Death After Death-Chapter 346 - A Quiet Time

Months passed that way, and little was done. Simon didn’t even attempt to help anyone rebuild anything until he’d gotten his cast removed, but that was okay. For once, Simon’s to-do list was a short one. All he had to do was relax and think happy thoughts until his sight returned, and then join up with the White Cloaks for more ideas on how to handle wicked witches and the like.

Unfortunately, despite a steady increase in his experience points, it was hard to think any thoughts at all, let alone happy ones, with a lingering traumatic brain injury. Eventually, he carved himself an icon of healing just to leech off the hearth fires of the inn and the common room below him, just to try to clear up the fog that shrouded his brain.

That, at least, didn’t harm anyone. It just made the owner of the Merry Maiden chop a bit more firewood each day, and he promised himself that he would pay the man back just as soon as he felt a little better.

Fortunately, no one expected much from a man who had gotten the side of his head caved in fighting for the town. It wasn’t the heroic thanks he’d experienced so recently in Olvens, but it was fine. Majoria visited him almost every day, and other than that, he was left to his own devices.

Over the course of that winter, his body wasted away to some degree, but his mind grew ever sharper, and by spring, he wished that he had the materials to paint properly, because his mind was as sharply honed as it had been in many lifetimes.

Still, he could sketch, and he used up whatever scraps of paper he could scavenge, drawing little portraits and scenes of village life. Those fascinated the elderly herbalist, who took full credit for his staggering recovery, and she asked to see his latest creations whenever he visited her for tea. Though her knowledge of healing was hardly encyclopedic, he did learn, or at least remember things he’d once known, when he visited her for tea.

“When are you leaving? Where will you go?” 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

One or both of those questions usually found their way into those conversations as well. They were not spoken with the same insistent tone as he’d heard them before. No one tried to boot him from the town; if anything, she seemed sorry that one day he’d be leaving.

“When I feel like m-myself again,” he told her. It was an honest answer, but an indefinite one. Indefinite was good; the vaguer he was, the less often she asked her third favorite question.

“Why not simply stay and make an honest woman of my granddaughter. She’s quite taken with you.”

The first time she’d asked him that question, he’d choked on his tea. While he’d been more than aware that the dark-eyed Majoria was fond of him, she’d never even approached the lines that her grandmother crossed so brazenly.

“Neither of you are getting any younger,” she insisted. “Take it from me, age and wisdom go together. Enjoy yourself while you can.”

It was good advice, and Simon should have taken it, but he wasn’t really in the right headspace for that. Instead, he said, “Maybe after I figure out where those orcs come from, and make sure they aren’t a threat to this place ever again.”

The healer frowned at that answer, but didn’t tell him not to. The most she said was, “You go looking for death often enough, and you’re likely to find it.”

She wasn’t wrong there, but then, Hybissian rarely was. She was a smart lady.

Simon didn’t even try to do any of that until the weather warmed up, and his verbal tics had vanished. Well before that, though, he’d mapped out the area through conversations with traders that passed through. His initial theory had been completely wrong. He’d thought that the town would be close enough to Crowvar to be related, but they were over a hundred miles apart, and though they shared a mountain range that was lousy with orcs, he didn’t imagine there was much travel through the arid portion that cut through the desert.

Truthfully, he’d need an army and a campaign to root out such monsters over an area that large, but he was sure he could still do some good while he lived here. He just wanted an excuse to travel into the woods for long stretches of time by himself, and an orc hunt in a town that had been so recently traumatized by the beasts was a good one.

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That spring and summer, Simon made many trips through the woods to the mountains in the east. Each was a little longer than the one before, and while he mostly hunted goblins, he did find an orc camp on occasion. None of these were large enough or well-ordered enough for him to worry.

If the hulking green menaces were alone, he’d strike them down, but if they were in a group, he would hide until they’d passed. While it was a sad thing to come to grips with, he was not a one-man army in this life, and he needed to act that way.

