Death After Death-Chapter 371 - A Final Resting Place

In the run-up to the showdown with the warlock, Simon’s fear and anxiety had all but erased his sight. In the aftermath, though, when a good man lay dead at his feet, his cold anger erased all of that. He no longer cared if he lived or died as long as he got his vengeance, and that made all the difference.

Fueled by a fatalistic need for vengeance, he moved from fight to fight like a bloodhound. No one could hide from him anymore, not when the world was laid out in a smooth series of events. If he went left, he’d catch two orcs from the front and have a bad time, but if he went right, there would be only one, and Simon could stab it through the ribs before it realized it was even in danger.

In that bloody predawn hour, it was all so simple, and Simon regretted that he hadn’t been like this the whole night. It seemed so unfair to Sir Derinholt that he couldn’t have been like this from the beginning, but then, except for a few moments in Hepollyon, he’d never really been like this.

Is this brain damage? He wondered. Do I have a concussion? What changed?

Thinking too much about it dulled the effect, so Simon stopped. Instead of worrying about why he could see how all the orcs connected to him, he focused on spilling their blood in the places that his vision said he should. There was no fate, though. Even in that strange fugue state, nothing made him kill them; he just saw the optimal points where he could, if he so desired.

That time went by in a series of bloody flashes, and by the time dawn lit up the sky in soft blue light, it was over, and Simon had nothing but a throbbing headache, the corpses of nearly two dozen orcs, and a bone-deep sense of exhaustion to show for it. He returned to Sir Derinholt’s body, but no longer had the strength to carry it.

So, like a zombie, he trudged to where the knight had left his horse by the road, and then returned. Even then, though, he still couldn’t lift the body, so he used the reins to drag it to the shade of a tree, which was a slightly more defensible position, and then he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Simon had been up all night, and he’d fought as hard as he had in lifetimes. Somehow, the throbbing pain of his skull didn’t wake him for hours. Neither did orcish weapons or goblin teeth. He was reasonably safe from those during the day. In the end, it was a crow that woke him up. The bird decided that the wound in his head meant he was fair game, and it only just escaped Simon’s wrath as he lashed out, and it squealed away in a cloud of feathers.

Hours had passed, but the day brought no favors with it. There was only pain and flies. At least now he had something resembling strength in his leaden limbs, though, and he was able to load Sir Derinholt’s corpse on the horse and start back the way they’d come.

Normally, Simon could walk for days without complaint, but in the state he was in, he needed to rest often. Was that due to blood loss? Fatigue? Soreness? He wasn’t sure. It was hard to think. It felt like his head was stuffed with cotton.

He slept all alone by the side of the road that night; news of the orcs seemed to have scared everyone away. That was a shame because he could have used a lift.

The following day, he staggered to the nearest inn under his own power. This was the one that he and Sir Derinholt had stayed before they’d found the survivors of Elem Field, so he needed no introductions, either to the owner or to their ragged and impoverished guests.

Instead, he was welcomed inside. At first, that was for news, but when everyone found out what a bad way Simon was in, the focus quickly changed to his wounds. Most of Simon’s cuts were superficial. Only the blow to his head was serious, but it was more serious than he knew.

His hair had been soaked and matted with blood, and when it dried, it became almost a helmet. Even after he took a bath, the second tub filled with blood nearly as quickly as the first, as one of the bar maids tried to help him. The wound turned out not to be as deep as he’d feared. His skull was intact, but it was a scalp wound, and it had bled badly.

Worse, it hadn’t been cleaned in two days, so it was almost certainly infected, but there was nothing he could do about that now besides rest and let his body fight it. Unfortunately, rest was the last thing on his mind.

The most he would allow was a brief stay while the wound was stitched and news was spread. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist with a concussion, though, and half of the time the barmaid talked to him just to keep him from falling asleep; the poke of her needle did little in that regard.

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

She alternated between telling him how the other survivors of the hamlet had fared, and pressing him for details about the fight. Both of these topics inevitably lead to praise for his heroism, but he did his best to shrug that off. That wasn’t the story he wanted the White Cloaks to find when they came to look into his story.

“The baron will want to reward you,” she insisted. “You’re a hero!”

