Death After Death-Chapter 338 - A Little Too Quiet (part 2)

When most of the guests had left, the Karl turned to Simon and said, “You know, I didn’t think you’d actually come, even with the invitation, but you did.” as he smiled coldly.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Simon asked. Pointedly ignoring the door as it slammed shut behind the retreating guests. “I’m always happy to leave the past in the past for the right opportunity.”

“Just another reason you’ll always be an outsider,” the Karl answered with a cold smile. “A true son of the mountains carries all of that past with him, and builds upon it, generation by generation.”

While Simon was used to the man’s humor and disdain, this felt different. His words might not be a direct threat. Even if they were, though, Simon wasn’t exactly in any danger. The Karl might be a big man, but he was old, and besides him and two pairs of guards who stood at the far doors at either end of the hall, there was only a single maid who was starting to stack dishes for removal. Still, something felt off, but Simon decided to play along.

“What was I supposed to do, then?” Simon asked. “Ignore the invitation? Continue our feud in perpetuity, all based on a slight misunderstanding?”

“You couldn’t do that, could you? It’s not in your nature.” Karl Himar said as he stood and stretched before going over to the far wall and studying some of the weapons that were mounted on it. For a moment, Simon was reminded of the way that the rebels used similar weapons to murder the nobles in Kayla’s bloody masquerade at some point in the future. “I’ll bet you even thought this was a trap, but still came anyway?”

“Is this a trap? Should I be worried?” Simon asked, not bothering to rise as he leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. He hadn’t brought a sword with him, but he need only remove his ring to become a weapon himself. “I’m hardly defenseless. I’ve already cut your champion down once. I can do so again.”

“You probably think the smart thing to do would be to come to some agreement and build some venture together. You’ve already got plenty of books and bridges. Maybe bricks would be your next step?” the man answered peevishly as he picked up a heavily notched great axe and studied its edge. “That would make sense to a man like you who doesn’t truly understand honor.”

Simon opened his mouth, as much to crack a joke as to protest, but the Karl continued, talking right over him. “But then you think the rules of hospitality protect you now that you’ve eaten from my table, so clearly, you understand nothing at all.” 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

Even as Simon’s mind tried to figure out what the man’s point was, legally speaking, the Karl pivoted and threw the axe, sending it whirling end over end with more force than Simon would have expected from the old man. That was his second clue that something wasn’t as it seemed, but he didn’t have time to think about that either.

Rather than think, he kicked over the chair, falling beneath the arc of the axe and causing it to embed in the wall behind where he’d been sitting instead of deep into his ribcage.

As Simon spilled from the chair, he rolled with it and was on his feet again, almost as soon as the danger was passed. As he did so, he reached for his weapon even though he knew he wasn’t belted on, and the Karl continued. “The rules of hospitality only protect our people from each other. That’s true of a great many things in this world that you clearly know nothing about.”

Simon cursed the force of habit and looked to his left and right, noting that the guards were all moving toward him with their spears and shields. This was certainly a trap, and he would clearly be surrounded very soon. He wasn’t worried. With a word, he could behead all of them once they got close enough.

As he removed the ring that was crippling him, he said, “All I want to do is help people. Everyone I’ve worked with has benefited; I suppose Clan Himar will have to be the notable exception to that.”

“Benefited? Even the daughters of Sybil?” the Karl laughed, apparently entirely unafraid. “You’ve destroyed so much that you don’t understand, and now her mark will destroy your very soul!”

As he gloated, the maid who was standing down the table from the growing confrontation pursed her lips in anger. A normal maid would have already run screaming, so the fact that she merely stood there and watched was enough to tell him she was involved. The fact that Karl Himar had clearly said enough to annoy her, though, well, that was enough to move her from involved to dangerous.

Did I have this all wrong? Was she the witch I’ve been looking for this whole time? He asked himself as he raised his hand to his neck. He didn’t know, but she’d be a fine lead for him to try to track her down in another life.

Even as she opened her mouth to cast something awful, and the Karl’s idiot smile widened that much more, Simon’s hand closed around his necklace. He didn’t hesitate. He could already feel something shifting inside of him, even in that moment. Rather than trying to slip the ring back on or even trying to strike her down, he reached up and gripped the gold chain around his neck. Then he yanked it hard enough to draw blood as the links broke, activating it in the process.

It was a small, biting pain, and it covered the complete lack of sensation caused by the invisible guillotine that sliced his head clean off. With that, all sensation with his body was lost, but strangely, his consciousness continued for another moment or two. He had just enough time to feel his soul start to fracture under the strain of the magic that had been used on him as the world burst violently into flame around him, lighting the table, the tapestries, and even the guards that stood nearby him on fire. Then his head rolled to a stop on the floor, and the world faded to black.

Normally, death was a fairly instantaneous thing. Simon seemed to recall that he’d had a few brushes with the dark that lasted longer than others, but just now he couldn’t really remember them. His mind was hazy, and all he could do was float there in the void, wondering why he was still wracked with pain instead of feeling the familiar sensation of the lumpy bed beneath him.

It occurred to him only belatedly that he might well be lying in the bed, though, because even after the pain faded, it was followed only by numbness. How much damage did that spell do before death took me? He wondered.

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Simon spent a moment pondering that. He remembered who he was and where he was. He remembered his last life, and the lives before that, more or less. He could even recite all eighteen words of power that he knew in alphabetical order. Clearly, whoever Sibyl was, she hadn’t done too much damage to him, and yet here he was, stuck in limbo. It was troubling.

Had he ever had a death quite like this, where he was stuck between lives? Had the soul damage broken Heledes reality knot? The very last thing he wanted to do was escape the Pit like that. He did not want to be sent back to her antechamber and offered another life as a sloth or a red panda.

