Death After Death PLUS 361-363

Ch. 361 - Further Delays

The group’s trip back to the coast, and the trade city that sat on it, was slowed by Aranna’s mother, Lorinda, more than it was by Simon’s wounds. While he was definitely moving slower than he was used to, she was moving slower still. He used his icon at night by the campfire to speed up healing, but the location of his wounds made it hard for them to close completely when they were walking ten or twelve miles a day, so infection was an ever-present concern. 

God, what I wouldn't give for just a little magic, he told himself whenever he thought the cuts looked redder than they had the day before. Sadly, for now, that was entirely out of reach. It was his burden to know magic, but not to use it.

If he still had the money, he would have bought all of them mounts, but those resources were running low until they returned to the inn. So, he opted to save them.

Still, taking the long way back wasn’t such a bad thing. Most of the time, he enjoyed the company of both women. The worst thing about the trek back was the profuse outbreaks of thanks that seemed to alternate from one woman to the other and back again. The first few were gratifying, after that, they became embarrassing, and eventually annoying. Simon kept those feelings to himself, though, and instead let the long-separated family enjoy this moment together.

Aranna glossed over a lot of the worst parts of her own experiences, and Simon saw no need to fill in those blanks. By contrast, her mother told her everything. At least she seemed to. She told her how her father died, and some of the terrible things that had happened to her over the years. It was heartbreaking stuff, but even those dark tales told around the campfire were drowned out by the joy of reunion. 

In that sense, at least, every night around the campfire was a feast. They didn’t have much food, and after the first night, they were out of wine, but what they did have was an irrepressible hope that everything was going to be okay, and that was the whole reason they’d made this trip. Simon could now leave the inn with Aranna, her mother, Bessa, and Leon and pursue other projects for a year or two, knowing it would be in good hands. 

He didn’t yet know how he was going to use that time, but he had some ideas. There were a few loose threads he’d never properly solved. Chief among them in this part of the world was the black swarmers. Fighting them without magic would be fatally stupid, of course, but they came from somewhere around here, so he should be able to research them more if he wanted to. 

The idea of getting on a ship again was even more appealing. After spending so many lives on land and mapping the farthest extents of this continent, part of him wanted nothing more than to join a crew and sail off to some place he’d never heard of. After all, it stood to reason there was an entire world out there just waiting to be found. 

The only idea that even competed with that was traveling west to visit Zoa again. It would have been over a decade for her, though, and he couldn’t decide whether returning to her would be a cruelty or a kindness. 

For now, though, those were just dreams, and they continued to the coast. Day by day, those well-worn trade roads became more familiar, and when they reached the Farthest Feast, Simon decided they’d earned a rest. 

It wasn’t as nice as his place, but it was on the very edge of the city, and had hot food and a warm hearth. So, the three of them stopped, for what he hoped would be several days of food and rest. His leg could use it, and both women definitely wanted the chance to bathe and clean up. 

Something felt off to Simon as soon as they entered Abresse. Even at the outskirts, there was a tension and a muddiness to things. The streets were crowded, and more people seemed to be leaving the city than were entering it. 

At first, he ignored it, focusing on buying all of them as fine a celebratory meal as he could afford. It’s a trade city, he told himself. Traffic is normal. It's trying to use your sight in such a crowded place that’s abnormal. That night, everyone got drunk, and only the presence of her mother kept Simon and Aranna from having the fling that had long been threatened between them. 

That vanished with the dawn, though when Aranna fetched him first thing in the morning, “My mother, she’s sick,” the woman explained. Simon checked her out immediately and determined she had a decent fever, but nothing life-threatening. 

“She’s probably just worn from the road,” he told her, but inside, some fear he couldn’t quite name nibbled at the back of his mind. He saw several other people sick that day, but that was hardly uncommon. It wasn’t until the evening that he noticed a lesion on someone, and by that point, even as the gossip permeated his brain, the pieces fell into place. 

Still, but the time he raced upstairs to check on the older woman, she already had sores of her own. The plague, Simon cursed himself. I knew it was coming, but I didn’t think it would be here yet. 

It was, though. He’d lost track of time, and sickness was once more sweeping the land. 

