Death After Death PLUS 306-308

Ch. 306 - A Stranger

Simon had been in Ordanvale for more than half a decade when he saw someone he was sure was part of the Unspoken for the first time. He was hardly the first stranger. There had been so many travelers and peddlers that Simon could hardly hope to count all of them. There had been tax collectors and nobles, too, and now that the town had a little wealth, a traveling circus came through twice a year. 

It was a shabby thing with a few jugglers, a couple of acrobats, and a dancing bear, but the residents seemed to enjoy the show, so Simon never tried to run them out of town or discourage them from coming again. Instead, he sketched them and tried to capture their garish colors with his limited variety of paints. 

That wasn’t true of everyone else. Simon had made several ne'er-do-wells disappear in his time here. Some of those he’d paid to leave. Others he’d banished on threat of death; he’d only actually killed the two that had tried to kill him first. Simon held no position of authority here, but unofficially, his research had become more of a part-time occupation compared to his full-time task of making his community a better place. 

Everyone else was focused on their profession or their family. Simon had neither; he just had a few hobbies he worked on every night, and his share of the profits from half a dozen illicit mining operations scattered throughout the nearby mountains. So, he used those profits to make everyone’s life better.

He kept telling himself that this wasn’t permanent. If I don’t plan on doing more demon summoning, then I don’t really need to stick around any longer, but he kept ignoring that advice as he found other things to spend his time on. 

In some small way, he’d adopted this place and enjoyed watching the town flourish as much as the people in it. To him, it had become a sort of bonsai tree, or model railroad set. He would often just walk through town and help the first person he saw who needed it. In that way, he made the world better, one small piece at a time, even though he never quite managed to bridge that distance. 

Every year, he worked on his own magical projects, but also worked on larger things that made the place more pleasing to the eye, and he imagined that he’d keep doing just that until the time came to move south to Ionar. One year, he financed the construction of a new cobblestone main street, and then the next, he personally planted slender elm trees along it at regular intervals to make it that much more picturesque. 

What he wanted to do next was streetlights of some sort, but he knew that magical lights would get him hanged. Besides, even if he could figure out how to pipe out methane gas from a nearby coal bed he sometimes exploited for his forge, he was reasonably sure that would have been seen as witchcraft as well.

The unspoken certainly would. They weren’t big fans of change, and in Simon’s time in their library, he’d seen evidence that they’d oppressed various inventions and ideas because they considered them to be witchcraft adjacent. While Simon hadn’t seen them burn a movable type printing press or anything, he expected that they would if they found one. Even little things like better ways to create paper or certain types of medicines had found their way into the White Cloak’s Black Library.  

While the man who had introduced himself as a sell sword named Jakob hadn’t been wearing a literal white cloak, Simon had recognized the amulet around the man’s neck. In another lifetime, he might have made it himself. It was a simple blazing heart motif that almost certainly used fire magic to power an aura of protection around the wearer. 

None of that information made it any easier to decide what to do with him. Simon had a deep paranoia about that particular cult, but he wasn’t really in the mood to execute people who hadn’t given him cause, either. Simon hadn’t even cast a spell in over a year. Almost anything he needed to do magically, these days he’d created some implement or artifact for, making his unassuming little home a magical trove more powerful than anything to this side of Ice Fang’s hoard. 

Simon wore something similar to the man’s broach these days, though his was much more complicated. It didn’t just try to protect him from the energies unleashed by a word of power, though. It warned him of its use, and between the two functions, that was certainly the more useful. 

He didn’t fear being killed by a warlock or a Magi; he was more worried about them getting the drop on him. Much like an old west movie, the person who drew first almost always won. Magic was so powerful that it was like using bazookas at twenty paces. 

In this battle, he didn’t have to fear magic, only discovery, and Jakob seemed abnormally interested in Simon, for reasons that he couldn’t quite discern. The stranger didn’t try to talk to Simon directly, except on their first encounter, where he’d shaken Simon’s hand, but he sure talked about him often enough. Several people, including the headman himself, had asked Simon why that might be the case, but he had nothing to tell any of them. 

“Could be an old grudge?” Simon lied. “I don’t remember a Jakob, but maybe I met them on some battlefield before now, who can say?”

