Death After Death

Simon hung around for a week. It wasn’t hard. He knew the town better than most, and between the refugees and the news that someone had killed the Baron, it only took a change of clothes to evade the law that really only seemed to be halfheartedly looking for the Baron’s murderer.

Honestly, if having to find half-decent food was the thing that annoyed him most about his current situation, then listening to the gossip in the aftermath of the Baron’s death was the best. No one had anything positive to say about the man, and by the time the funeral rolled around a few days later, Simon thought there would be riots.

Sadly, no one pelted the man’s procession with rotting vegetables, though he reasoned that was only because food was so scarce just now. It turned out that Vardin’s younger brother had long ago died under mysterious circumstances, and his son was too young to inherit the title in his place.

Instead, the head of the man’s household guard took over one night in something that sounded very much like a palace coup to Simon’s ears and appointed himself Regent and Lord Protector until the boy came of age. Normally, that would have rubbed Simon the wrong way, but he cared very little about what happened to the Raithewait bloodline.

Simon enjoyed the circus it caused just the same, but he spent most of his time in the graveyard. That wasn’t just because he had a late-night appointment with Varten’s freshly dug grave, either. It was just quiet.

Sometimes, he would talk to Freya, even though he knew she wasn’t actually there. Other times, once that got him good and depressed, he would go to the reflecting pool and talk to the mirror.

In fact, as the days passed, except for his trips into town to look for the damn portal in every gate, alleyway, and public building, he spent almost all his time talking to the damn mirror. The thing didn’t have many answers, but now that he understood that wasn’t its role, it annoyed him less than it did up until now.

It didn’t know anything because he hadn’t told it anything, but once he did, it would be more useful. So he tried to think of it like a journal and just tell it whatever. He started with the basics, telling it about each floor he’d come across in order.

What was in it, what the hazard to be cleared seemed to be, and other similar details came first. On floors where he wasn’t sure, he just rambled at length. This was especially true in places like the jungle city and the trap floor.

In some of the early levels, he had a pretty good idea of what he wanted to do next. He was pretty sure that the rats on level one weren’t the problem, and he needed to break through the trap door and find something in the house. If it wasn’t that, then the critters must have some kind of plague, and he had to purge the whole place with fire. He wasn’t sure which, but it was probably one of those.

The skeleton knight floor and the sewer floor seemed pretty straightforward, too. He laid out everything he knew about them, along with a few guesses.

Where he spent most of his time, though, was talking through the tavern level. First, it had zombies, then it was complete, and now it was open again, but there were no zombies. The mirror didn’t have a lot of answers to give it on that front.

“Floors that are completed are not required to be repeated,” the mirror told him. “Events have played out the way they need to for the knot to unravel.”

That made Simon picture the whole pit as a vast lock, with lots of tumblers that had to be lined up just right to unlock it, but theoretical questions like that seemed to be largely fruitless, so he didn’t bother.

“I just… not required to be repeated is awfully vague,” he complained, “What would change that and force it to be repeated again if that was the case?”

“If a floor is incomplete, then it must be completed until it is not incomplete,” the mirror said unhelpfully.

“But how can a floor that was completed become incomplete?”

“Did you do something on a nearby floor that might have undone work that you did previously?” it asked Simon finally.

He spent a lot of time thinking about that statement over the next few days. What had he done exactly? He was pretty sure in the run before he discovered that Freya’s tavern was back, he’d killed the warlock, but that couldn’t be it because he was pretty sure that came after. Later floors all seemed to occur further in time than earlier ones, and the only earlier floor he’d completed had been what…

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“The Goblin level,” he said to himself as he remembered that was how he’d gotten tangled up with Gregor’s family in the first place. “I cleared the damn goblin level, but Slany and the capital are nowhere near Schwarzenbruck, how could one affect the other?”

The answer was that he didn’t know, but it was the only thing he’d done that could have even affected level six as far as he was concerned. Simon still didn’t know if the solution had ultimately been preventing the war or saving the village from starvation.

That was a lie, though. After enough pondering, he was forced to admit that to himself. As much as he might value Gregor and the other good people of Slany, they weren’t part of Helades’ game. He knew that because that’s not where the door was.

The portals tended to be pretty close to whatever it was he needed to be doing. He was slowly coming to that inescapable conclusion. Even the ones that were fairly far from where he started, like the owl bear level and the wyvern level, were in prominent places that were just about the closest doorway structures.

