Death After Death

The answer proved to be zero, as it turned out. Without magic, he might have lost all of his digits, of course, but with a few applications of lesser healing, Simon was able to turn all his toes and even his blue and black nose back to a healthy pink color. That was great, of course, because he was fairly certain he would have hit the reset button and started this run-over if he had to cut his own nose off. That was too disgusting for words.

The home he’d chosen to spend the night in had no bodies, but it had plenty of meat and vegetables that were suffering from only a little freezer burn. The fact that they were edible after he turned them into a stew that he’d let simmer for hours while he soaked in the heat from the small cookfire only proved that this had happened recently.

“But why now, though,” he asked himself as he took another bite.

If Helades had truly wanted to stop this tragedy, couldn’t she have had the portal open up in the moments before the mage had completed his experiment? That frozen look of panic flashed unbidden in front of Simon’s face as he contemplated the moment.

Clearly, the man had just enough time to figure out the fact that he’d screwed something important up to run away. So why couldn’t Helades have sent Simon here at that moment, or even ten minutes before, to do what he’d just done before everyone else who lived in this town had paid the price?

“At least some people got away,” he said to himself, poking the fire absent-mindedly before taking another bite of his mushroom and mutton stew.

It wasn’t as good as Freya would have made, he decided for the dozenth time, but he instantly forced the thought out of his head before he allowed his mind to wander to all the painful places an errant thought like that could lead.

After his somber, tasteless dinner, he searched the small two-room hut twice for alcohol but found none. So, he decided to go to bed early. He’d cleared this level as far as he was concerned, but he still wanted a day or two to poke around and see what could be learned from this mage’s mistake.

. . .

In the morning, Simon woke up sweating in his furs, and when he went outside, he found the snow had receded quite a bit. It was still present in a ring around the village proper, and the rooftops of the central buildings still glistened with ice. However, the fields between here and there had melted, and there was only a line of slightly darker mud to mark the radius that had previously been a winter wonderland.

As he walked toward the center of the village, he started to feel a little chilly, but until Simon got to ground zero, he felt nothing that even resembled the bitter chill he’d been forced to struggle against yesterday. When he got to the house that was the epicenter it got colder still, but this time it was merely as cold as a walk-in freezer rather than the inhuman cold it had been suffused with yesterday. He barely felt it through his furs.

This time he could take his time, and he very deliberately went room by room looking for clues to what exactly had happened here. Judging by the state of the larder and the quality of his silverware, the man that had lived here had obviously been well off, though not as wealthy as either of the Barons that Simon had served.

He’d been rich enough to have two servants, too. The maid had frozen to death on the kitchen floor by the stove, and the footman had died in front of the hearth. Both had sought warmth to protect them from something that could never be held back by mere flames and though Simon didn’t know what that was yet, he was going to find out.

On the second floor, he found a study full of books, which he’d learned was a rarity in this world. For a few minutes, he’d thought he’d found the jackpot, but they were mostly books of poetry, with a few books of history and heraldry mixed in. He flipped through a couple dozen at random, and finding nothing that even smelled of the arcane, he gave up and continued to the scene of the crime in the cramped garret.

Everything was exactly where he’d left it. The frozen man, the bisected orb, and all the other tools were completely unmoved. Simon took his time, examining the room, looking for anomalies. He found what he thought was a spell book on the table. After leafing through it, though, he found that most of the rest of it had nothing to do with magic.

It was a book of natural philosophy, or primitive biology, as Simon would have called it. It mostly talked about the local birds and herbs of the region and hypothesized how the gods might have created them. Four pages though, at the very back of the book, stood out. They were written in a different hand and contained complex schematics for an orb of silver covered in very precise runes.

Nothing in those pages told Simon exactly what the thing was supposed to do, so he tore them out and shoved them in his own book, so he could examine them later. Once that was done, he picked up the pieces and took them outside, so he could examine them somewhere warmer.

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On the way out, he noticed that one corner of the wooden floor was a lot cleaner than the rest of the room. There was even some chalk residue there, but no obvious answers as to what that might mean, so after a few moments of investigation, he shrugged and started down the stairs, and left the building.

Sitting on the stoop in the sun, he looked down the street where he could see the ice-shrouded temple that he’d eventually need to cut through to make his way to the next world. He turned his attention from that for a moment, though, and focused on the problem at hand, studying the pieces of the hollow, rune-covered orb.

