Death After Death PLUS 339-341

Ch. 339 - Blast from the Past

The mirror burned with the complicated magic his twin wrote there. For a moment, it was jut those lines of power, but as the spell took hold and the inscribed runes faded, and the mirror burst to vibrant life, Simon’s vision was wiped away by the intensity of it. For a moment the mirror wasn’t a mirror anymore; it was gateway of dazzling light, and he blinked hard as his eyes watered.  

No matter how much it affected his vision, though, his hearing was left untouched, and while he wasn’t sure entirely what the words meant, he heard his doppelganger say, "Start at the beginning, but as fast as is comprehensible. Skip the parts where you can’t find him. Maybe five or ten times speed. We can always go faster next time.”

For a moment, Simon thought that the man was talking to him, but he quickly realized that he was commanding the mirror, as it sprang to life. As the light faded, the images that came out were familiar ones. They were of the cabin, and of him, fresh after a death. No, not after a death, at least not in the Pit, Simon realized as he watched himself flounder around the cabin for the first time. He’d forgotten the details of this moment, but it was easy to remember them as they unreeled before his eyes. 

Only, it wasn’t before his eyes. The mirror wasn’t displaying it as it always had before. It was projecting them onto his very soul. He wasn’t quite relieving them. He was watching them from the perspective of wherever the mirror had observed him in those moments. In the cabin, that meant that it was watching him from where it hung right now, but as the past version of himself stepped outside, that perspective became more jarring. 

For a moment he watched himself from the shiny metal of the doorhandle, and then, after that, from the stream as he walked over it. Not only was it playing fast, but whole stretches of it were missing. It was like every time he walked out of the mirror's view, time stopped, and then started again when it found him again. There was no sound, but his mind almost filled that in.

The experience was jarring, but not as jarring as it should have been, because the longer he watched, the more he remembered about what was happening. He recalled his frustration at how stupid the mirror was during their first argument, and how quickly he thought he’d beat this place. 

No, I’m not remembering, he realized as he watched himself come back to life after his first death to the rats. He could almost hear the words that the first version of him said, and there was no way he would have remembered such an inconsequential detail. 

Let those little bitches try to bite through this, he thought, cringing at his words as if deciding to use armor was some kind of genius tactic. It should have been the first thing any serious warrior would have done from the start, but Simon hadn’t been a warrior then. He hadn’t even been a serious person. 

It felt like a memory, but it wasn’t. It was like he was sharing the moment with his past self in some small way. He might not see him get ripped apart by rats, or die to goblins for the first time, but he could feel it echo through him. Those moments were bone-deep and their shame and pain were still vivid centuries later. 

He actually didn’t see much of the goblin level at all. There were a few snips of him walking along the meltwater stream with the torch, and a single terrifying moment where he fell down the waterfall before he drowned in the dark, but until he got down to the skeletal knight level, there really wasn’t much to see. 

Simon should have wondered why he was being shown all of these things, but he didn’t even ask the question. He barely asked how he was being shown them at all, because the novelty of what was happening all but overwhelmed him. They weren’t pleasant memories, but even watching himself die to the skeleton knight from a dented helmet across the room wouldn’t have been enough to cause the rising panic he was feeling. 

He knew that he’d been terrified in that moment. He could recall killing himself, but such a thing wouldn’t have rattled him today. Today, he would have fought and he would have won. As he watched Simon pick up the mace and battle for the second time, he could feel himself not just critiquing his old performance, but trying to move along with it. 

That’s when he realized he was actually moving again. That stunned him enough to stop, taking him right out of the experience. It kept playing, of course, but he was more concerned about the fact that for the first time since he’d blown himself to bits at the end of his last life, he felt something at all. 

That was when his Dopelganger started to speak again. “Sibyl’s mark would have utterly destroyed your soul if you were any slower. I’m sure you’ve figured that out by now,” he explained. “As it is, though, it still did enough damage to disconnect you from your body. Without magic you’d probably be a vegetable forever, sort of like a stroke patient, I guess you could say.”

Simon might have said exactly that, but he couldn’t say shit  like this. All he could do was watch his former self throw an extended pity party at the idea he’d never get past the knight because the entire Pit was broken, and Helades was out to get him.  While he lay there quietly, trying and failing to get his fingers to do more than tremble to the images he was watching, his apparently not-so evil twin continued. 

