Death After Death PLUS 223-225

While this hasn't been Simon's most popular arc, judging by the comments, I'm very happy these chapters fall the way they do. I've gotten some really good feedback in comments/discord/dms and plan to improve this section of the story, but that is later. For now we... well, no spoilers.

Ch. 223 - Only a Distraction

Simon lurked and waited as the minutes passed, resisting the urge to kill and devour more men just because he could. Instead, he only eliminated one more man, and that was only because he’d been walking too close to the alarm bell for Simon’s liking. Then, after he’d hidden the body, he broke the man’s spear in half to create an appropriate wooden stake with the haft and positioned himself on the tower nearest the stables that gave him the best view of the girl’s retreat. 

They did not run, just as they’d promised him, which must have been hard, given what an awful place Castle Gravenstone was. They went down the long hill slowly, making good time. It was only when the horizon started to glow blue that the alarm went up from an unexpected quarter when they were almost out of sight that Simon finally had to act. 

Simon turned to the shouting and noted it was coming from a guard who had just come up from the basement. “The bloodsucker’s escaped!” he shouted. 

Simon sighed. He’d been so sure that no one would check on him that he hadn’t tidied things up more. If they’d just dumped the corpse of the first guard into the cell and shut it tightly, it might not have been noticed until Freya visited him tomorrow. Still, he forgave himself. It was all he could do not to devour the girls in that moment. He’d hardly been in the right state of mind for thinking ahead. 

Word spread quickly, and Simon was sure it would attract Freya’s notice soon. That left him with a hard choice. Should he kill himself now or try to buy them more time. He looked to the sky, even though his every impulse said that he should not, and noted that they had less than a half hour until the sun finally rose. They might only have twenty minutes, but that was still enough time for Freya to soar through the sky and rip those girls’ heads off. 

So, Simon decided to sew a bit more chaos. He walked around the battlement like any other guard, appearing to search for the escapee, but each time he passed a building with a thatched roof or, in the stable’s case, an exposed haystack, he whispered the word of lesser lesser fire. 

Each spell, as weak as it was, was a real exertion. When he’d been alive, he barely felt a lesser word, but as he was right now, a lesser lesser word felt almost as hard on his body as a greater word usually did. He thought that he might be able to cast a lesser word while his body was saturated in power. A true word of power might even be an option, but it would take all he had to do it. Greater words were definitely off the table.

For now, he didn’t do either. He just lit fires and watched the light blossom ever faster as the castle came alive in the worst way possible. When every building on this side of the compound was on fire, he decided that was enough. He looked to the horizon where he’d last seen the girls one last time. He couldn’t see them now. He could only see the sunlight building there. 

The light of false dawn terrified him. It made him want to flee, and even though he knew that the light would be strong enough to take him in seconds or minutes, he decided that wasn’t enough. So, with his eyes on the horizon, he raised his stake with both hands to end his cursed life. 

Simon had felt the thing pierce his skin and brush against the bone, but fractions of seconds before it penetrated his heart and reduced him to dust, Freya arrived. She ripped it out of his hand, and with a single gesture, she tossed him off the catwalk, and sent him tumbling twenty feet to the cobblestone courtyard below. 

Before he’d even risen, she was already there again, kicking him hard enough to break ribs without every blow while he tried in vain to defend himself.  “What is your problem!” she raged. “I give you a lovely feast, and you thank me by letting them escape? I build a lovely home, and you try to burn it down? Unforgivable! I was in the midst of a perfectly nice orgy, and then you do this to me? I will make you rue this day for the rest of eternity!”

Simon lashed out at her with his fists, trying to carve out some breathing room, but it was hopeless. She was a blur, and the only reason he wasn’t dead already was because he wouldn’t stop healing. It was only after she collapsed his eye socket for the second time that he realized she was practically naked and dressed only in the most indecent of robes. 

Once upon a time, he would have given anything to see Freya like this again. Now, it only made him sick. She’s not your Freya, his brain reminded him for the thousandth time. This time, though, he agreed totally. He’d kill her if he could, but he was entirely outmatched. 

When she was done kicking the shit out of him because it was almost sunrise, she personally dragged him down into his crypt and left him there bleeding. Simon spent the day lying there in torpor. Occasionally, thoughts about what she might do to punish him bubbled to the surface, but he dismissed them as much as he was able. 

