildings, he spent the rest of that time searching through the wagon for some magical artifact that might have done this. His best theory for the missing tinkerer was that the man had been perfectly safe until he’d touched whatever magical mystery was at the heart of this. It was a fine theory, but by the time the expedition's teamsters had finished removing the carcasses of the dead horses from the wagon’s harness and hitched new horses, he was still no closer to proving it. 

Simon kept looking even after they got back to camp under the guise of “cataloging the donation to the brotherhood,” but after another hour, when full dark made further work impossible, all he had was a list of mundane treasures that were valuable enough to steal, but hardly enough to kill over. 

By the time he rejoined everyone else by the fire to eat, Simon was forced to rethink his theory. What if this really is new, he thought as he ate a bean-heavy stew that reminded him of chili. What if there really is magic out there I haven’t seen before?

He was lost in thought, chasing himself in circles while others talked around him, and he stayed that way until their leader addressed him directly. “So what is it we know?” Sir Rozman asked Simon over the fire that night after everyone was done eating. 

“We know that being careful won’t save you and that whatever happened can happen again thanks to the merchant,” Simon answered. 

“We also know that the magic is subtle,” another knight said. “If it were loud or dramatic, some of the townspeople would have fled.”

“And it only affects people, not animals, so only the ensouled need to be concerned,” a squire added. 

While the former point was obvious, the latter was interesting, especially because Simon hadn’t thought of it until he mentioned it. Whatever did this isn’t inimical to life, but to intelligence, he noted. Having a soul was also possible, as the young man had said, but Simon considered that less likely, unless demons were involved. 

He personally still believed that they’d find a warlock of some sort at the heart of this, and despite the tragedy of the human cost, he was hopeful he’d find a new word of power. Whether it turned out to be humans or fae, though, they kept a strict watch, and when Simon was woken up after only four hours to patrol the edge of the camp by torchlight, he didn’t complain. 

Instead, he focused on trying to see the world without a torch, which wasn’t so hard once you got into a certain mindset. It rendered the world into an illustration of sorts and made it difficult to tell which tree or branch was in front of another when his view was especially cluttered, but he was fairly certain that he could see with it, even in pitch dark. It was a useful exercise, and he thought he’d practice it more often. Still, he kept the torch within arm's reach, because he’d been ordered to.

There were no mishaps during the night; no one saw anything strange, and no one vanished. In the morning, they were able to start their search in earnest. 

This time, they went street by street and house by house, traveling in pairs, to leave no stone unturned. Simon was paired off with Sir Harvin, who didn’t care for him, because almost everyone else had a squire. Nonetheless the man was professional, if a bit cold. 

For the first hour, no one found anything, and when Simon finally detected something amiss, it was the taste of sulfur. Nothing was immediately visible, but as he paused and forced the world to give up its secrets beneath his intense gaze, he noted a strange carpet in the middle of the room they’d just entered. 

No, not the carpet, Simon realized, something under it. 

Sir Harvin saw him freeze and said, “Something is off here. I feel it too.” Still, he didn’t notice the rug until Simon pointed it out, and when they pulled it away, Simon immediately saw the problem, and Sir Harven blew a horn to summon their brothers. 

While the eddies of evil he’d barely been able to make out through the fabric had been circular, the actual design was complex. It was smeared and ruined now, and scorched in several places where runic lines had touched when they shouldn’t have, but he was fairly certain it was drawn in blood to start with. Still, it was legible, and Simon read it as the summoning circle for a demon named Vagaroxarath. It wasn’t a familiar name, but he’d check the mirror to be sure when he had a chance.  

Sir Harvin looked at the same thing he did, but it was evident that he saw none of those details. He simply made a warding sign and looked to Simon, who decided not to reveal too much. “Something awful must have happened here,” Simon volunteered. This has to be the source. 

Even as he said that, though, and other knights started to arrive, he knew that wasn’t so, though, at least not completely. Demons are banished to hell when their circles fail, aren’t they? He asked himself. So if this Vagaroxarath ate everyone, who covered the circle back up? Who killed the peddler days or weeks later?

Even as everyone else arrived to discuss what they’d found, Simon brooded. This wasn’t fairy magic as everyone had thought it would be, but it was inexplicable. There was something here that didn’t make sense with the way magic worked as he understood it. 

After a cursory examination where Simon noticed Sir Rozman didn’t violate the edge of the broken circle, he declared, “This is definitely a work of infernal evil. Whoever created this caused the village's hardship.”

He ordered one of the knights to sketch it before they obliterated it. Simon thought about warning them to be careful, but decided that, as mangled as the circle was, the odds that anyone would recreate what it was supposed to look like were minuscule. Instead, he volunteered, “If a witch or a warlock created this, they almost certainly have a grimoire hidden nearby, don’t they?”

“Good thinking, Enis,” Sir Rozman agreed. “Tarnton, you keep drawing. Everyone else, find me that book.”

The home was small, and half a dozen men were able to tear apart the place fairly quickly. One of the apprentices found it in the false bottom of a desk drawer. The dark leather tome was thinner than Simon would have expected, but even if it didn’t actually radiate evil, it looked menacing enough. He would have loved to investigate it, but given the speed at which their leader tucked it away, it didn’t seem likely. 

There was a wand too, but that didn’t interest Simon. From the markings, it was clear to him that it was an implement of fire powered by the wielder. He could have carved one in his sleep. Still, he listened to everyone discuss the right way to dispose of it, along with other ceremonial implements; all of it could be safely burned without issue, but he listened to everyone else work through that instead. 

It was only after a few more minutes, when the sketches were complete and discussions about just burning the house down in its entirety were occurring, that the group figured out that they were a man short. Sir Rozman’s squire, it would seem, had vanished. 

The boy had been searching the house with everyone else. One moment, he’d been searching the pantry, and the next, he’d vanished. At first, knights called out for him, especially his master. After that, there was a concerted effort to search for him, room by room. They tore every space in the place apart, but the boy was simply gone.