“I guess you could call this, physical therapy for the soul,” he explained. “The mirror records the world, but specifically it records you. That’s how it knows what your experience should be at any given moment. It's a bit like… You could think of it like your guardian angel, only it doesn’t stop you from doing anything stupid; it just writes it all down. And today, we’re going to use that to help your soul remember what your body feels like.”

Simon’s first thought was, So Helades is always spying on me? But he quickly dismissed it. She was an omniscient goddess. She was always spying on everyone; it was her nature. Instead of focusing on that, he worried about what the other version of him was saying. 

They were ideas he’d never considered, but they did have a strange sort of sense to them. Rather than getting stimulated by a masseuse or a physical therapist teaching him to walk again, he was getting blasted by a stream of memories going a mile a minute. 

“Anyway, I’ll leave you to it,” his duplicate told him. “It's more effective if I let it work uninterrupted. I’ve got other things to do anyway.”

Simon wondered what those might be, and if he should be worried, but only until he got killed by being an idiot. After that, he lost himself in the visions before him. Sometime after that, after he got used to the echoes of his own deaths, his twin doubled the speed, and sometime after that, a few hours, or a few weeks later, he doubled it again. 

At that speed, every hour took a minute, which rendered the world into a blur that made his muscles twitch, and his emotions trembled as he oscillated wildly between success and failure. He relived his experiences dying over and over again to the skeleton knight, and the feeling of that first major victory coursing through him was so strong that he barely had time to berate himself for not opening up its breastplate and finding the dark heart that would cause so many problems down the line.

Still, Simon endured it for hours and hours as whole lives flashed before his eyes. Several times, his twin stopped to say something, and several other times he walked away, leaving Simon to his own devices. He wasn’t quite sure what the man was up to, but it was hard to be paranoid when he was bathing in a whole lifetime of Schwarzenbruck. He met Freya again for the first time, and lost her. 

That hurt less than he’d feared. He could feel his old self’s anguish, but there was no wound left in his heart to poke on that front. The most he could do was hope that she ended up happy in whatever version of that cursed town didn’t involve zombies. He also met Brena all over again, though this time he pitied her more than anything, even when she bit him.

I could have saved us both a lot of suffering that day, if only I’d known how to use magic, he told himself. 

He didn’t, though. Rather than save her, he’d damned them both, and then spent a year or two as a ravening zombie. That was an ugly year, but not as ugly as he remembered it, and as he endured the zombie’s spasmodic motion, he slowly regained the ability to do so himself, at least with his fingers and toes. 

His doppelganger eventually stopped the spell sometime after he rescued Gregor the first time. Stop was literal, too. He didn’t just end it; everything froze mid-dinner with Baron Corwin one night and then slowly faded from view, and when he found himself back in bed, he was left with the hunger he’d felt. That was when he realized why the smells and the sounds of the meal had seemed wrong. The day had come and gone, and while Simon had been remembering food in another world, his twin had been cooking food in this one. 

The meal that his duplicate had made for them wasn’t nearly as fancy as the one that Baron Corwin’s chefs had prepared. There was no cognac, or pastries. It was just a simple venison stew that showed that his doppelganger had been out hunting, but Simon was still grateful for it. 

What he was less grateful for was the fact that he had to be fed, like an infant. That grated on him, but even if he could raise his arms weakly, his hands shook like he was having a seizure, and any time he tried to talk, all that came out of his mouth was a stuttering snarl that he didn’t really mean. While he was frustrated, it wasn’t with his twin. 

For once, Simon didn’t feel the need to blame anything on the man who didn’t even rub in the situation, or try to torment him about it. He just blew on spoonfuls of stew before feeding Simon. That gave Simon a long time to chew over both the root vegetable-heavy stew, as well as the things his twin had to say.  

Mostly, though, he talked around things. He talked about what a struggle it was to recover from soul damage, and how Simon really needed countermeasures for this and everything else in future runs. 

“More than fifty deaths now, and you’re still treating parts of the Pit in a very cavalier way,” his duplicate said. “What are you going to do if you fall into hell, or if the next time someone really does shred your soul all the way? You know there are fates worse than death, but Helades' magic won’t bring you back from all of them; the rest are on you.”

Simon wanted to yell at the man that he had no idea how to do any of that, of course, but such words were impossible. The most he could do was shake his head weakly, which was a big improvement over this morning. 