“I’m not,” Simon answered reluctantly. He’d started the statement by shaking his head, but the motion had started the room spinning, so he quickly put a stop to it. “The hero is dead outside. Let no one forget the name of Sir Derinholt; I was merely his squire.”

Simon wasn’t able to give them a full version of the tale, true or otherwise. He merely gave them numbers and let his injuries and the corpse of his master fill in the details.

After his wounds were tended to, Simon spent half a day sleeping and eating broth in shifts in an effort to keep up his strength. He tried to get a mule for the knight’s corpse, or at least a cart, but there were none to spare in this neck of the woods, so he continued on.

He still felt wretched, but now was not the time to be bogged down. Instead, he continued on his way to the south and east.

Sir Derinholt’s boy had a reasonably full coin purse, but every inn he stayed at between there and the Broken Tower turned up his nose at the idea of carting around a corpse. Only his story of Sir Derinholt, the orc slayer, and Simon’s angry stitches let him get his way.

Some of those nights, he talked to the mirror to remind himself of his last stay with the Unspoken, but most nights he merely slept to wake and continue on as the smell of rotting flesh grew ever stronger. Simon wasn’t much better, of course. One of them was a corpse, and the other one would become one if he didn’t take better care of himself.

After almost a week, it became a race to see whose body would give out first. Would Sir Derinholt’s body became unrecognizable, or would Simon keel over just short of the finish line?

It was an open question, but even so, he was making progress. Slowly, he left the forests behind him as the wide plains opened up before him. It would have been more convenient if this whole thing had happened further south, but even without trying to use his sight, Simon was sure he’d make it.

He knew this area from a long way off, even without asking the mirror to pop up in a puddle and show him a map. He just aligned himself with the right mountain peak and kept walking, sleeping as little as possible.

He should have been in bed, but he wanted to get where he was going before his strength left him entirely, and he’d crisscrossed these plains so many times that he probably could have reached the Broken Tower blindfolded. He did not linger for sightseeing or old times' sake, though. That was both because Sir Derinholt’s corpse was rotting a little more every day, and because he had no idea where other versions of himself might be at this point in time.

It was possible that he could run into himself at any point in half a dozen different lives. So, he kept himself to himself and pressed on, thankful that he’d smashed the Blackheart and spoiled the timeline where he served the White Cloaks in the Black Library.

Wait, didn’t I skip the Blackheart on purpose that run? He asked himself. He was pretty sure he hadn’t done anything at all in that life that would lock in a level. He’d started as a mapmaker in Darndelle or something, and attracted their attention by accident, hadn’t he?

“Was I really just waiting a whole life to get the timing right to see Elthena?” he said exasperatedly, as much to the corpse and the horse as himself. That he thought they were worthwhile conversational partners meant his fever was getting worse, but even so, he couldn’t imagine why his past self had thought that was an appropriate thing to do.

“Spending my whole life waiting on a damn woman,” he cursed. “What in the hell was I thinking?”

Simon still wasn’t sure if that would happen. He didn’t think it would, but if it did, it was decades in his future. He could live with that.

It should only take a couple of years to learn what I need to know. I can be here and gone before past me screws things up, he told himself.

Still, the doubt lingered, and even when he saw the broken castle on the horizon, he couldn’t be sure if it was any more broken than the last time he’d seen it. It wasn’t until he saw guards manning the gate that he felt confident everything was as he remembered it. The Unspoken still operated out of here; they were still exactly as he remembered.

“Last chance to change your mind,” he told himself as he kept walking, but there was no way he was changing his mind now. He’d been trying to set up this moment for months, and he couldn’t have scripted it more perfectly. He was the injured squire of a dead Unspoken with a powerful gift. If they didn’t invite him to join like this, then they never would.

When he arrived at the gate, he was met with a mixture of looks. Some were suspicious. Others were concerned. One of the guards asked about his business, but Simon ignored them all. Instead, he said, “I come bearing the mortal remains of Sir Derinholt. He died in battle, and I nearly followed, but he said he wanted me to… to…”

Simon passed out before he finished. It wasn’t pure theatre either. He felt himself weakening from the moment he stopped his relentless walk. He spent his strength getting where he wanted to go, and now that he had, it was all used up.