Simon gave her the healing icon to hold, but knew it would do little good. It might keep the worst of the lesions at bay, but healing and curing weren’t the same thing, and he’d made the thing to deal with injuries he was likely to receive while adventuring, not for curing the plague. So, no matter how long they lingered here, she wouldn’t really get any better. 

He didn’t wait. He’d seen how the city would look when the fever took hold. Those yellow sores would be the least of their problems. Lorinda was too sick to walk or hike, and Simon wasn’t about to leave her. Instead, he paid the last of his silver to a merchant charging extortionate rates for what Simon was pretty sure had been a dung cart. Then he hooked it up to his mule, and they quietly headed out of town. 

It would have been nice to beat the panic, but of course, panic had already set in, and several buildings were burning on the waterfront. According to one version of local gossip, one of those warehouses was where the pestilence had emerged. Others were either the homes of evil warlocks or merchants profiteering from expensive cures, depending on who you asked. 

Simon didn’t care. He knew the city would survive. In fact, another version of him was making sure of it even now. That wasn’t a guess. He could reach out to the threads that bound him to the region and see that one was different than the rest. It wasn’t a clear line racing to some distant point. It was a looping, tangled thing that stood out from all the others, and there was no doubt in his mind that the distant point it led off to was a much earlier version of himself treating the sick. 

As much as he would have loved to go and glimpse that, without causing some kind of paradox, he couldn’t justify the delay. The longer they stayed, the sicker Aranna’s mother would get and the more likely it would be that her daughter would join her; Simon might even catch it. His body reset each life, so he had no immunity from surviving it previously, and unless he was willing to throw away all his hard work and use a word of power to cure himself of its ravages, he could certainly fall ill.

It’s fine, he told himself. We’ll get back to the Wayfarer, I’ll make a cure icon to go with my heal icon, and Lorinda will be okay. 

They walked all that day, and slowly but surely the traffic thinned out. When Aranna was tired, she joined her mother in the cart. When she was refreshed, she walked beside him, but the only breaks they took were for the donkey. It got food and water, but he would wait. He wanted to stay ahead of the tide around them. People were afraid, and more than a few were already sick.

He wanted to help them, but unless he used magic, he was just as powerless to save them instantly as he was to save Aranna’s mother. It’s selfish not to use words of curing, he told himself. You should help these people. He knew that he should, of course, but he also knew where that road led. Once he started, he wouldn’t stop, and then he’d spend another lifetime. 

No, he stuck to his guns, promising himself he’d do what he could for everyone as soon as he got back to the inn. There were ways to do this right, but the couple of days it took to get back there were hell.

When he finally saw it on the horizon, Simon was grateful to be back in his inn after months away, but it wasn’t really his inn anymore. It had become something of a refugee camp. Many of the sick and fearful had fled Abresse just as he’d done, but they hadn’t gotten very far before they were too weak to travel.

Leon had closed the front gate at some point, but even after that, even after the yard and presumably the building were full, they continued to gather outside, looking for any help. Most of them looked too weak to even make things ugly. 

Still, Simon couldn’t exactly turn his back on them, and after he forced his way to the front of the crowd and inside the gates of his establishment, he promised the agitated crowd he’d help them. Those weren’t just words to placate them either. He meant them. 

Ch. 362 - Triage

Before Simon could help the masses, though, he had to help those closest to him, which meant getting a handle on the situation. It was worse than he feared. While he’d only touched on it in the outskirts of Abresse, some of the people here at the Wayfarer had seen trouble coming off the docks the week before and fled, bringing the disease with them. While he’d left his inn in as fine a shape as he could imagine, he’d come back to squalor. 

People were at wits end, especially Bessa. She seemed about to pass out standing up when she saw Simon. Now that he was paying attention to the miasma of illness, he could see who was sick and who wasn’t, and he was grateful to see that she was merely exhausted trying to care for so many. 

“I d-didn’t think you’d come,” she stammered. “I thought that the plague might have gotten both of you. I can’t imagine how bad Abresse is now with all of this.”

“Not as bad as it will be in a week or a month,” Simon clarified as he took in the situation and bombarded her with questions. For a moment he worried that the former slaves he’d sent her had been the ones to spread this illness so far so fast, but his cook assured him that wasn’t the case. 

