Death After Death

This time it wasn’t a question of where he wanted to spend his time, it was a matter of how he wanted to spend this life, and Simon spent several days considering that question. At this point his lives were stretching for decades rather than ending in weeks, so in a way, he was picking what kind of play-through he wanted to have. Maybe picking my major would be a better choice, he added as he reflected on his previous life.

It was that thought that made him decide he definitely wasn’t going to do what he’d planned. Once he finished recording every fact worth remembering into his ever-expanding personal library, he’d thought about going to Liepzen and living a similar life for as long as he had the last time in a different library. It was sensible. The facts were all fresh in his head, after all. Surely, he’d be able to learn the most by comparing what he’d read in Darndelle and the Broken Tower.

But it sounded incredibly dull. He’d spent years reading and tinkering, and right now, he wanted to do what? Besides seeing Elthena, he wasn’t sure, but seeing his sword leaning against the wall, called to him more than a little, and he wondered what enchantment he might put on it when the time was right.

Strangely, though, he didn’t feel like enchanting anything. He wanted to in theory, but he knew exactly how much work that was. It would be weeks and months to set everything up, depending on what he wanted to do, and right now, that all just looked like more waiting to him. Truthfully he was chaffing at spending so much time just talking to the damn mirror for day after tedious day, but he knew if he stopped, he’d never pick that back up again, and he’d forget an awful lot.

“You know, you do a terrible job and holding up your side of the conversation,” he told the mirror at one of the points he felt like giving up on this part of the project.

‘I do not understand the point you are making,’ the thing said after only a slight delay.

“Exactly,” he laughed. “That’s the problem.”

Simon managed to put up with the boredom for almost two weeks before he gave up. In that time his only real entertainment was hunting, fishing, and thwarting the increasingly aggressive goblin raids.

Simon had never tried to stay on this level for so long. Indeed, he remembered a time when he regarded staying here for five days as impossible. This time, though, he looked forward to the sunset raids that only intensified day after day.

After the shaman was dead, he hoped to see more new monsters he hadn’t seen before, but instead, it was just more angry swarms of goblins. Without the spells splashing against the side of his cabin, though, he finally got a workout with his sword.

Even five- or six-on-one, the goblins were only challenging in that he wasn’t half the swordsman he’d been a couple lives ago. Simon was happy to take that frustration out on them, though. “Note to self,” he told himself, gasping for breath after he finished night eight’s fight, “Don’t stop sword fighting for like thirty years, between two lives.”

Shockingly, the last really good fight he’d had was against the monster in the volcano, and that was a long time ago. Still, slowly, but surely some of it came back to him, and by the time he decided he was ready to go, he felt like bandits wouldn’t be an imminent danger for him.

Of course, the skeletons almost proved him wrong. Simon hadn’t fought them in decades, either, and it was the first time he struggled against them in a long time. They didn’t wound him, of course, at least, not badly, but it took a little bit to clear the room enough that he could take down the death knight in a good clean fight.

Afterward, he paused and took the Blackheart out of the knight’s chest to examine it more closely. That, at least, was interesting, and he paused only long enough to gather some silver and use a lesser word of earth to make a mirror so he could compare his current analysis to his previous notes. He decided he wasn’t far off. The thing used runes of Uuvellum to create anti-life and area effects, forcing the dead to come to life. Whether the original sorcerer had done so to keep himself alive and if it had worked.

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“From my brief stint as a zombie, I’m leaning toward no on that one,” he decided before he put it carefully back. Then, he gathered as much gold and silver as he could before he continued on his way.

This time, he didn’t dig down into the subchamber. Instead, he just took the exit to the Wyvern level. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

“A handful of silver is enough to get to where I’m going.” He decided. “I only have half a decade to waste before I go back to Ionar.”

His logic on that was pretty straightforward. The wyvern level was the level before the volcano level. That meant that somewhere between tomorrow and a couple of years from now, he was going to fight that thing, and then about four years later, his lover was going to refuse to marry him and send him away.