While Simon couldn’t say why the man was interested in him, he’d certainly like to know. His experience was at -52,166 now, which was a trend that was only accelerating thanks to his good deeds as much as his abstention from magic and murder. He was on track to be in the positives by the time he returned to Ionar to resolve it once and for all. 

It’s not my aura that makes him so interested in me, Simon told himself, certain that there was more to it. Do I still have the stink of sulfur on me after all this time?

Simon wondered about that as he watched the man. Even if he was somehow tainted by his brush with evil, he didn’t see how that would draw the man to this place. 

At first, the White Cloak had merely been content to ask around after anyone who might be looking for work. Then, a few nights in the bar, Simon overheard him asking one of the farmers, “But I thought this whole area had a goblin problem?”

“It did,” the man agreed. “Past tense. Ain’t seen one of them critters around here in years!”

“What happened to them?” the sellsword asked.

I used them to fuel dozens of experiments and a decade of life, practically making them an endangered species in this part of the Arpanian Range, Simon thought to himself as he took a drink from his mug. 

“Who can say?” the other man answered with a shrug. “Eventually, we just killed them until they stopped coming. I’m sure if it’s goblin killing you want, they can still be found elsewhere if that’s what you’re huntin’ for.”

That made Simon smile. Though most towns were fairly suspicious of outsiders in this part of the world, Simon had made this Ordanvale all but impenetrable, thanks to his tax dodging schemes for his mines. The people of this community knew where their wealth came from, and did their best to make sure that no one else did. 

The Earl had made his job that much easier in that regard when he’d nailed proclamations to every town in his domain, letting everyone know that ‘Attempting to deny the crown its rightful tribute would be met with consequences both swift and severe!’ 

Given that the notices had been put up just after he’d executed his own tax collector, no one needed to be told what swift or severe meant. Simon had enjoyed that little bit of the noble’s self-sabotage and had kept one of the notices, framing it before mounting it on his wall as the piece of art it was. 

For a few days, Simon was content to pretend to ignore the man’s nosing around. All that came to an abrupt end one night when he came home and found the Unspoken trying to pry open one of Simon’s shutters. 

“Do you mind telling me what you’re doing?” Simon asked, putting his hand on his hilt as he walked up behind the man. 

He didn’t usually wear a sword these days, but with a White Cloak in town he made sure never to be without one, and the one though he was a touch out of practice, the blade that he wore today had several surprises that could even the playing field against even the most cautious opponent. 

“I didn’t expect you to come home so soon,” Jakob said, turning and drawing his blade. “Your habits seemed pretty set.”

“Well, I make it a point to keep an eye on strangers,” Simon said, not yet matching his opponent. “And I think it’s time that you left town, before I have to make you.”

“I can’t do that,” the White Cloak said, his expression becoming more serious, as whatever act he’d been hiding behind up until now faded. “Not without answers.”

“Well, I’m not in the business of giving men answers at sword point,” Simon answered with a shrug. “If you’d come at me honestly, then we could have had this discussion over tea, but as it is—”

“You’re not a warlock, I think,” Jakob answered, ignoring him. “There’s not much taint about you, but still… Everything points to you. What are you? A demon? A god?”

“Now you’re just being dramatic,” Simon smirked. “Just because I make friends and run a number of businesses doesn’t mean I’m any of those things.”

“I’m not talking about your connections,” the fanatic said, circling him, “Or even your home. I’m talking about you.”

“No, you’re not making any sense, is what you’re doing,” Simon answered, finally drawing his sword. “And I’m starting to get sick of it.”

More than anything, he wanted to ask the man what he was talking about, but he couldn’t think of a way to do that without tipping his hand, so instead he feigned complete ignorance, hoping the White Cloak would let something slip. 

Unfortunately, after that, the only thing he said was, “I might not understand what this is, but I know you’re too dangerous to be allowed to live.” 

He came at Simon then with a hammering series of blows. Bringing them down over and over again in an effort to batter Simon’s guard out of the way and end things with a quick blow to the head, but Simon didn’t allow it. 

While he wasn’t in peak form, he was hardly in poor shape in this life. He was as young and as strong as he’d ever been, plus this time, he had an ace up his sleeve. He shifted his grip slightly, covering the contact points that activated the strength runes that he’d etched deep in this weapon, and they instantly sprang to life, making him twice as strong as he’d ever been.

After that, he didn’t parry so much as halt the forward motion of his opponent’s weapon. That seemed to shake the man, but before Simon responded by delivering a blow that would surely be fatal, he said, “You’re making it harder and harder to justify sparing your life.”