He ate in silence, but that night, when his duplicate laid him back down in his bed, he didn’t sleep for some time. Not only was he afraid the paralysis he’d suffered through for weeks or months might return, but his mind was racing with all of the new information. Not only was the man he’d first thought of as his evil twin obviously not, but as he helped Simon dig his way out of his own grave, he was raising questions about things he’d considered impossible until now. 

If she had destroyed my soul, how would I have managed to save myself? He wondered. He didn’t have an answer for that yet, but he hoped to soon. 

Ch. 340 - A Day in the Life

That first day Simon gained some sensation and spasmodic movements, but there was no strength or coordination. There was scarcely any control. In the days that followed, things got better, but largely because his doppelganger increased the speed. Before Simon had been going almost an hour a minute, but by the end of the second day, he was going nearly a day a minute. 

On that scale, his time as a statue was barely a blip. Decades passed in the blink of an eye because there was nothing to reflect his fight with the basilisk. It’s probably better that way, he decided. 

The speed made it harder to understand the details, and the bandwidth of all the memories strained him enough that he couldn’t really do more than reflect generally on them. Even that was hard on the most brutal days. 

During the succession wars of Brin, and his attempts to solve that problem, was one thing, but when he reached Crowvar and dealt with the rage of Freya's death, he actually had to focus on suppressing his nascent movements rather than trying to control them. For a time, they were so violent he nearly bit off his own tongue, forcing his double to stop the spell again while he healed Simon. 

“Do you need me to turn this down?” he asked, sounding almost concerned. Simon shook his head at that. If he could have, he would have asked the man to speed it up, but words were still beyond him. Those didn’t come until days later when he was reliving his life in Ionar. 

Even the days spent fruitlessly hacking away the demon seed were dangerously nostalgic to him. Simon spent half a year learning to hate fish, and a lifetime cultivating a taste for seafood, art, and that endless sea vista.

Maybe I should have just stayed there, he thought to himself more than once as he basked in that view more than he ever did until he became an artist. He lived in Ionar for years and spent far too much of it worrying about the showdown that had crippled him instead of the sunset that lit the sky on fire every night before dinner. 

Not long after Queen Elthena sent him away, Simon managed his first words. They were mangled, slurred things that made it clear that magic was still well beyond him, but his double understood, and that was all that mattered. 

“Why?” Simon mumbled during dinner, a few nights into his strange guest’s stay. “Whyre youdoin this?”

“Because a long time ago someone helped me when I was in a bad way,” he said with a sad smile, before changing topics. 

“Tell me, do you ever wonder why there’s millions of souls in the Pit, but no one has ever beaten it?” he asked as he fed Simon another mouthful of stew that had become more like soup tonight because of the amount of liquid that had been added. “Are you even still trying to beat it yourself?”

Those questions were complicated enough that Simon would have struggled to answer either in his present state. All he managed was, “Onelevelat atime…”

The other Simon nodded at that, like they were wise words before tangenting entirely. “Sometimes, when people are new to the Pit, they like to believe that there’s something down there… like there’s one level that no one can get past, but that’s not the way the Pit is laid out, you know that right? It’s not sorted by difficulty. It’s sorted by time.” 

The two of them had those conversations every night for a while. Sometimes they ate stew or soup with ashy bread, and other times they had roasted fish, but Simon didn’t prepare any of it. He always lay there in bed, bombarded by decades of memory as his double took care of everything else. It was a surreal situation. 

He endured raising a son and fighting the Murani all over again. He remembered what it was like to murder humans and taste goblin blood, too. And all the time he relived those painful lives, he regained the use of his body as his soul regenerated. It was nearly as bad as the time he survived the fall from a volcano, but after two weeks, he was able to sit up on his own, and he was mostly able to feed himself with shaky hands. 

“See?” his double said, “You’re nearly better already. I’ll be gone before you know it.”

“I’d b-be be lying… I-if I said I ever thought I’d be better a-after this,” Simon answered. “Wh-whycan’t I just use a word of sssoul healing and be done with it?”

“Well, when you can cast spells again, you’re welcome to try,” his doppelganger said with a barely concealed smile that told Simon he’d expected the response. “But me… You wouldn’t want someone else repairing your soul. It’s a delicate thing.”

Simon supposed that made sense, but he wasn’t very happy with the response. He was getting bootstrapped back to being himself one step at a time. First, he had to get back to where he could take care of himself. Then the magic would come, and things would get faster. 