Which meant that in the meantime, he’d fight and maybe do a little exploring. Simon’s map had largely been filled in through the Kingdom of Brin and up to the Northlands. Likewise, he’d traveled past Ionia all the way to Abresse and the seas beyond that.

So his blank spots were mostly Ionia in the west and the mountainous Kingdom of Chiara in the mountains to the east of all of this. Chiara was almost a complete mystery, but in Ionia, at least, he knew where the cities along the coast and on the islands were.

The Kingdom was a large peninsula surrounded by a scattering of islands off the coast to the west and south. Knowing the names on the map and what those places were actually like, though, well, there was a world of difference between those two.

And this time, once the volcano exploded, he was going to start purging other parts of this supposed curse. At least, he would once he learned more about it. He was resolved. In this life, he was going to solve Ionia. Well, probably not solve, he corrected himself. I doubt I can go fix everything, then come back and kill the wyvern a decade from now, and Helades will let that count.

Understand was a more doable goal. By the time this was done, he was going to figure out everything he needed to know to fix it. “That should be easy enough,” he said to himself as he made his way down the mountain.

He spotted the wyvern half a dozen times over the next few days, and each time, he crouched behind a boulder or a tree and waited for it to turn toward him. Fortunately, it never did. However, on the second day, someone else’s fortune obviously wore out, and Simon spotted it carrying the corpse of someone back to its nest.

“That’s probably the thing I’m supposed to prevent,” he decided. Simon didn’t take the failure to heart, but he did decide to go and investigate where it was the wyvern had taken off from, even if it meant a little extra walking.

He spent the trip wondering just how many levels had minor, almost petty events. “Kill this owlbear, and those children live. Stop this plague in that village, but let everyone die first,” he said to himself, looking for the logic. “Oh, and don’t forget to bring this village food so everyone doesn’t starve to death.”

He’d hoped that his intensive study of history for a few years would have given him a better perspective on this issue, but he still found it more than a little confusing. All he could do was hope that if he found this guy’s wagon or whatever, this level would make a little more sense.

Simon was huffing and puffing that evening when he found the site of the battle. There was no wagon, but even so, it was pretty unmistakable. There were other corpses, along with the remains of two horses. The first lay atop the dead man, and the second split into two gory halves. One half of it lay in the middle of the road where a vulture had claimed ownership, and the other half of it was up a tree where the ravens were having a party.

Simon left them alone and decided that he wasn’t camping anywhere near there. Before he left, though, he took the coin purse off the corpses, and then he dug through both sets of saddlebags. Mostly, he found camping supplies for people traveling light. He helped himself to some of those since it would reduce his need for hunting.

More interestingly, though, was a sealed letter that he found on the half a horse. There was no name on it. All there was was the impression of a signet ring on the wax seal. Simon thought it looked like Brin Hearldy, but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure.

Inside, there were some names, but not enough that he’d ever find who this had been meant for. ‘Dearest Antonia, we have been betrayed. If this letter reaches you before the worst should befall you, I urge you to kill your brother and flee south. I will meet you in Abresse. Look for my ship. L.’

“So, this woman never gets this letter, and the worst befalls her, and what? She gets killed? He gets heartbroken and commits suicide?” he said aloud as he talked himself through the sequence of events. “I can’t even find who sent it because he didn’t even sign his damn name!”

Simon crumpled up the letter and threw it away. Then, he started walking to the northwest. He couldn’t sleep until he put some distance between himself and the wyvern nest, but even without the frustrating letter, going this way was clearly the right choice. He’d never gone this way around these mountains before, and he wanted to approach Ionia from a new direction.

That was one part of the world where he knew what went where, thanks to the map in the Queen’s library. This time, instead of approaching the northern reaches of Ionia through the mountains and starting in the south, he was going to travel around the mountains to the north and then travel south along the shore. It would be a lot of walking, but he was sure he could find plenty of paying mercenary work. The people of Ionia weren’t very trusting, but they weren’t especially peaceful, either, and during his time in the capital, he’d never seen a sell sword go hungry.