“They were a fine help when everyone else started showing up the following week,” she assured him. 

Simon took charge immediately, and gave a short speech from his balcony which overlooked the front yard. He put on his armor first, though, because he knew it would make the frightened people below take him more seriously. 

What he tried to do was assure them they had everything they needed to beat this, and give them hope. That wasn’t strictly true, of course, but it would be soon enough. Still he stood there assuring everyone that this was not a divine punishment from the gods, or witches curse and that it be cured. 

“With any luck at all everyone will be on the road to recovery within a fortnight,” he assured them. Some doubted him but they were shouted down by those who desperately wanted to believe. Given that most of the still healthy people had fled, the doubters were greatly outnumbered by people who wanted to believe him. 

That wasn’t to say that everyone was sick or dying. It was just that every group had at least one person in such a state that the rest could not bear to leave behind. Simon spent the rest of the day putting everyone to work. 

Mostly that meant cleaning. He didn’t have enough beds for everyone, but that was quickly rectified. In the space of an afternoon the common room was torn apart and remade as a crude hospital ward, and spare bedding was shredded to become bandages and face masks as he put everyone to work. 

Some people were sent north to the woods in small groups to gather herbs and hunt game. Others were put to fetching and boiling water to sterilize it, or caring for the sick. That last group would almost certainly get sick themselves in a day or two, but Simon was working on that too, or at least Leon was. 

While he technically wasn’t the stable boy anymore he’d stayed on as a carpenter, and right now he was chiseling out wooden forms that Simon had drawn for him. They were simple things, that were very nearly the words for lesser curing powered by fire. That’s what they would become after a little work on his part, but he didn’t want to share that information with the boy, or the smith who he planned to recruit to cast them in bronze. 

Even so, with all the trust the young man had for him, Leon had still asked, “Are you sure this okay? This symbol… are you sure it isn’t evil?”

Simon nodded and assured him it wasn’t. “It’s just a holy symbol from up north,” he explained. “We will use it to heal the worst cases, where medicine fails us.” Even with help it was a solution that took several days to create. It cost simon as much silver to buy the smith’s silence as it did to actually make the things, but even with all those costs it was worth it. 

The objects were nothing but cheap copies of those that he’d made in Charia. Their workmanship was rougher, which meant they’d take more fire and put out less healing to do the job, but it was what he was capable of on such short notice. Really, except for the fact that he’d only done a little of the work himself on the final inscriptions to connect all of the words properly before hiding those runes the most remarkable part of them was that he’d done so little to create them. 

Those first few days, despite all of his efforts, the most they’d done was to keep the situation from spiraling out of control. Medicine and bandages could only do so much, though, and as more people became sick, just grinding leaves and mixing them in the right proportions became a full time job for Simon. 

Everyone else had their hands full too. He was hardly alone in that. Aranna was a dutiful nurse, working late hours every night, at least until she started to get sick too. Likewise, Bessa never left the kitchens at this point. With so many people in need of food to keep up their strength, it was a round the clock operation that included half a dozen helpers. 

Those were just for cleaning, too. There was a whole group led by Leon that was devoted simply to gathering, splitting, and carrying the endless firewood they needed; those needs only doubled when Simon’s magical trinkets got into circulation too. After that the fires never burned hot or high, no matter how stacked with wood they were, frustrating Bessa to no end. 

The very first person to receive one of the amulets was Aranna’s mother. She wasn’t the sickest, but she was the sickest person that he cared about as an individual, and he made the hard choice there. Even though he got four more into the hands of those who needed them most, people died as a result of his selfishness, but there was little he could do. 

Simon had long ago come to the grips that he couldn’t save everyone, even though he regularly tried. Still, day by day he could see that he was saving dozens of lives here, and that was enough. The other version of himself in that crowded marketplace in Abresse was saving hundreds more than that, but then he wasn’t limiting his use of magic, which made all the difference. 

When Simon felt himself starting to get sick, he fought through it, and didn’t tell a soul. He supposed he should have, but the last thing he wanted to do was worry people when things were already in such poor shape. 