Though he still wasn’t sure what the man had been hoping to make, whatever it was he’d been doing, he’d screwed up. There was a single drip of magical ink that had dripped from the cold rune he’d been painting, and it had dribbled down the side and connected with a trace between some sort of recursive element and a symbol that Simon didn’t understand, resulting in a short circuit.

Simon had no idea where the orb had been pulling all the power that would be required to freeze this place solid, but he was pretty sure that if no one interfered, it would have been something that went on indefinitely.

“A real-life snow globe,” he said to himself as he shrugged off his backpack and tucked the pieces inside it.

He’d find some time to better understand this puzzle, but now that he established that it was the magical equivalent of an industrial accident. It didn’t really matter so much. After all, whatever this guy had been trying to do hadn’t caused the problem - it was what he’d done by accident that had gotten his neighbors killed.

That wasn’t what bothered Simon now, though. What bothered him was how this guy had learned any of this in the first place. That, more than anything else, was what stuck out to him here. A book with pages that didn’t belong in it. A house that was utterly mundane, containing the most complicated magical artifact that he’d seen so far on his trip through The Pit.

How did that happen? Did he find something he shouldn’t have? Was there some other force at work here he didn’t understand?

“Not my problem,” he said finally, rising to his feet and tromping through the melting snow toward his real destination.

The street from the house he’d been investigating to the temple that held the portal to the next level was eerily quiet, and Simon briefly considered looking in some of the other houses but suppressed the urge. There wouldn’t be a point after all. It was possible he might find some gold or silver, but he really didn’t need it for where he was going, and other than maybe a few more arrows for his longbow, he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to carry around.

He wanted to get back to level twenty, so he could give Helades a piece of his mind, and the only thing he had to do to make that happen was to cut through a wall of ice, walk through a city of the dead, then a swamp, and finally, he had to kill a Basilisk. While he wouldn’t call that to-do list easy, it was certainly simple and straightforward, and he didn’t need to complicate it by digging any deeper into this place. The mystery had been solved as far as he was concerned.

So, with that thought in mind, he pulled back his hood and enjoyed the brisk air before he reached the front door of the temple. Once there, he forced it open with a brief shove and wiped away some of the snow that rained down on him from the eaves as he did so.

From here, Simon could finally see his destination. This time, it didn’t glow red with sunset because he’d taken much longer. This time, the ice was as black as night, but he was certain it still led to the same place, and with a smile and a flourish, he unsheathed his sword, watching it burst into flame as he did so.

“Alright,” he said with a smile, “let’s see what this baby can do.”

He plunged the flaming sword into the icy barrier in front of him, smiling grimly as he felt it slowly cut through the thing like a hot knife through butter or, perhaps more poignantly, a lightsaber through a blast door. This felt like real progress to him. The last time he’d been through here, he’d blasted his way through mostly with pure desperation and barely managed to avoid freezing to death. This time, though, he was very deliberately cutting his way toward the dead city that lay beyond, with a tool he’d made with his own two hands, and that was extremely satisfying.

He studied his reflection in that melting block of ice as he started down the second side of what would eventually be a doorway. Even taking into account the distortion of the ice, he looked as different as he ever had in his whole life. In truth, he barely recognized himself. Losing all that weight had given him cheekbones he didn’t even know he had, and it left him looking angry and older than he remembered, and the snow in his hair only intensified the illusion. For a brief moment, he had a good idea of how he’d look when he was his dad’s age.

Honestly, he wasn’t sure he liked it. Despite the number of times he’d already died, he really didn’t like the idea of getting old. That was something he wouldn’t have to worry about for a long time from now. It didn’t really matter though, did it, he decided. The only person his looks should ever matter to, old or young, was dead. He could become one of those greasy, unshaven mountain men now for all he cared.

“Well, I could, except for the lice,” Simon corrected himself with a laugh. He was at a point where he didn’t really care what he looked like, but he definitely still cared if he itched or stank, so that wasn’t going to happen.

Once he finished his third cut through the ice block, he sheathed his sword, noting the cloud of steam it created as he put it away. Then, he put his back into it and shoved hard, pushing the block of ice out of the way and into the dark cobblestone street beyond.

This place, at least, hadn’t changed a bit. It was a city full of the dead, and he had no idea what it was the goddess wanted him to do with it.