“Which means she doesn’t care about a war as much as she cares about a tiny, snowed-in hamlet. Why…” he trailed off as he had an epiphany as he lay there in the grass not so far from where Freya’s grave should have been.

“Is it because I changed something she didn’t want to be changed, so now I have to fix that?” he wondered. It was the only thing that made any sense. He’d stopped a war. Who knew how many lives that had saved. Could just that have been enough to eliminate the zombie outbreak by itself? Why did it only unlock a few floors instead of all the floors he’d completed until that point?

Simon didn’t know, but he was going to have to find out on his own. He definitely wasn’t going to be asking Helades when he finally reached level 30.

Though Simon had tried to keep loose tabs on Murphy, he’d mostly failed at that. He knew the man still lingered around town, but mostly because he was a coward with no interest in braving the plains while the centaurs moved across them with impunity.

Still, when the night finally came and the full moon began to rise, he made his way to the tallest building outside of the keep and waited for some sign that the werewolf he’d accidentally brought to this place was about to lose control.

He didn’t have to wait long. Almost as soon as he reached the peak of the rooftop, he heard a few guards yelling something, followed by the yell it made that was neither fully man nor fully beast. “That has to be him,” Simon said to himself as he used a few minor words to leap from rooftop to rooftop to get to wherever this was about to happen. He was responsible, after all, and he couldn’t let this thing run amok.

He didn’t have to go too far. Four streets over, he found Murphy ripping his clothes off in the small market that was mostly used for fresh produce. He was already partway through the change.

“Stay back!” Simon yelled to the guards that were moving to surround the madman as he landed halfway between the werewolf and the row of market stalls along the city wall. This was as good a place as any for a fight and certainly better than an alley.

Two listened, but one did not, and even as he raised his sword, the thing reached past the sword he held warily and grabbed the man by the rib cage. The guard stabbed the werewolf several times, but it did nothing, and instead, he was crushed like a child's toy against the paving stones of the square several times as the monster continued to grow larger and hairier.

The man’s armor did nothing, and when the giant wolfman finally tossed the bleeding corpse aside, it was as boneless as a ragdoll. Simon was the closest man left in the monster’s line of sight, so it charged him without even the vaguest hint of recognition.

It ran on all fours, using its long arms to gain speed with each lopping stride. This time, Simon was ready for the thing, though, and as he pulled something out of his pocket, he knew he’d brought the right weapon for the job this time.

He flipped the silver coin in the air, and then as the werewolf that had once been Murphy ran at him, Simon whispered, “Aufvarum Oonbetit,” and launched the thing straight for the monster’s heart.

It didn’t even try to dodge. It didn’t understand the danger. That was why he’d used lesser force. The last thing he wanted to do was use his impromptu silver bullet to give the thing a flesh wound as it passed right through the body of the hulking thing.

That didn’t happen. Instead, the coin lodged firmly in the thing’s chest, mid-stride, staggering it and sending it tumbling to the ground. Even in the dark, Simon could see smoke rising from the creature’s chest.

It howled long and mournfully as it clawed at its wound and tried to remove whatever it was that was causing it so much pain. That just made the dark pool of blood beneath it expand faster, though, and with every passing heartbeat, it grew weaker, and the strange curse that powered it began to fade.

The distant guards approached the two of them slowly after that. They watched in disbelief as Murphy’s cooling corpse slowly turned back into a man over the next minute. Even though Simon had seen this process only once before, it wasn’t any less horrible this time.

It was terribly anticlimactic, though. The first time they’d fought, Simon had blasted the monster with torrents of fire and lightning, and it had done very little. This time, it had barely taken a flick of his wrist and a few words, and the beast was no more.

This is where I should make some joke about the right tool for the job, Simon thought, but he said nothing.

Instead, he looked from the beast to both guards and then past them to the sheer number of people looking out their windows and down on the square behind them. This had definitely attracted some attention, which was the last thing he wanted since he still hadn’t found the way to the next floor of the pit.

“I assume that neither of you are going to try to stop me from leaving?” he asked.

One opened his mouth but closed it again and just shook his head as he walked off into the night. He wasn’t sure how he felt about putting down this one. Hell, he wasn’t even sure if that counted as solving the level, but he supposed he’d find out eventually.

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