He did try to get one of the icons he’d made previously to ward it off before it was too bad, but two of them had been stolen by the people they’d healed, and the other two were with people that would certainly have died if he’d taken them away. Since he was unwilling to kill a little boy or a young woman he dealt with it for now, and instead sent Leon to start making another batch of five. 

This time the boy didn’t bat an eye. It wasn’t until the following day when he was pale and visibly sweating that he Aranna forced him to step back. “You have to take care of yourself Simon!” she scolded him. “You do too much.”

He thought about pointing out that in this case too much wasn’t enough and people were still dying, but still, he agreed to rest. Outside of magic, rest and fluids were the best medicine for this disease since he hadn’t invented antibiotics and wasn’t likely to ever do so. 

The printing press is probably as far as I go, he told himself. Chemistry, except where it concerned paints or medicine, was largely beyond him. 

For a day he choked down the same herbal teas he’d been forcing everyone else to drink with mixed results, but that didn’t stop the sores from appearing as the disease assaulting his body started to grip it more tightly. 

Those weren’t enough to keep Aranna away, though. She’d already gotten sick and recovered in the course of treating her mother. She didn’t fear this plague, though she obviously feared losing him. Each time she insisted he take one of the amulets that were doing such good work he’d refuse. “Others need them more than I,” Simon insisted, unwilling to kill any more people with his own selfishness. 

That barely placated her, though, and whenever she had spare time she would sit at his bedside, hold his hand, and talk to him. As his fever worsened Simon had a hard time keeping track of those conversations. Sometimes they were about her early time time at the inn, and other times they were about their recent trip together. Always though, he could see regret linger in her aura. 

As his fever increased those stranger perceptions intensified. It was like he could hear the things she didn’t say. 

“Why didn’t we ever get together?” 

“What will I do without you?” 

Most of all, though, the question she wanted to ask him but didn’t was, “Why didn’t you see this coming with all of your magic? Why didn’t you just avoid it?” While Simon never answered it, he thought it was a very fair question. 

I should have known that spending a life near a place I knew a plague would break out was a bad idea, he told himself. Still, this was infinitely better than his original plan. He’d planned to be in the city during all this before. While he would have hoped he would have made friends in that version of his life too, here at least he had people that loved and cared for him. 

Those relationships only became more critical in the days that followed when his condition worsened. Aranna and her mother had already sickened and recovered, so they were immune. So were many other survivors. Many of those fled as soon as they were well, fearing they’d get sick again, but a few stuck around. They made for a fairly competent nursing staff. 

Simon let himself be cared for, and took some small measure of pride in how smoothly things continued to go even as his life became a series of naps and watery soups along with increasingly foul bandages. 

While his immune system fought hard for a while, by the time his condition worsened enough that they went off to search for one of his talismans they couldn’t find one. Simon could no longer say how many days he’d been in bed. Still, by then, Leon was finishing the first of the new batch, and gave that to Simon to clutch as he shivered in his bed. 

Unfortunately, Leon didn’t know about that last, crucial step, and Simon’s throat was too swollen to explain it. Not that I would if I could, he reminded himself. Leon was a good kid. He didn’t want him to learn any more about the dark arts than he had to.

Still, Simon didn’t want to die right now, but all he could do was lay there and let his body do the fighting for him, since the faux relic that was clutched to his chest was doing nothing at all. Would I whisper the word if I could? He asked himself. Simon drifted off to sleep before he could answer that question. 

Ch. 363 - A Clean Slate

It was hard to say how long Simon lingered at death’s door. With the dreams he had, it was hard to say how much time passed at all. Aranna was by his side constantly, but sometimes she wasn’t. Sometimes she was Elthena or even Zoa or Freya. Once it was Helades.

Intellectually, he knew that wasn’t possible, but that didn’t stop him from talking to them. He couldn’t remember those conversations, but he hoped he didn’t tell Aranna anything too embarrassing. Still, when that haze ended, he didn’t need to open his eyes to know that she wouldn’t be standing there. 

His mind felt too clear, and the lumps in his mattress were too pronounced. He’d died and gone back to his cabin to start over again. He clinched his fists at that, but quickly released them. He was frustrated, sure, but it had been a good life, and ended more or less on his terms. 