Even if I have to spend a lifetime on greater words, I can just start over after that, he promised himself. Still, he had questions and doubts. 

“Why are you helping me?” Simon asked one day, when he thought their time together was coming to an end as they ate mostly in silence. 

“You’ve already asked me that,” his doppelganger answered patiently. “And I’ve already answered you. Asking again won’t change that answer.”

“But, we’re on opposite sides here,” Simon asked. “Aren’t we?”

“You tell me,” He answered with a tight smile. “I’m sure you’ve seen enough to make that determination one way or the other.”

“I…” The mere fact that he knew what Simon had seen was enough to answer the question, and he wasn’t sure how to proceed with that. Finally, he changed topics. “I just… When I’m better, when this is fixed, I don’t know if I should go back to Charia and get my revenge or keep knocking out levels.”

“That's a question that no one can answer by you,” the other Simon answered, not bothering to meet his gaze. “You don’t have to listen to Helades, the Oracle, or anyone else you might find out there. With a little effort, you could make most of them listen to you, I expect.”

Simon spent a few seconds trying to imagine the sort of power he’d have to master to put either of those women in their place. After he dismissed that, he spent a couple more wondering if his duplicate would tell him anything about who those others might be, but decided against it. 

If he really is me, then he’s not going to tell me anything he doesn’t want to, Simon said silently, answering his own question. 

Simon decided not to test those gray areas, or even to ask how a future version of him could travel back in time after Helades said it wasn’t possible. Instead, he asked about the vortexes and why his changes were persisting when he hadn’t solved a level. 

“Well, now you’re messing with the base layer of your reality knot,” his doppelganger answered. “So pretty much everything you do is going to stick. You undo a level by changing a level before it, but how are you going to undo what you do on level zero?”

Simon nodded, taking those words in before he answered, “So there’s no way? It’s impossible?”

“Simon, you know magic,” his double said. “Literally nothing is impossible.”

“But how can there be multiple copies of myself on the same floor?” Simon repeated. “There’s only one cabin, and…”

“If there were only one cabin, then there would be infinite you’s fighting over a wedge of cheese at every moment. Past a certain point, the world is real… This place, I wouldn’t worry about that too much.”

The ideas made his head ache. He realized he’d have to be in a dozen different places in the world to make the future he’d created unfold, often at the same time. He thought about asking about any of the issues, but in the end he just sighed and said, “It’s true. The hardest part isn’t doing it, it’s deciding what to do.”

“It is,” his double agreed. “When you can do anything you want, it can paralyze you.” Their conversation continued long into the night, which was all the confirmation that Simon needed that it was probably their last. 

In the morning when he went outside with his duplicate and saw all of the fish he’d strung up on drying racks. “This should be enough to see you through,” he explained, “At least until you can hunt on your own again.”

“I… Thank you,” Simon answered, deciding not to look the gift horse in the mouth. “But what about the goblins? Why haven’t they torn all of this down?”

“The goblins? I took care of them on the first day. Sealed their lair shut,” his double answered. “We didn’t need the distraction while we were dealing with all of this.”

“Well, I appreciate it,” Simon said, shaking the other version’s hand for the first time. “You’ll forgive me though, if I reserve a few doubts about why you’re helping me at all.”

“I help people who need help. Isn't that what you do?” his doppelganger asked. “You’re coming dangerously close to throwing stones at yourself here.”

“Maybe people wouldn’t have those kinds of doubts if you were a good guy,” Simon suggested, ignoring the irony.

“Who said I wasn’t a good guy?” the other Simon asked. 

“I think you announced that yourself,” Simon spat, trying not to explode at him. “Unless you want to tell me a really good reason why you blew up that volcano?”

He owed the man, of course. He could only move and speak thanks to his help. It might have taken a hundred more deaths before he’d manage to roll out of bed on his own. Even so, though some of these conversations gave him emotional whiplash. 

“Well, I’ll let you think about that one yourself,” the other Simon said as he turned and started walking away. “I have no doubt that you’ll eventually come up with the answer.” 

Because I already did, and you are me, he said to himself as the door closed. 

His doppelganger might not admit it, but that was the only possible answer to everything he’d said and didn’t say over the few days. None of that was in an answer to Simon’s questions about what he should be doing, but then, that made a strange sort of sense, didn’t it? If he knew what was going to happen, he had to let it happen, or it would cause a paradox or something? 