She’ll do what she’s going to do, he told himself. She needs to make me suffer, and I need to escape, one way or another. 

It was that stoic attitude that let him endure what happened the next day when he woke to find himself in chains with little more than a shrug. He couldn’t sit up, but he could see that there were several people already hard at work bringing bricks into the room. Between that and the sound of cement, he figured she was going to go full… well, full whatever that revenge story he’d had to read in English class a million years ago about the dude that bricks up his enemy in the wall of his wine cellar.  

“Comfortable?” she asked sarcastically when Freya finally showed up. “You’d better get cozy because I’m not reopening this thing for decades.”

Simon didn’t answer. He continued to stare at the ceiling and wait for whatever was going to happen.

“I know you think you’re some big hero,” she told him. “You saved me, and now you saved those girls, but you know what I’m going to do? Tonight, I’m going to go find them, and make sure they think they got away. I’m going to let them live nice, happy lives. Hopefully, they’ll have nice big families, too, because one day, when you’ve completely lost your mind, I’m going to dig you out of this hole and let you spend the whole night devouring their grandchildren. Won’t that be fun?”

“I would never,” Simon spat, hoping it was true. 

“We’ll see,” she smiled wickedly. “Decades of starvation and isolation can take a terrible toll…” Simon knew that to be true, but he vowed to ignore it anyway. 

“No?” Freya pretend to pout. “No last words?”

“Rot. In. Hell.” Simon said coolly. He didn’t do it because he thought she needed to hear it, though. He only spoke because he was certain she’d drag out the moment until she got some sort of reaction out of him. 

He was right, too. As soon as he finally gave in to her needling, she smiled and slammed the lid on him, letting him breathe a sigh of relief. 

“Oh, I almost forgot,” she said, “We need to hammer this thing shut… Where are the… Oh, right here…”

Simon screamed when the first blade plunged through the lid and his chest, but only from the first one. All in all, she pierced his body in half a dozen different places, but none of the others got as much as a whimper out of him. 

“Sorry,” she taunted. “We didn’t have any nails long enough, so I thought I’d use the blades of my men you murdered. Have fun with that!”

Freya didn’t speak again after that, though Simon could feel her presence lingering. She might want him to think that she was gone, but she was still watching him suffer as he heard the bricks and mortar still piling up around him. 

The workman chatted some, but between his occasional grunts of pain and the supervision by their particularly scary boss, it was a quiet affair that was dominated by row after row of masonry going up around him. That wasn’t good, but truthfully, if he’d just been lying here, it would have been bearable. It was the sword in his fucking liver that made this truly awful, but for the moment, he did his best to ignore it, as well as the cold and the pain that radiated off of it. If there was anything to be done about it, that would have to be after they’d finished entombing him. 

Simon suffered for the rest of the night and most of the one that followed. It was only after the last of the bricks had been piled on, and they started work on bricking up the door, that he even tried to move. The first thing he tried to do was to see if he could work any of the wood slats free, to see if he might be able to break a wooden stake off of this and end himself. 

That proved impossible, which was a shame because Simon would have loved nothing more than to open this tomb in fifty years, only to find out that he’d long since turned to dust. Still, death was by far the preferred outcome, so he kept trying, and it was only after several days that he resigned himself to his prison and set about trying to make it more comfortable. 

One of the blades was short enough that he was able to push it back out of the coffin lid into whatever cavity lay beyond it. Three more, he was able to yank his limb through the blade and then allow it to heal up behind it. 

Only the two in his chest were intractable. They stubbornly refused to budge, and he no longer had enough strength to cast a word of force necessary to sheer either of them off. It was an awful predicament, but eventually, he made it better by doing the opposite of what he’d done with most of the rest of the blades. This time, instead of trying to shift far enough to cut his way out, he shifted his spine toward the blade embedded near his heart, severing the spinal cord and any sensation below his chest. 

That was enough to finally rest a little easier. Spending eternity with a sword in his chest wasn’t exactly his idea of a good time, but it beat being a pincushion. Now, he could focus on it. He could endure it. 

Will she really wait decades for her revenge on those girls, Simon wondered as his mind started to come to grips with the terrible situation he was in. What if this is all just another twisted game, and she wakes me up in a week or a month. 