“You can become a sea captain in another life,” he told himself as he took a deep breath and opened his eyes to make sure he could still see the subtle currents of the world. “You were going to leave the Inn to Aranna and Leon anyway; now you have. It’s just a little sooner than you wanted to.”

The words rang hollow to his ears, but Simon made a conscious effort to suppress whatever regret he had as the colors around him started to blur and fade. He’d sacrifice a lot to keep that particular gift, and he wasn’t about to dull it with negativity; the right time to save himself with a word would have been a week ago. It was too late for that now. 

Instead of that, he got up and began to pace. He noted the way his body wobbled as he moved, but for once it didn’t rate as a concern. He’d fix that on his hike down the mountain. For now, he wanted to see his stats, and after a quick command to the mirror, they appeared in their normal cyan font. 

‘Name: Simon Jackoby

Level: 33

Deaths: 70

Experience Points: 229,569

Skills: Academics [Above Average], Agriculture [Poor], Archery [Poor], Armor (light) [Below Average], Armor (heavy) [Poor], Armor (medium) [Poor], Art [Above Average], Athletics [Poor], Baking [Poor], Cooking [Poor], Carpentry [Above Average], Craft [Average], Deception [Above Average], Escape [Poor], Fishing [Below Average], Healing [Average], History [Above Average], Investigate [Excellent], Maces [Average], Mining [Above Average], Navigation/Mapping [Average], Research [Excellent], Ride [Below Average], Search [Average], Sneak [Average], Spears [Poor], Spell Casting [Excellent], Steal [Below Average], Swimming [Below Average],Swords [Above Average], Trading [Above Average], Transformation [Below Average] Warfare [Below Average].

Words of Power: Aufvarum (air, disperse, minor, slow), Barom (illusion, light, vision), Celdura (plan, shape), Delzam (cure, order, repair), Dnarth (command, connection, distant, hidden), Eszloum (soul), Farzehl (alter, manipulate, twist), Gelthic (ice, death, weakness), Gervuul (greater, power), Hyakk (flesh, healing), Karesh (location, protection, understanding), Meiren (creation, fire, life), Oonbetit (focused, force, motion), Uuvellum (anti-, null, boundary), Vosden (earth, growth, metal, strength), Vrazig (lightning, ruin, quickening, wind), Weylera (because, on condition of), Zyvon (sacrifice, transfer, plants, water)

His experience had gone up quite a bit since he’d stood here last time, but that wasn’t a surprise given how regularly checked it or how much he’d done. A life well spent filled up fast, and if he actually lived for seventy or eighty years, he was sure he would have had enough points to choose any fate that Helades had in her library. 

Helades, just thinking about her made Simon want to talk to her, as he had so recently in his fever dreams, but he decided against it. I don’t want her to see me like this. 

Instead of reaching out to a goddess when he didn’t even have a good reason, he checked what levels were available to him next. There, nothing had changed unexpectedly. He’d take out the two levels he’d planned to take out, and only four familiar levels stood between him and something new.  

‘Level 19 - Lizard men in a swamp.

Level 20 - A Basilisk amongst the ruins.

Level 21 - A haunted cemetery.

Level 27 - Centaur raiders near Crowvar.

Level 34 - ?????’

He didn’t plan to pursue any of those right now, though, so that didn’t matter. Instead, there was something he desperately wanted to see, but looking around his body, he didn’t see any of the strange swirls he’d expected after glimpsing them in Ordenvale. Thinking that the cabin might block the threads of fate, he skipped his usual post-death meal and went outside first thing. 

The sunlight blinded him momentarily, but if anything, that blindness made the lines of the hidden world glow brighter. Even then, though, the whorls that the Oracle had told him were caused by too many Simons in the world were absent. “This is the place with the most Simons anywhere, though, isn’t it?” he asked himself. 

While that was technically true, as he thought about it, he realized that such a statement didn’t make a lot of sense either. After all, if the magic that brought him here ended at the cabin door, then he’d be able to see every Simon that ever came out of that door from where he was standing. He’d be in a river of Simons. He wasn’t, though. He was by himself, as he always was.

“Maybe the magic goes further than I thought,” he said to himself as he started walking. 