“As if I’d allow it,” the other man spat. “Do you really think I’d break under torture? I’ll tell you nothing.”

“While that’s an option,” Simon agreed, “It’s bad for my karma. I’d feel better about that than ripping the answers out of your soul after you are dead… The choice is yours, really.”

Ch. 307 - A Stranger (part 2)

Jakob’s eyes widened before he whispered, “It’s true, then. You are a warlock.”

“Only in the sense that the Unspoken think that everyone is a Warlock,” Simon sighed, beating the man’s blade hard enough to make him take a step back. “But in the killing and sacrificing people for power in the way you mean it—”

He grunted as the unspoken struck with an unexpected backhand. Simon acknowledged that his opponent was good, as the other man shouted, “Where did you hear that name?” 

The White Cloak was certainly good enough that Simon would be struggling without his magical boost. As it was, he could keep this up long after the other man tired, but for once, trying to wear his opponent out wasn’t a good idea. The volume of their conversation, combined with the sound of swordplay, was concerning. 

“It's not a particularly well-kept secret,” Simon said, taunting the man as he stepped back, letting him press the attack as his fury outpaced his training or his sense. “You know what is? That your Grandmaster knows how to use magic.”

“Liar!” the White Cloak raged. “You know nothing of our order! You seek to smear us with your lies!”

Simon had expected that response, and let the man exhaust himself, peppering him with taunts more than blows as he fought fairly defensively. As he did so, he heard the sounds of distant shouting, and he could see a lantern heading in their direction. 

“Do you know what your problem is?” Simon grunted, finding the rhythm of the battle. “The White Cloaks, I mean. Not you specifically.”

“Anyone who uses magic is damned!” the Unspoken warrior shouted. Even as he did so, though, Simon forced him back. 

“It’s that you’re too inflexible,” Simon teased. “You’ve got the right idea. You should kill warlocks, necromancers, and demonologists, but maybe, just maybe, you shouldn’t assume anyone that’s the least bit suspicious is one.”

“Evil shows itself easily enough for those with the eyes to see,” the man shouted as they exchanged blows. 

Simon wanted to tell him how wrong he was in that moment. He wanted to explain that if magic really poisoned the soul, then his would be ebon black, but he knew there was no point. The Unspoken had been brainwashed every bit as thoroughly as the Magi, he just hadn’t seen the process close up. 

Instead of talking, he finally took control of the tempo of the battle completely. If the time for talking was over, then they really only had one option left. 

Then, when the exhausted man was in a vulnerable spot, Simon asked, “If what you say is true, and I know nothing, then how do I know what hides beneath the Broken Tower?”

That was enough to make the man pause just a moment, which Simon exploited mercilessly. This time, he didn’t strike at Jakob’s body or even his weapon. He struck at his wrist, slicing right through it with a powerful blow that sent his sword in one direction and his hand in another. A scream that was certainly loud enough to send people running to them a little faster than they were already. 

“We could still talk this out,” Simon offered, pulling back slightly as the other man fell to his knees, looking at the stump that had been his right hand in horror. 

“I would never cooperate with black blooded filth like—” the man growled. 

“Yeah, I thought as much,” Simon said with a sigh before running the man through the chest. “Don’t say I didn’t give you a chance to avoid this.”

The torches were getting closer now, so Simon released his sword and left it stuck into the man’s chest, then pulled out his own dagger and gave himself a shallow slash across his chest as the torches of the night watch closed in. It wouldn’t do for him to be caught red-handed and entirely injury-free.  

Two members of the town watch arrived less than a minute after that. One had a spear and a lantern, and the other carried a crossbow that misfired, sending a quarrel over Simon’s head and off into the night when the man saw the corpse lying on the cold earth. 

“I don’t really know what happened,” Simon lied. “I’m not even sure he knew who I was. One second I heard someone breaking in, and the next, he was trying to kill me.”

Not a single word of what he said was true, but that didn’t stop everyone from believing it. Simon was a pillar of the community, and the dead man was a desperate stranger who had been asking everyone for work. 

When they left, Simon secured the severed hand, but he packed it in salt and let it sit for a few days while his self-inflicted wound healed. Mari visited him several times a day for the next few days, and the last thing he wanted to do was be involved with some dark ritual when she knocked. 