Then you count yourself lucky as hell and impale yourself on the nearest fence post, he told himself. 

He could worry about all of that later. For now, he had to worry about keeping his sanity in all the years that lay between here and there. It was a long, terrible road made worse by the blade that jabbed into his spine, but he’d endured it before, and he would do so again if he had to.  

Ch. 224 - A Painful Eternity

Even with all Simon did in those first few days to make himself more comfortable, he was still in agony. That didn’t change as the life force he’d drained from those three unsuspecting guards slowly leaked out of his open wounds, leaving him with hunger and pain as his only true companions. 

In his tomb, it was so quiet that he could hear every small move that he made but nothing else. The world might as well no longer exist, and Simon tried to make peace with that. For a time, he even tried to use this time productively and think about some of the lingering questions he had in regard to magic. After a lifetime of painting, he had a very vivid imagination and didn’t need paper to draw. He could trace the runes in his mind without much effort. 

This effort didn’t last for as long as he would like, though, and neither did his attempt to count the days. Even buried in stone, he could still feel the oppressive weight of the sun as it crushed him into torpor, and even with the pain of the hunger, he was still able to think clearly for a while, but in time, he weakened, and the last day he bothered to count was day 167. It hadn’t even been half a year, but already, it was starting to feel like an eternity. 

If I stop counting, then it won't seem as long, he told himself. 

A watched pot never boils and all that, that was a lie, though. The truth was that he was losing heart. That number had been the cornerstone that gave structure to his tiny little world. Once he took that away, it started to fall apart within a few days or a few lifetimes. It was hard to be sure of which. 

He didn’t quite regret saving Emma and Ara, but after a while, his most common thought was that he shouldn’t have sacrificed so much time to ensure their safety. I got them out of the castle! He raged at himself. That should have been enough, right there! I should have killed myself the moment I’d given them a fighting chance!

Regret was a toxic thing in an infinity of hunger and pain. He tried to find some way to be zen about it, but it wouldn’t come. He’d been able to endure a lot of hardships that way. When he cut out every last sprout of the demon seed in a version of Ionar that never existed, he’d watched the waves every night until sleep took him and reminded himself that his efforts mattered little more than those waves but that he couldn’t do anything else. 

Now, he didn’t even have the peace of the sea. He only had a gnawing hunger for flesh and blood that was rivaling the senseless need he’d had back when he was a zombie, along with the terrible pain of a sword jabbed into one of his cervical vertebrae. 

He played with that, sometimes, because it was the only means of entertainment he had left to him. It was the only sensation in the world besides his hunger and the smooth feeling of wood that was his prison. 

If he moved a little to the left, eventually, his spine would heal enough to reveal the painful wound of the other sword still embedded in his chest. It also revealed that he had toes, and if he tried, he could even wiggle them. If he moved to the right again, he severed his spinal cord once more, and all of that vanished, leaving him with only a single painful wound to focus on. 

Eventually, all of that became too much trouble. For a while, a year or two at least, he hoped that water damage would rot and warp the wood and let his feeble finger reach up and pull a piece of plank free to end himself. Surely that would be enough, he thought. Even rotted wood would penetrate my parchment skin. 

It never happened, though, and eventually, he grew tired of checking. Not long after that, in the grand scheme of things, he couldn’t check at all. He no longer had the strength to lift so much as a finger. He couldn’t even blink anymore. All he could do was lay there and wait to die. 

When this started, Simon had earnestly believed that it wouldn’t have been as bad as his time as the statue, but he’d been wrong. There, he’d experienced no pain or hunger. He’d just laid there, immune to the ravages of time as the sun rose and set. He would give a great deal for a single sunrise now, and not just because it would scourge him from the world and let him start over properly. 

He just wanted some stimulus that wasn’t horrible. A flower, a view of the stars, or really, anything at all would do. He would settle for the smell of a home-cooked meal or the feeling of a soft bed. His ability to think abstractly was starting to break down under the weight of years. 

His negative emotions were growing ever more powerful in comparison to the thinking, rational part of his mind. Eventually, all he could hold on to was Freya’s promise that she would release him. She meant that as a form of torture, but he really longed to be free so badly that he would accept any other humiliation or abuse she planned to heap on him in exchange for removing these blades and walking under his own power once more. 