Eventually, as Simon hung there in the dark, he decided the most likely answer was that he wasn’t trapped between lives, but within his own body. That witch’s spell didn’t have the chance to lobotomize me, he reasoned, but she did break something important.

It was a little terrifying to contemplate. Given the nature of the pit, if he was a coma patient lying in his cabin, he’d stay that way forever. If he really had become nothing but a vegetable, then he was doomed to lie here until he wasted away, died, and repeated the process.

If she’d succeeded, then the same would have happened, but I wouldn’t know, because there’d be no mind or soul to experience it, he realized.

Simon allowed himself a moment of self-pity. He’d contemplated how many heroes of the pit might be statues or zombies before. He’d even wondered how many of them might have accidentally slipped into hell, never to return, but how many might have been permanently crippled by magic in a way that made death eternal? That was a fresh hell that he wished he’d never discovered.

Eventually, though, that self-pity gave way to determination. If he really was stuck inside his own body instead of lost in a void of eternal darkness, finding some way to reconnect with himself should be possible, shouldn’t it? It’s not that I’m stuck in my own body, doomed to die forever, he told himself. It’s that I’ve got as many opportunities as it takes to fix this.

With that thought in mind, he set about trying to force a connection with something, then, when that didn’t work, he just floated there, grasping for the faintest sensations, anything to prove that he wasn’t crazy.

Simon had no way of knowing how long he lay there in limbo, but the first sensation he noticed wasn’t touch. It was hunger, followed eventually by thirst. The dead felt neither of those things, so that proved to him that he wasn’t actually dead, but still he couldn’t feel his fingers or his toes. During his experiments to bridge that gap, he would have given a great deal for a sword to be pierced right through him as it had when he’d been entombed as a vampire; such a sharp sensation would have anchored him, while the other, hazier sensations only slowly drove him crazy.

The hunger and thirst came in waves. Sometimes they were almost unendurable, and other times they were entirely absent, but Simon could do nothing to address them as he tried to imagine his body in minute detail as he imagined opening his eyes.

He pictured the skin, the eyelashes, the eye itself, and even the small muscles responsible for the movement. He did the same for the timber ceiling that must be above his head. The latter image was one of the scenes he was most familiar with in the whole world, and he had no trouble painting every knot hole and detail of the woodgrain in his mind's eye.

Still, it was a long time before he actually managed to make it real. How long was a long time? He had no way of knowing, but if each wave of unendurable thirst had been the end of one life, and each new wave of peaceful numbness had been the start of a new one, he’d been at this for weeks and died several times. Finally, though, all of that paid off when he managed to open his eyes and see the thing that he’d been trying to look at so hard.

Above him hung the ceiling of his simple cabin, not in the bright colors of morning light, but in the dull colors of sunset. That was the reason he knew it was real; he rarely looked at it unless he was waking up or going to sleep, so this was an unexpected view for him.

What was more unexpected was what happened the following morning. Simon spent the whole night struggling to move even the smallest finger on his hand or feel the bed that he was lying on, but he was entirely unsuccessful. He could blink, with great effort, but he couldn’t even force himself to breathe deeply. Instead, his body took only the shallowest of breaths, minutely altering the angle of his head with each cycle.

Sometimes he thought he felt something, though he might have imagined it, and other times he could see the results of one of his muscles twitching from his point of view, even though he couldn’t see which muscle, or if he’d had anything to do with it. Still, even those moments felt like progress.

In the morning, though, after a night of sporadic sleeping, he was surprised to find that he wasn’t alone. His eyes flew open at the sound of his door opening. He thought it was a goblin about to rip out his throat, but it was someone far more familiar: his doppelganger.

“Rough night?” the other Simon asked him with a smile, looking about how he would have expected the other man to look. While Simon was still stuck in the fat body he started with, his twin was wearing a thirty-something version of his face that he would have considered normal.

Rather than wait for a response, he continued, as he lifted Simon up and started to manipulate his body. “I know you’re probably freaking out right now, but just try to stay calm. It’s going to be okay.”

Easy for you to say, Simon yelled silently. He might not be able to feel his body, but every part of his mind was in fight or flight mode right now at the idea that he was completely in the power of a stranger wearing his face.

“This is the first time we've met, actually,” his doppelganger explained while he propped Simon up against the wall. “Not for you, but for me. Soul damage is an ugly thing; you should avoid it whenever possible.”

Simon wanted to open his mouth to ask a question, but that was quite impossible; he could barely blink his eyes. When his doppelganger poured water into his mouth from a skin, Simon wouldn’t have been able to spit it out even if it was poison.

“I know you probably think you’re screwed to relive this moment for years or decades,” the doppelganger told him, giving voice to his secret fear. “But it’s going to be fine. A few days… maybe a week or two, and you’ll be back to normal.”

Simon wanted to ask how anyone could possibly know that, but he just lay there as his clone turned away to rearrange the large mirror that was so familiar and hang it on the wall directly in front of Simon, so it was all he could look at.

Then, as he started to draw on the mirror, he said, “You’ve learned a lot about magic, and you use the mirror a lot, am I right? Well, I’m betting you’ve got a lot more to learn about mirrors and magic both, but this one in particular. This spot… this place… this mirror, this is the focal point of Helades' magic, and just this once we’re going to use it to fix you up. Sound good?”

Simon watched his copy trace out a series of fairly complicated runes, Barom Weylera Meiren Delzam Eszloum, and as they twisted together and began to glow, Simon translated them roughly as ‘a vision of a repeated life to repair the soul.’ Simon barely had a chance to marvel at the elegance with which his copy drew them freehand as he somehow managed to make the complex five-part symbol flow together in such a way that it might have been one complex glyph all along. He also had only a moment to wonder what that might have meant, then the mirror sprang to life and began to glow, even as the glowing words of power that activated it vanished.