“Why do we keep meeting like this?” she teased as she sewed his wound shut and applied a greasy ointment of ground mustard, erden leaf, and another ingredient or two he couldn’t recognize by smell. He wasn’t in any danger, of course. The only reason he didn’t heal it immediately was to garner sympathy from those who mattered until the dead man was in the ground. 

It was only when she stopped coming around to check on him, the body had been buried, and the rumors had died down, that Simon finally dug out the mummified hand and made a chalk circle in his basement to summon the spirit of the dead man and get some answers. 

This one was slightly different from the one he’d created last time. Its construction was tighter, but more importantly, it was not fueled by the soul itself. Instead, he made the whole thing in a way that it could be powered off a charged obsidian shard, which would be enough to power the thing for days at least. 

After Simon had tried his previous experiments with dynamite and demons, he was more than a little concerned that he’d get a fairly large experience penalty from that. More importantly, he was convinced the reason the soul he’d asked about had started coming apart so quickly last time was because he’d been draining it to manifest it. 

Depending on what Jakob said this time, Simon wanted more time to explore topics. Where the Unspoken were concerned, he was always interested. 

When the man manifested in that candlelit basement as an ethereal cyan spirit, he was not pleased. “You!” he shouted, whispery and faint. “You were a warlock! I knew it!”

“Guilty,” Simon answered dryly. “Now tell me how you found me? Did the Broken Tower send you?”

“I will never tell our secrets!” the translucent man spat.

“You will,” Simon said. “If need be, I will torture you, or even give your soul over to the pit itself! My magic commands you to tell me what I want to know!”

Simon could see the ghost suffering, even as it tried to resist the command. Though he’d never throw an innocent soul into hell, Jakob didn’t need to know that. 

Instead of giving in right away, the ghost blustered about how his paradise was already secured. “As soon as your foul magic ends, I will return to Elysium!”

Still, minute by minute, and command by command, his will was eroded away, just like last time. The dead could not resist the living that had summoned them, any more than demons could. 

“No one gave me orders to find you,” the spirit eventually admitted. “I was questing, and saw it in the signs. The world practically conspired to pull me to you. If I’d known what you were, I would have struck you down sooner instead of trying to understand you.”

Simon knew what questing was, of course. The members of the Unspoken, especially the younger ones, spent much of their time doing just that. They claimed to be doing good, but mostly, covertly or overtly, they were killing anyone a bit too far out of the norm. 

A hermit studying insects all by himself in the woods? Probably a warlock. An old woman getting too good at curing people with herbs? Almost certainly a witch.

While Simon knew that the order killed warlocks, monsters, and even the occasional devil, he also knew that they did plenty of harm along the way. It was hard for him to see them as anything but tragically misguided heroes who had become villains somewhere along the way. 

“Good luck with that,” Simon smirked. “What do you mean by signs? Is this a sight thing?”

“You would never understand what eyes that have not been blinded by magic can see,” the ghost said, before going on to paint a surprisingly familiar picture. 

Simon didn’t bother to explain to the man the few times he’d glimpsed exactly what he was describing, but it was fascinating to hear from someone else’s perspective. “When my brothers and I see a man, we can often tell his importance and density at a glance. It is how he moves with the world, instead of through it. In your case, though, you have perverted that relationship. You do not move with the world, it moves with you!”

He went on to describe the currents of the air, and even the beams of the sun bending from where they should have to direct Jakob’s path to Simon, one sign and coincidence at a time. While he hadn’t quite described the black lines that Simon had seen on several occasions, it was clear that was what he was talking about, and after he ran out of new ways to explain it, Simon moved on to other subjects. 

He tried to get the man to explain heaven, but he could not. He could only speak in generalities and couldn’t quite explain what it was he’d been doing in the moments before Simon dragged him back to the mortal world. That intrigued Simon, but he wasn’t sure what to make of it. 

Maybe the dead can’t remember such places because they’re beyond understanding, he considered as the dead man spoke.

Regardless, when the man began to fade after more than an hour of conversation, Simon eventually released him. He’d learned plenty and didn’t need to torture the poor guy; he’d done what he thought was right, and that made it hard to hate him too much, even if he’d wanted to kill Simon. 

Even after Simon dismissed him, though, he wondered why Jakob saw what he saw. The man clearly didn’t know the cause, and truthfully, neither did Simon. He couldn’t even begin to guess at it, but he knew someone who could.