She didn’t come, though. Years passed, and she didn’t come, and slowly, his sanity paid the price for that. She’s never going to come! His mind raged. It was just a trick to give you hope. You’ll be down here forever, now, and not even that bitch of a Goddess will save you. 

Simon had no idea if that was true or not, but then, as the months and years passed, he was having a harder and harder time remembering who he was. Things were getting muddled, and only his happiest memories were enough to penetrate the darkness after a time. 

He thought about Elthna and his son Sayom often. The vampire level was in their future, so she hoped things were going well there. Sayom was probably the King of Ionia now. He probably had a family. At least, Simon hoped he did. 

He promised himself that when this was done, he would go and visit them if he escaped, even if he was a vampire. He wouldn’t let them know he was there, of course. He’d just watch from a distance as Sayom tucked his grandchildren into bed for a night or two before he let the sun scour him from the earth the way that God intended. 

He made up all sorts of stories about where he would go and what he would do when this was done. He knew that the real answer was that he was going to kill himself at the first chance he got and reset his miserable existence, but that was too depressing, so he thought about the other things he could do. He could visit friends and family, or he could use his fantastical vampire powers to kill people he didn’t care for, like the Unspoken. 

Simon spent weeks thinking about the best possible way to take those pricks apart, simply for something to do. He considered every weakness and every avenue of attack. Mostly, he was surprised and a little bit unnerved by how much better his mind seemed to work when he was fantasizing about something dark. He had trouble remembering what Eltha looked like, but when it came to vengeance, things were crystal clear. 

His only lucky break came several years into the whole process when the settling stone finally caused the mortar to crack. It was a tiny thing, but it was enough to return at least one of his senses: smell. In a world defined by pain and hunger, that counted for more than one would have expected. 

Over time, he was eventually able to smell many different things. He even heard a rare sound or two if someone was being tortured, murdered, or whatever it was that was making them scream so. While he still wasn’t depraved enough to take enjoyment in the suffering of others, he did appreciate any sound that reminded him that he still existed. 

Mostly, though, all he smelled in those first few years were damp air, shit, and the occasional whiff of cooking from the kitchen. He had a hard time coming to grips with the fact that in the body of a vampire wracked by years of hunger, the smell of freshly baked bread smelled almost as badly to him as vomit, but it was something, and he would take it. 

Eventually, though, even those things failed to motivate him. As the march of years became the passage of decades, almost everything failed him. He continued to shrivel and atrophy, and thinking became too hard for him to consider. 

His mind only operated sporadically now, and it ran off of feelings and urges instead of anything more abstract. Only his regret and his anger were strong enough to penetrate the thick fog of hunger that he seemed to permanently reside in now. Eventually, he was too far gone for even that. When that happened, he was reduced further to merely a desire to feed, which was only interrupted by the distant rising sun. 

With nothing else left to distract him, though, that hunger was forged into something sharp enough to sniff out a surprising amount of detail from only a few molecules. As the endless, unceasing cycle of the sun hammered against him, eventually, smell, and hunger were all that he had, and Simon used it to ever-increasing effect. He could smell when someone died when someone fed, and most of all, when there was fighting. 

That last one had nothing to do with hearing. He couldn’t hear the sword blows or the screams of the dying, but he could smell the different flavors of blood that had been spilled well enough that he could tell them apart, and though he couldn’t say how any of them had died, he could figure out who had bled the most as their odors made their way down into the dungeon. 

That was likely a process that took days, though, but then, Simon no longer understood time. He was just a hungry animal, trapped in a cage while the sun battered him with fear like a blacksmith’s hammer. 

So, it was with some surprise when he finally heard something again, and though he no longer understood that it was hammers and chisel banging against stones that were setting him free, he knew that sound meant freedom, and even if it was only freedom to suffer in some new terrible way, he welcomed it. He’d suffered enough this way, and anything would be better than continuing to exist like this.

As the wall that imprisoned him was chipped away, one thing mattered to him even more than the prospect of impending freedom, and that was the rising smell of blood. A lot of people had been wounded or killed recently, and he wanted to devour them all. 

