Death After Death-Chapter 206: The End of the Beginning

After he collapsed at the end of the last battle, as disappointing as it was, Simon expected to wake up in his cabin all over again. That’s not what happened.

Instead, he drifted in and out of sleep in a bed that was much more comfortable and far too white to belong to him. It occurred to him only after several days that he was not, in fact, dreaming it. He was lying in a bed somewhere in the palace. He could barely move, and even opening his eyes was too much work at first, but in time, he could feel Elthena’s dry, cool hands holding his. Eventually, he could even squeeze them back, but only softly.

It turned out that she’d been talking to him the whole time, but it took days to differentiate that from the background birdsong or other people speaking in the same room. He had to focus to a painful degree to understand even part of what she was saying. He didn’t need to understand her to know that they’d won, though. If they hadn’t, the sound of birds would have been replaced by the sound of battle, and the smell of Elthena’s perfume would have been lost in the smell of burning.

In a way, the fugue state he was trapped in felt like brain damage, and that idea sent a chill down his spine. Given that he could still think and reflect when he was half asleep, though, it was probably something closer to exhaustion, complete and utter exhaustion.

He was certainly tired. He’d burned through years, or perhaps decades, of life in a single hour. He’d channeled enough energy that he should have become a bonfire himself, but somehow, he did not. Somehow, he didn’t even die, but he was dying now; he was sure of that much.

In the days that followed, even as some parts of him healed and his mind became clearer, other parts of him, like his heart and his lungs, labored ever harder to keep up. He’d burned through an entire season of his life just to win a single fight. But I did win it, he told himself. That’s all that matters. I won. It would have been worth it at twice the price.

It took days for him to be able to meaningfully interact with the woman who should have been his wife or the boy that was his son. Each of those moments was brief because sleep was always chasing at his heels, but they were still nice. Most times, he would wake up to find Seyom or Elthena sitting by his bedside. Whether this meant that they were always there or he only awoke when they were, Simon couldn’t say, but he found their presence infinitely comforting.

All he could do was bask in their affectionate words or listen to them offer updates on the situation. One thing he couldn’t do, though, was answer them. His efforts had completely fried his vocal cords, and when he tried to talk now, only hacking coughs came out.

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So, he stopped trying to answer. Part of him regretted that he couldn’t tell them to burn his papers or destroy his weapons, but he didn’t let that bother him too much. His notes were cryptic enough that copying them would be difficult. Instead of worrying about what he wanted to say or do, he simply did his best to bask in the time they had left together because he knew it would be over soon.

Then, one day, he fell asleep, and he never woke up again, at least not in Ionar. He lingered there between life and death, lost in the darkness for a long time. Or, at least, long enough to be frustrating. Eventually, though, when he woke up, it was on the same lumpy bed that it always was.

He felt whole and rejuvenated when that happened, but he also felt greatly saddened by it. He’d finally gotten a perfect sort of life, and then he’d lost it. “That’s just the way of these things,” he muttered, testing his voice even as he reached for the bottle of wine.

He sat there in silence for a long time this time. He didn’t ask the mirror questions, nor did he try to drown his sorrows. Instead, he just reflected on his life and what he might have done differently. Would it have been worth pressing myself less hard to spend more time with them? He wondered. If he could have been victorious with less effort, then maybe. He supposed that his real mistake in all of this might have been urgency, but if he’d pushed himself less hard, he still would have been laid up for days or weeks. If our enemies would have regrouped in that time, well…

He let that question linger. He had no good answer for it, and the more lives he lived, the less interested he was in second-guessing himself. Even if he made a mistake, fixing it would be difficult or impossible, and getting caught in that loop was a trap. In this case, at least, he couldn’t revisit that moment because it no longer existed. All those years spent in Ionia were like they’d never happened. He’d never solved that level, which made things easier but also that much more heartbreaking.

For a moment Simon tried to think constructively about his last moments, and any lessons he might have learned. He considered the tactics of the Murani, and what the consequences of Ionar’s fall might be. Ultimately, his mind kept drifting back to his Son’s face, though, and not even thinking about the consequences of the over use of magic was enough to shake those looks of love and respect that Seyom had given him while he lay dying.

Simon studied his socks with an intensity usually reserved for facing down dire opponents in that moment as he struggled not to cry. Then, when he’d mastered the emotion, he got up and said, “Okay, enough of that. Note to self, even if you have the years, if you spend them all at once, you’re going to have a bad time.” For a moment he thought about the time he’d cast greater greater fire, and decided he’d just done the same thing with extra steps in his last life. Then he said, “Alright, mirror, you know the drill, show me my character sheet.”

The mirror complied and brought up the sheet in its faint blue writing.