The Oracle. Simon still felt bad about the way he'd never come back to visit Zoa. Even if this version of her wouldn't know it, it was enough to make him hesitant to visit the caldera temple city again. Still, he might not have a choice.  

Until then, though, how the hell am I going to hide from the people that are looking for me if the world is trying to tell them where I am? He wondered as he went back upstairs.

Ch. 308 - Strange Currents

After that encounter, Simon became a borderline shut-in for the next several years. Since he’d nearly been killed in his own home, it wasn’t hard to convince anyone that he’d become a bit more paranoid. That wasn’t quite true, though. 

He wasn’t afraid that others would hurt him, or even that more White Cloaks would find him. Well, he did worry more would come, but he knew he could handle them. 

He just didn’t understand how the Unspoken had found him, and it made him wonder who else might follow the breadcrumb trail he’d left around. He’d become convinced that the only way he could prevent the perturbations of fate he was causing was to limit his exposure to the outside world.

Truthfully, he would have put up a circle of protection or warding to try to contain whatever the effect was, but he didn’t know how. He tried to create boundaries of plan and shape around himself because he lacked a word for fate. Once he started seeing the signs himself, though, he knew those efforts were wasted. 

In fact, by then, he had almost completely lost interest in his magical experiments. He actually ripped his demon summoning circle out of the ground and melted it down into ingots, but it changed nothing. The only magical experiment he did of any note in all that time was to test his frost orb prototype with a shard of charged obsidian in a mountain lake one summer. It worked precisely as planned, freezing it over for a few days before it ran out of power. 

Neither his efforts at isolation nor the cessation of his experiments did anything to stop the effect he was having on the world. No matter how many days in a row he hid from the swirling sparrows or the breezes that seemed to beckon him with their invisible currents, they never stopped reaching for him. Though hiding away from the world made it easier to pretend he was sane and normal, it limited his observations and caused rumors about what he was doing with his time to spread. 

Simon could ill afford those, so he rejoined the land of the living but even the normal activities of daily life were made harder by the delusions and the visions that began to plague him. He began to glimpse what Jakob had described after nearly two years without casting a single spell. 

They were quick glimpses that disappeared as soon as he focused on them at first. Other times, though, he could see the way that the wind would swirl through a pile of dried leaves, or the way the clouds in the sky moved.

Simon summoned Jakob twice more in that time but gained no further insight into the phenomena. He considered summoning a demon again to continue the conversation, but decided against that; he’d had a nice long streak without doing anything evil and wasn’t inclined to do anything that might cloud his growing perceptions.

And the longer he did that, the more things began to unfold. One layer at a time, the world was revealed to him, and as it did so, it became clear that the world was pivoting around him in some subtle way.

That has to be something new, Simon told himself. If it had always been like this, the Unspoken would have said something, and if not them, then the Oracle or the Magi. But how? What did I do to change things?

Simon reviewed everything he’d done over his last couple of lives, but he couldn’t think of anything. Even if he had, it wouldn’t have helped him interpret the signs he could see swirling around him on a regular basis now. 

His experience points had been steadily improving, and now he was very slightly in the positive. He felt that was probably related to his improving sense of clarity, but not to the larger issue; if anything, hiding away from the world had slowed his experience point gain down substantially. 

Simon queried the mirror at length, on several occasions, but it had no advice to offer. It could show him his aura. He could even use its reflection to see the strange threads that seemed to run through the world sometimes, but its knowledge of them was limited. 

‘I exist to help answer your questions,’ the mirror admitted, ‘But my knowledge is far from complete.’

It was a familiar refrain, and it annoyed Simon less as time went on. Instead, he did his best to fill in the thing's gaps with his own knowledge, to make it that much more useful in the future, and that seemed to be working, more or less. It was no longer as stupid as he remembered it being at the very beginning. He wouldn't quite call it helpful yet, but after centuries of use, it was no longer obtuse and seemed to have adapted to him.

Had he not heard about all of this from Jakob, he would have called it some form of creeping madness. Simon certainly felt like he was going insane sometimes, but there was no denying it; this wasn’t in his head. He could gain insight from the way his tea leaves swirled, or the shape that a spilled drop of ink would take. He couldn’t quite hear voices on the wind, but sometimes, if the breeze whistled through his shutters just right, it sounded like he could. 