Ch. 225 - Unearthed

The process of freeing him took hours, but eventually, he felt his coffin shift as it was pulled out of the wall. Then, those cursed swords were removed, and his coffin lid was opened. He was still in darkness, though, because Simon was too weak to even open his eyes. 

He could hear people talking, and the sputtering of a torch, but what the actual words might mean was well beyond him right now. It was enough that he could tell they didn’t all belong to the same person. There were three people here with him. Well, there were at least three people here speaking. There might have been more standing by silently. His sharpened sense of smell was so overloaded by all the new things around him right now that he couldn’t tell anything apart with it. Only his neglected sense of hearing and his atrophied brain provided any help, and they whispered that there was a woman and two men. 

Freya, he thought. She came at last the second he figured out that it was the woman who was in charge of the two men. 

He felt a moment of gratitude toward her then, even though he hated her. He’d gladly rip her heart out if he got the chance, but hearing her again was a vast improvement over the alternative. She sounded like she was giving someone an order, but before he could figure out if that was directed at him or not, something was shoved in his slack mouth, and he bit down on reflex.

It’s going to be terrible! His dormant mind tried to warn him. You’ll open your eyes to see a child or someone you care about, and you’ll be the one to have murdered them!

None of those admonishments stopped him, though. Nothing could have stopped him in that moment. He was a beast, and he needed to feed.

Whatever he was feeding on struggled weekly in his mouth, but not enough to dislodge his fragile fangs, and slowly, one heartbeat at a time, that vitality entered Simon’s awful body. He was too weak even to suck the blood from his victim, so to add insult to injury, the heart and the blood pressure of the person he was about to murder had to do all the work to feed him.

That only lasted for a few seconds, though. Once he began to revivify, he began to suck lightly, and then, like his life depended on it. The taste and the power of the blood made his heart sing, but more than that, for the first time in decades, the hunger that had been his constant companion began to fade. 

He felt free in that moment, even as he continued to drain his victim. In only a few seconds, they were dead, and even as Simon opened his mouth, they slumped to the floor. 

Simon opened his eyes, then, and was assaulted by the brightness of the torch and the lantern that were in the room. He saw at least half a dozen blobs that were probably people, but it was hard to say. Instead of trying, he hissed and shut his eyes again. The only useful piece of information was that the blob being dragged from the room was too large to be a child. It was either a very large woman or a medium-sized man, and judging by the taste, Simon leaned toward the latter. 

Even as he shut his eyes, there was talking and yelling. Someone tried to talk to him. It was the woman, but he realized then that she wasn’t Freya. Her hair was too dark, and her voice was too deep. 

All of this was too much to take in while his body was buzzing with a life’s worth of energy after years of starvation. So, he tried to roll away to block them out, but instead, another victim was pushed forward toward him. Even as annoyed and out of sorts as he was, that was not a temptation that Simon could resist.

This one smelled and tasted similar to the last one but different from the guard’s he’d devoured before he’d been imprisoned. Not from around here? He wondered. After drinking more of the man’s blood, he decided they were definitely foreigners. 

That was all the proof he needed that his mind was starting to wake up. He’d feared that what had been done to him had caused irreversible brain damage and reduced him to some kind of wild beast. While he could still feel that angry, raging beast inside of him, it was slowly going back into its cage as his mind returned to something resembling sanity. 

As he felt his second victim start to weaken, he opened his eyes again, testing the light. This time, he found it tolerable, but only barely, and even though someone was still trying to speak to him, it was still too echoey and distorted to really understand. Instead, he focused on the man he was draining dry, willing his eyes to focus so the details would resolve. 

Murani, he thought, as soon as he could see clearly enough to recognize the facial features. The same people we fought in Ionar, but they live hundreds of miles to the north. Why would they…

Fragments of conversations with Freya, or perhaps with the farmer before he’d been captured by her, started to come back to him. She was at war with them, or at least this kingdom was. What was the name of this kingdom? Brin? Ionia?

None of those were right, but he couldn’t be bothered. He was in a vampire castle high in the mountains, and that was as much about the world he needed to understand as he let his second victim fall free and turned to face whoever it was that had freed him.

Her face was almost as hard to decipher as the horselord, but once it snapped into focus, he was in stunned disbelief. 

“Arrraaa…” he rasped, still in denial about it. She’d come back for him, some way, somehow. 