The small voice in the back of his head said he shouldn’t leave the cabin without a sword at a minimum. His armor and a water skin would have been a good idea, but he pushed those aside for now. He wasn’t planning to go far.

Still, even as he trudged through the meadow to the forest on the far side, he didn’t see what he was looking for. The colors that clung to the trees were a bit more iridescent than usual, and the threads that led to the goblin den were a little more tangled than he would have expected, but it was hard to say what that meant. 

Simon went for the best part of an hour before he turned around. By that point, he could safely say that Helades magic affected the whole valley, not just himself or the cabin. What did that mean? Probably nothing, besides the fact that he wouldn’t be able to get the answers that he sought until he left, and he absolutely wasn’t leaving like this. 

In the cabin, he nibbled at his bread while he tried to decide what he was going to take and where he was going to go. He had a plan for this life, of course. He was going to infiltrate the White Cloaks for real this time, and then, after he learned what he could, he would either destroy them or try to reform them into being better than they were. He hadn’t decided that. Even with such a definite goal, though, there were still a lot of possibilities for how he should go about it. 

He didn’t even know if he should do it at this moment in time or not. After all, whatever he did on level zero couldn’t be undone on subsequent levels, but it could undo them, creating its own complications. 

“Do I really want to trek all the way to a swamp, figure out where it is, and then make my way back to civilization though?” He asked himself. 

Simon checked the mirror just to make sure, but it only confirmed his suspicions. He’d never pinpointed that level’s location; he hadn’t even put much effort into it, and though he knew of a few swamps throughout Brin, none of them seemed quite right. It was possible it wasn’t even on the same continent. He was certain that the jungle temple that had dominated his earlier runs was somewhere else in the world at this point. 

That was one of the reasons he’d wanted to try a seaborn life or two, but that would have to wait. He wanted to be able to cast spells again, and he couldn’t do that until his business with the Unspoken was concluded. 

On whim, Simon went back outside and tried to locate both the swamp and the temple after he’d finished eating. He walked out to the shade of the nearest tree, then sat there in a deepening meditation, looking for the thread that connected either his destiny or his past to either of the places. He’d tried divination magic before, but he’d never tried to use the sight, and that was an oversight. 

Still, it was a thankless task. His own threads weren’t any easier to read than Aranna’s had been, and he was much older and, at this point, very well traveled. He had connections everywhere, so the more tranquil his soul became, the more impenetrable the knot he was looking at. It wasn’t a thicket, it was a jungle. It was the farthest thing from a tapestry that he’d ever seen, and he wondered idly how all of those deeds and connections would be recorded in Helades’ book. 

Looking for places he had been before, especially so long ago, was a bust. While he could find the lines that connected him to Abresse, his former inn, and even older lives like Ordenvale and Hepollyon, a place he hadn’t seen in fifty lives, was just too far away. 

Still, he didn’t let himself get frustrated. Instead, he looked out to the future, trying to find the right path that would allow him to meet his current goal. That was easier to find. 

It wasn’t quite the thunderbolt of enlightenment he’d faced in the north, but as the colors of the world swirled around him, and he sat there in a cocoon of all of his past deeds, he finally saw a way forward. Well, ways, was putting it more precisely. He saw all the different ways that he might be able to proceed.

He saw how low his odds would be if he just walked up to the Broken Tower and demanded entry, which had been his main plan, somewhere in the back of Simon’s mind, but there were a thousand fuzzy encounters that might or might not happen anywhere else in the region. The real question was Simon. 

Was he there at some critical moment or not? Did he show himself as brave or arouse their suspicions? Most important, though, seemed to be him; did he look like a warrior? Did the tangled whorls of fate dance around him? In that moment of perfect stillness, he saw no chance of being recruited when he looked like this, or at this time. 

He was going to have to bide his time for a few of the Simons that already existed to move on to other things, and he was going to have to get in shape. It was only when those things were done that he was going to be able to prove himself and find his way into their good graces. 

“Will that take months?” he asked himself. “Years?”

Simon wasn’t sure, but as he shook himself free of his fugue state, he wasn’t disheartened by the news. It was a straightforward task, and as much as he would have preferred to simply speak a word of greater flesh and become the man he knew he could be, to some degree, he relished doing this the old-fashioned way.