He couldn’t talk about this with anyone, not even the friends he’d made, but he wanted to. 

He would often bring up questions on God or Nature just to find some way to couch these ideas in frameworks people might understand, but that did little good. For a community of herders and miners, life was simple and fatalistic. For a hero that was now hundreds of years into his new existence, things were more complicated, and apparently he hadn’t reached the limits on that yet. 

Some of these motifs ended up in Simon's art. He didn’t show those paintings to anyone, after the reactions they got the first few times. The people of his town were happy to praise portraiture or nature scenes, but trying to understand abstract art that showed a teacup unfolding like a flower, or a book filled with words between words, was a bit much for them. 

It was a bit much for him, too. Why is this the life where I’m slowly going crazy? He asked himself. I’ve done nothing. I’ve simply relaxed, experimented, and attempted to understand things. 

In retrospect, though, that was probably the difference. He’d felt the faint stirrings of this in Hepollyon, too. Almost every one of his lives was dominated by fighting and magic, and now that he’d found a moment to breathe, he was seeing the world in a new way. Still, it was one thing to lie in the grass and look at the clouds and see shapes, and another to feel like he was seeing portents of the future. 

If a friend had confessed all of this, Simon would have worried for him. In his case, though, he was less concerned. Especially after his observations started to become less hallucinatory, and more insightful. After a while, he could predict who he’d interact with on a given day, just by the direction and the number of strings that pulled at him. 

He could see it in his visitors, too. He could see more than just light and dark now. He could see faint bands of color, and sometimes he could even guess at what those colors might mean. 

For a season or two, this became the focus of his studies, since his little town provided the perfect tiny laboratory for it. He knew everything, and everyone in it, and slowly, he began to dissect them, one at a time, via clues that only he, and perhaps one other old woman in town, could see. 

When Simon noticed Gertha shying away from those with the darkest auras, he asked her about it, but her only response was to say, “Some people just ain’t right, you know? If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay away.”

Simon understood that, but hated the idea that even those who had this gift seemed to know no more about it than the mirror did. Not him, though. He was determined to understand it, and one person at a time, he learned to tell the difference between those dark colors. That black-brown was malice and sadism, whereas black-red was something more like having blood on his hands. The headman’s black-blue stain, on the other hand, wasn’t evil of any kind; it was just a bruise that had been left behind by his wife’s death, a decade before. 

By comparison, lighter colors were comparatively easy, and he could see the difference readily enough between the white green of happiness and the muddy green of petty jealousy. It wasn’t always easy to see what caused these emotions to flare, but after a time, it became easy enough for Simon to see in the petty dramas that rippled through their small community like a stone into a still pond. 

Adultery became an even easier one for him to pick out. He could see not just who lusted for whom by the way their aura sprang to life in mixed company, but the way that contrasted to the way they chose to hide their feelings. Simon spent one spring just playing matchmaker in an effort to see how much he could change the world without violence, and he was largely successful. 

It probably wasn’t the way that Helades intended for him to change the world, but he didn’t care. Art wasn’t a useful skill when it came to swordplay, but it was invaluable when it came to imagining magic’s effects. The same was less true with his current subject of study.

While trying to focus on both a man’s aura and their movements in a duel was impossible, Simon noticed that if he could remove his mind from the equation entirely, he could work wonders. Too much thought on the battlefield made one slow to react. Simon had learned that lifetimes ago. What was new now, though, was the way that he could use that zen state to get some insight into his opponent's next moves. 

Even with wooden swords, he could detect the flicker of murderous violence around their limbs, giving him a warning a fraction of a second before the blow came. It was an exceedingly useful, if sporadic, gift.  

In fact, the longer he eschewed speaking any words of power, and he studied the strange new world taking shape around him, the more he learned about it, though his observations were almost too trite to put into words. 

He really did feel like everything was all connected, though, and as time went on, it became increasingly clear that his fate pulled him south, back to Ionar. Threads connected him to everything in this world. He could pluck one and see that it led to one of his mines in the mountains. Another might lead to Mari, or one of his other friends in the town. Most of them, though, especially the ones that braided together into larger cords, lead to the south. 

“Do they lead to the Oracle’s volcano or Ionar’s?” Simon wondered aloud as he studied the horizon. He supposed that it didn’t really matter. He planned to hit them both in time.