Does this mean that the people of the region have overthrown Freya? He wondered. It was a shocking thing, but it seemed the most likely option. He had, after all, taught her how to use magic. Perhaps she’d succeeded where he’d failed. 

Still, he doubted that. Something was off. He was sure he’d been in there for decades, and given how she didn’t appear to have aged much, if at all, it couldn’t have been nearly that long. 

Was my math off? He wondered. Was I only in the box for a year or two? That would be a horrifying realization, yet even as her mouth continued to move, he finally figured out the discrepancy. She hadn’t aged, but she didn’t have a pulse, either.

The moment she tried to sacrifice her life for her sister came flashing back to him then. It had been decades before, but it was in this very room that she’d begged him to kill her instead of her sister. She’d no doubt made the very same offer to Freya, which meant he’d suffered for nothing. 

More importantly, though, it meant that Freya was alive. That anger was what slowly forced the world to come into focus and for sounds to finally complete their transformations into words. 

“Where is she?” he growled. 

“That’s just what I was trying to explain to you,” Ara signed in muted exasperation. 

She might look the same, but she acted differently enough that it was clear she was taking her cues from the mistress of the castle, which meant she was a servant, or even an apprentice, and not a slave or worse. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, but before he could decide, she continued. “We don’t know where she is, but we know what’s coming next, and you’re the only one I could think of who might be able to help.”

“To help? Who? Her?” Simon asked. He wanted to laugh then, but he was physically incapable of it, and when he tried, all he succeeded in doing was coughing. “I’d rather die.”

“I’m sure that can be arranged, but that won’t help with the army, which might start coming down from the pass as soon as tomorrow,” Ara explained. “They will sweep through the region in a matter of days, and sooner or later, they will take Gravenstone Castle while I slumber.”

“That’s rough,” Simon nodded, smiling. “Destroying everything that Freya cares about. That would be a shame.”

The vampiress looked like she was about to slap him. Instead, she commanded, “Leave us. I will call when he is ready to consume another prisoner,” in a tone that brooked no argument. 

That was the first time that Simon noticed the other people in the room beyond their shapes and their heartbeats. There were guards that obviously belonged to the castle and workmen, but they had several prisoners, too, bound and gagged. It was only when all of the men had filed out that she spoke again. 

“You have every right to hate her. I don’t blame you,” she said finally, deflating now that there was no one around she needed to put on airs in front of. “I hate her, and she’s done so much less to me than she has to you, but—”

“But nothing, Ara,” Simon blurted out. “She took your humanity from you.”

“She did,” the vampiress agreed, “But she spared my sister as she promised, so I continue to serve her loyally in all things.”

Simon flinched as his earlier theory panned out. “Well, I can tell you that she’ll be very unhappy with you for waking me up.”

“I doubt it,” Ara shrugged. “I think she’s forgotten all about you, to be honest. If you’ll help me save her castle, then she will forgive me anything, and if you don’t, then I’ll put you back in the box, and she will be none the wiser.”

That last part was said just cold enough that Simon believed it, so, for the moment, he changed topics since that was the very last thing he wanted. “What is it you think I can do for you?” he asked tiredly. “I doubt I can even stand, and you know I can’t use magic anymore.”

“Simon, you are as clever and as fierce a man as I’ve ever met,” she answered, taking one of his bone-slender mangled hands in both of hers. “You saved my father from a vampire and then destroyed Freya’s castle not once but twice, and I have been looking for a justifiable opportunity to free you ever since. All I want is for you to help me save the valley and the people in it, and if you die in the process, then I think we both get what we want, don’t we?”

“The people, huh?” he asked. “You mean your sister?”

“My sister is long dead,” Ara answered with a shake of her head, but her children are grown and have children of their own. Some of those children have children, too, and all of them are spread in a dozen different villages throughout the valley. So, no, I don’t want to save her, or even then, I want to save everyone.”

Simon could respect that. He would have complimented her on it, in fact, if he wasn’t still so blown away by what she said. “Great Grandchildren?” he asked, doing the math. “How long have I been in there, exactly?”

“I-I’m not sure that you want to know,” Ara answered with sadness in her voice. 

“Tell me,” Simon said, looking at her with renewed determination. “Tell me everything.”