‘Name: Simon Jackoby

Level: 33

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Deaths: 43

Experience Points: 3,084

Skills: Agriculture [Below Average], Archery [Below Average], Armor (light) [Below Average], Armor (heavy) [Poor], Armor (medium) [Below Average], Art [Excellent], Athletics [Below Average], Baking [Below Average], Cooking [Below Average], Craft [Excellent], Deception [Below Average], Escape [Poor], Fishing [Average], Healing [Excellent], History [Excellent], investigate [Excellent], Maces [Average], Navigation [Above Average], Research [Excellent], Ride [Average], Search [Average], Sneak [Average], Spears [Below Average], Spell Casting [Excellent], Steal [Poor], Swimming [Below Average], and Swords [Above Average].

Words of Power: Aufvarum (disperse, minor), Barom (illusion, light), Celdura (plan, shape), Delzam (cure, order), Dnarth (connection, distant, hidden), Gelthic (ice, death, weakness), Gervuul (greater, power), Hyakk (flesh, healing), Karesh (location, protection, understanding), Meiren (creation, fire, life), Oonbetit (focused, force, motion), Uuvellum (anti-, null, boundary), Vosden (earth, growth, metal, strength), Vrazig (lightning, ruin, quickening, wind), Zyvon (transfer, plants, water)’

He reviewed the whole sheet with passing interest, but his mind wasn’t really on it, so it took a while to notice that his experience total had finally turned positive. “Huh, well, that’s not the silver lining I was expecting,” he said to himself, “but I’ll take it.”

Truthfully, he still had no idea what that was for beyond an indicator of how miserable he was. He occasionally thought about asking Helades, but after the last way she’d cut him to ribbons with the mirror, well, he’d wait until it was more important. He’d long since learned the truth. The mirror showed him these things because he thought that they were important. What she thought was important, and the Pit thought were important, though, were entirely different.

Other than clearing levels, he wasn’t sure exactly what either of them thought were important. He didn’t need the mirror to show him what he needed to do there, at least. He had to decide when he was going to purge the Blackheart on level 4, which would certainly unlock several or perhaps many levels after that. Then he had to kill a wyvern and deal with the fallout of helping Aaric escape. After that, it was back to the dragon and the vampire, along with whatever else unlocked as a result. In theory, it was a short list, but there was nothing simple about it.

“The real problem is the Blackheart,” he said aloud as he worked through the problem. “The right thing to do is to do all of the floors in order so they can’t reset and screw me over later, but if I do that, I’ll probably reset all of Ionar. Am I really okay with that? Am I really okay with the queen not knowing who I am? Am I okay with the idea that my son will never exist?”

A lot of the people that Simon had known no longer knew him. Almost all of them, really, but this one stung more than most.

It had to be done someday, but even if he never got to relive the life he’d just finished living, the idea of erasing it in his quest to go deeper struck him as entirely too soon. He wasn’t ready to say goodbye yet, and for as long as he wasn’t ready to do that, going deeper into the Pit was probably a fool's errand.

“I could go try to learn more about the dragon,” he suggested to himself before taking another sip of wine. “That at least would be useful. Maybe this time, instead of trying to kill it, I can try to save it and see what that does.”

The idea of trying to save a dragon made him chuckle, which was useful in that it finally cracked the feeling of despair that he was shrouded in. He’d probably get cooked for his trouble if he tried, but he was kind of in the mood for a throwaway life anyway.

“If I’m going there, though, I need to get in better shape because I’ll never make it in time like this.”

Simon had no idea why the start of the level was so far away from the finish, but it certainly made it an oddity. Most levels had entrances and exits within fifty feet of each other. Only a few, like the owlbear level, were spread out, and that was presumably to make sure that he found the wreckage of the caravan on his way to the covered bridge.

“If I had one level to go back and do again, it would probably be that one,” he decided as he put on his boots and forced himself from bed. “Saving them wasn’t enough. Something bad happened to those kids down the road, and fixing that would do a world of good.”

He didn’t feel that way about a lot of levels, of course. Usually, it was just the places where he’d left loved ones behind that stuck with him, but in a few, he felt like he could have done more. His most recent life made even that outlook more complicated.

After all, all of his good deeds had allowed a war to happen that he was pretty sure hadn’t happened before. If it had, it would certainly have been smaller in scope before his meddling. That further reinforced that the good and evil of everything he did was ambiguous at best. It also further drew into question what Helades’ whole point was.

Simon wasn’t about to get bogged down into that quagmire, though. He’d already decided on his current quest: get his fat ass in shape. That was going to be done with magic, of course, but given how much power he’d channeled recently, he was still feeling a bit fragile. It was probably all in his head, of course, but he wanted to try some new things he’d decided against in the battle for Ionar, and he had a ready supply of goblins he could burn, which would certainly take his mind off of everything that had just happened.