Death After Death-Chapter 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.”

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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 but 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.