He didn’t know. All he knew was that he’d gone from crippled to inconvenienced over a couple of weeks, and in another few days or a week, he’d be fine. 

Ch. 341 - A Chance to Heal

It had been hard thinking about much of anything while his double had kept him wired up to his memories for the last couple of weeks. Each night he thought about his situation and his strange caretaker, but the following day those thoughts were swept away by the high-speed replay of the lives he’d lived, and it was no surprise to him that he’d lived a lot of lives. 

However, as that came to an end, and Simon did more than lie in bed with overwhelming nostalgia, he forced himself to get up and move around. Just that much was enough to remove the anesthetic fog that had hung around him this whole time. It would have been easy then to fall to despair, but no matter how many moments of vertigo, or crippling panic attacks he felt at random moments of the day, he didn't let himself give in to the doom that haunted him.

She didn't destroy me, he reminded himself on a regular basis. This won't take long to fix. Well, mostly.

He was still fat Simon, which was his least favorite version of himself, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that until he could safely use words of power, and he couldn’t do that until he had full control of his body once more. Before he got to it, though, he took a minute to study his stats and get a feel for things. 

‘Name: Simon Jackoby

Level: 33

Deaths: 63

Experience Points: 96,443

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], 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], and Swords [Average] Transformation [Average] Warfare [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)’

“Eighteen deaths, huh?” he said as he did the math in his head. “That’s some ugly shit right there.”

Still, there was hope. Even if he didn’t trust his voice enough to cast a spell, none of his knowledge on the subject seemed to be missing. The mirror still rated him as excellent, and he remembered all of the words it showed. It was simply a matter of saying them. Simon could have checked the list of accessible levels, but instead went for a walk. 

“I can do all of that after sunset,” he told himself as he got his fat ass into gear. 

Simon spent the rest of that day strolling around the meadows that made up his little valley, and while he did so, he talked to himself. He tried tongue twisters first, but those were too hard for him. Seashores and seashells became mangled stuttering messes and sprays of saliva. 

Instead, after a time, he started to tell stories. First, the ones he’d made up more recently for his Charian Opus, and then, later when he was down to only a few where the characters had complicated names, he switched to some of the Ionian ones he used to teach to his class and his son. 

He stammered through moralistic tales about sly foxes, cowardly wolves, and know-it-all sheep, and after a few hours of that, his speech only hitched occasionally on certain sounds. It was progress, and while he was annoyed, he didn’t yet trust himself enough to use a word of flesh shaping. Simon did enjoy the day at least, in the broad strokes. 

More than anything, as he sat at the ruined temple or drank from the stream, he felt grateful to be alive. Eighteen deaths is ugly, but it could have been eighteen hundred, he reminded himself. It could have been eighteen thousand, or eighteen million. It could have been forever.

While dying in his bed over and over of dehydration wouldn’t be as bad as going to hell, it would have been close enough, Simon decided. He was just trying to decide what he was supposed to do, to keep that from happening next time,  when he reached the place where the goblin lair should have been, only to find that it had been erased. Not massacred, or demolished, but erased. 

The rock with the familiar crevice that led down into the earth where the little buggers waited for night simply wasn’t there. In its place was the same dark soil that was spread throughout the forest. 

“How in the f-fuck did he do that?” Simon asked himself as he studied the scene and looked for clues about what kind of magic might have been unleashed. 

Is this a clue? he wondered. A taunt? Simon couldn’t say, but the fact that his duplicate had mentioned taking care of them was enough to make him certain he was meant to find this spot. 

Still, Simon spent another half an hour just wandering in slowly expanding circles, looking to make sure that he hadn’t gotten lost or walked to the wrong place. In the end, he found nothing, though, and returned to the cabin with only questions and doubts as the sun set. 

That night, while he chewed on his simple meal, he chewed on the large questions of what he was going to do next. While he did so, he studied the mirror, which had pulled up all the levels that came next. 

“Why is it everyone seems to know more about how this thing works than me?” he asked himself between bites of dry fish.  

‘Level 12 - A bridge troll and an abandoned village.

Level 16 - A village in the midst of an orc raid.

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 - ?????’

“So nothing changed there,” he nodded. “What about the rest? Are you really always watching me?”