Eventually, he didn’t even murder monsters; he just explored the wider world and tried to find that sense of serenity that he’d left behind in the Oracle’s temple city so long ago. Still, Simon made an effort to look for it again anywhere that struck his fancy. He hiked to the top of the tallest mountain he could see one week, just because it felt right, and he stayed up there until he was out of food and he was too hungry to meditate properly. The crisp air did his lungs good, but there were no secrets of the universe to be found. Just a frozen lake and a view worth dying for.

That wasn’t the only high point that Simon visited, either. He built a crude tree house two days' walk from Rivenwood and spent many weeks there off and on. Though it was little more than a hunter’s blind with climbing pegs carved into the trunk, it was far enough away from anywhere that no one civilized bothered him, and no monsters that lurked in the woods below could reach him.

There, Simon contemplated the view less and a mirror more. It was an ugly thing of hammered, polished silver with a distortion to it that was far more exaggerated than what he could have made with magic, but it did the job. While he couldn’t, or at least wouldn’t, use the spell his other self had used to examine his past lives, he asked it frequent questions in an effort to better understand what other powers it might have.

He was convinced that was part of the secret message his doppelganger had left him. He’d left Simon just enough dried fish to get through that first life when he was too weak to take care of himself properly, and he’d shown him just how little he understood the mirror to kick his ass into delving further into it. However, no matter how long Simon delved into the thing, he only ever found dead ends.

It wouldn’t even admit to watching his soul directly, even though he knew that it did, thanks to recent experience. The most it would say was, ‘I observe you, directly, as much and as often as circumstances allow. That is my purpose.’

“Yes, but who are you? Are you a person? Do you have to watch me like I have to defeat the Pit?” Simon asked.

‘I am not human,’ the mirror said after a long pause. ‘I don’t believe that I even have a soul of my own. All that I am is what is reflected upon me.’

Simon wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but he was fairly sure the thing was slowly becoming more helpful over time, or at least slightly smarter. It was no longer infuriatingly obtuse; it was just kind of dumb.

He asked it about that on one dreary overcast day. The two of them had a long conversation about it, but the most it could say was that it wasn’t sure. ‘It is possible that the more information you give me, the smarter I become, but I am not the right person to judge that.’

Those looping, circular conversations were frustrating as always, but they made the perfect counterpoint for his endless reflections on life. He could only contemplate the way that various historical events were linked to each other, and the way that changing them would change other things, before he went mad. Contemplating the way things fit together at a lower level for too long wasn’t any easier.

Still, as he sat in his tree gazing out on the endless forest spread out before him, it was easy to imagine the intricate web that wove every life could see with every life he couldn’t, from the smallest ant, to the largest troll. In that context, it was harder to argue that most monsters were evil. Grizzly bears weren’t evil; they were just natural eating machines, and trolls, griffons, and ogres were just a little further up that hierarchy of apex eating machines.

Such thoughts were dangerous, of course, because they admitted that goblins weren’t really evil either. In a sense, he supposed that they weren’t, but they were still a pestilence that deserved to be eradicated, like locusts or malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

“Just because something isn’t evil doesn’t mean we have to tolerate its existence,” he said aloud as he made a mental note to investigate the black swarmers more thoroughly.

The last two times Simon had done so little, he’d at least experimented with magic and art. By contrast, this time he did almost nothing at all, but it still felt like time well spent. Sometimes he even toyed with the idea of having a family again and living a normal life, but he always decided against it. Opening that door again would mean nothing but pain, and he’d have to find someone really special to be that honest with them.

No matter how far afield he traveled and which frigid mountain lakes he plunged himself into, Simon never found the auras he was looking for. That was okay, though. It had taken years the last time, and he hadn’t gotten his hopes up. It was enough to be whole in body and soul for the first time in a very long time.

As the winter closed in that year, he spent most afternoons chopping wood to make up his secret debt to the innkeeper. Then, on whim, he decided to take up a new hobby for those long, cold months: weaving. It was repetitive and not particularly glamorous. It took forever to see the patterns develop, too, but it was very much in line with what he was feeling these last few months. Patterns that were already well along before you understood them seemed exactly his speed right now.