‘Only when conditions allow and you are able to be located,’ the mirror answered. 

“What about the other version of me?” he continued. “Are you always watching him? Can you show me his stats or tell me what level he’s on?”

‘While there are other versions of you present during certain levels and events, there are other versions of me that exist to watch them,’ the mirror answered, which was a reasonably straightforward answer for it. ‘Trying to interfere with myself during those times would greatly complicate things.’

“That’s not a yes or a no,” Simon answered. 

‘Complicating things more than they already are could cause the failure of the Reality knot that powers both of our existence,’ the mirror explained.

Simon shook his head, making a note to file that information away from later. He definitely wasn’t in the right headspace to complicate things further, but it seemed like there might be some opportunities there in the future when he was once again whole in mind and body. 

While his ordeal had granted him new insights into what the spirit that powered the thing was really capable of, right now he was more concerned with the words that were typed into neat lines on the glass. The biggest change was that the masquerade had been solved. Simon was of two minds on that. 

On one hand, he was glad he’d changed the future of the realms sufficiently that such a terrible night would never take place, but on the other hand it denied him a real reason to return that didn’t involve revenge, and as much as he wanted to take revenge on the woman who’d almost annihilated him, whether she be witch or demon, he wasn’t ready for that. His doppelganger had been right on that much at least. He needed contingencies for how to deal with such opponents, because he never wanted to deal with this again. 

“Would fighting a troll count as physical therapy?” he asked himself as he ate. 

While the right path to learn more about fighting mages was obviously to join the Unseen, he would need to increase his fighting skills and abstain from magic for years in order to get his sight back. That probably meant fighting and killing again. Can I really take the basilisk, though, without magic? He thought, before quickly deciding that even if he could, it didn’t mean he should try. The risks of failure were much too high. 

“Perhaps just another level or two, then, and then maybe I can find somewhere quiet to settle d-down,” he told himself as he finished his meal. While he had no idea where the swamp where the lizardmen dwelled was, he knew exactly where Rivenwood was, and if he showed up there without a toxic black aura, he was sure he’d be allowed to stay as long as he wanted. 

“I might not be able to take out all those orcs without magic either,” he reminded himself. Strangely, though, that didn’t bother him. After what he’d been through, the idea that an orc might behead him or a troll might rip him in two wasn’t frightening, even if it should have been. 

Probably the first sign of madness, he told himself as he went to bed that night. 

On one hand, as long as he wasn’t doing anything important with a particular life, it wasn’t really very valuable. How could it be valuable? He’d lost almost twenty in a row to dehydration, and the sky hadn’t fallen. 

Maybe that would be a good excuse not to use magic, he decided, unless it’s to save someone else.

Simon thought about it for a couple more days, but the longer he did, the more his plan came together. The biggest flaw, of course, would be that he couldn’t use a word of flesh to transform himself into the strong, healthy Simon he knew that he would eventually become. He also couldn’t use words of metal shaping to give himself a vorpal sword. 

He needed to learn more about fighting mages, which meant this time he would have to join the Unspoken as a full fledged acolyte rather than a silent brother, and to pass whatever tests awaited him for that, he needed to be able to see auras again, at least a little bit, which meant no magic for the foreseeable future. 

It’s going to be a pain in the ass to fight that thing with no magical advantages at all. Are you sure you’re up for it? He asked himself. He honestly wasn’t sure that he was.

“Did I use magic every time I fought that monster?” he wondered. He was pretty sure he had. Though his recent walk down memory lane was a little rushed, Simon was pretty sure every time he’d killed it, words of greater fire had played a big part, but that was just lazy. There were other ways he could bring fire to bear, and a torch would light the barn up as easily as a flamethrower. 

Naively, Simon had thought that the decision would be the thing that held him here the longest, but it wasn’t. Even when he could walk around and mostly speak well, he wasn’t a hundred percent, especially when it came to swordplay. Until now, the lack of goblins had been a blessing, but once he came to the realization that he was only getting so good by dueling with the shadows and attacking trees.

Still, at least he lost weight. His reflexes might have been all screwed up, and his reaction time could be hit or miss, but spending all day running around showed some results, and between his bedrest and his limited diet, he went from obese to merely doughy over the month he spent recovering. 

Then, on a day that was no different from any other, he belted on his armor and his sword, lit the few torches he had together, and decided to pay the next level a little visit.