Death After Death

“Helades!” Simon yelled, staggering toward the light. “Helades, this is level 30, and I’m here! You owe me some answers!”

“Well, an answer at least,” she said just behind him, making him whirl around to see the Goddess. “And might I say, you’ve made excellent progress. It only took a handful of deaths and a few years of life to get all the way down to the ogre. Good work.”

“I didn’t come here to make progress!” he yelled, wiping away the blood on his forehead before it dripped into his eye and sheathing his sword lest the Goddess decide he was threatening her. “I came to talk to you!”

“So talk,” she said, her smile growing a little tighter. “What is it you want to know.”

“Freya, was she faithful to me? Did I fail her? Did Varten…” he asked without a moment's hesitation, but despite his need, he still couldn’t bring himself to finish the awful thought.

A dozen more important questions flashed through his mind in that instant, but he ignored them. That was the only one that kept him up at night, though. That was the one he needed to know the answer to more than anything.

“Oh, Simon, I thought we were past this,” Helades sighed. “Are you sure there aren’t other, more pressing questions on your mind?”

She proceeded to drone off a list of questions in his own voice, one after the other, and each one left him slightly more pissed off as she seemed to read his mind and, worse, mock him: “Why am I too late to save people, but just in time to clean up the mess? How does that make any sense? Why do some levels reappear while others stay completed? What the hell is it I'm supposed to do with that stupid basement anyway?”

“Passed?” he asked, balling up his fists involuntarily as he ignored her list. “I loved her. Helades. I still do, but I need to know. More than I need to know why Schwarzenbruck is back or why Freya has changed. I need to know!”

“Simon,” she sighed. “She… your wife, she was always faithful to you. How could you doubt that? She was a good woman, and you did the best you could for her. You could have done more, but agonizing over that will take you to dark places that no one should go, especially not when they’re functionally immortal. Let her rest in peace.”

“But, the things she said…” he answered, holding back tears, “And then when Varten…”

Helades did the most unexpected thing then and stepped forward, giving him a hug. He was about to hug her back, but instead, the world dissolved around him.

Suddenly, he was reliving those awful moments, but in reverse. Killing Varten and feeling the urge to do it over and over again, burying Freya, trying and failing to save her life, and then coming home to find her in the arms of another man and watching her slip and fall to her death. Things were moving fast, and even before he fully experienced one moment, the next was rushing up to meet him.

Every part of him strained to use a word of force to catch her as she fell or to decapitate the foul man that had done this to her. No, he thought to himself in that instant, decapitation would be much too good for the man. He wanted to atomize him and turn him into a bloody mist. He wanted to watch him burn and…

Even as his rage started to boil over, things progressed further back, but now they were from Freya’s perspective. Instead of watching himself go back out to fight off the orcs and save Crowvar, he watched his wife have a conversation with Varten just before he arrived.

“No,” she insisted, pushing the man away, “If Simon dies, and all is lost, I still wouldn’t want you, Varten. Not like this. Not with you. Not ever with you!”

What he’d walked in on and thought was a moment of lustful passion was a moment of anger instead. That surprised him even though he knew that it shouldn’t.

Each moment was followed by the one before it, and they were only picking up speed as they went, which made it hard to follow the events and made the dialog nearly impossible to grasp. He puzzled it out, though, as best he could. To him, it seemed the noble had been expecting the city to fall and had tried and failed to seduce Simon’s wife.

The man should have been on the wall fighting for his life, but instead, he was trying to take what wasn’t his. It was infuriating, but more than that, the exchange showed that they’d never been intimate. There was no secret affair as he’d worried about for so long.

That should have been enough, but time kept moving backward, giving him dozens more insights into his wife’s life. He saw when he kissed her goodbye that morning before he left for the wall. He saw her break down in tears almost every day in the days leading up to that moment because he was a little too honest about their slim chances of victory.

Beyond that, though, he mostly saw how lonely she was. He’d brought her to a town where she didn’t speak the language, and every time he was away, she was almost completely isolated. The most friendly relationship she seemed to have was with the local butcher and the innkeepers they’d stayed with before their cottage was finished.

As the days passed one after the other, all he noted was the way that their tiny little home slowly got dirtier and emptier as it got closer and closer to when they’d moved in. It was a quiet, simple life, and sadly, Freya spent most of it alone.

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That, by itself, was enough of an indictment to make Simon feel terrible about all the little ways he’d failed her. He’d never really understood the sad look in her eyes or the way she clung to him when he returned home.

Then, suddenly, Varten slammed the door and left their house. No, he was entering it but in reverse, after cutting her arm, and now he had a knife to Freya’s throat.

It was a confusing mix of images, and Simon struggled to make sense of them for a moment. That was only for an instant. After that, he tried and failed to leap through whatever strange magic this was to rip the man’s throat out.

Still, time continued to move back irrevocably as these two argued, then it did something else unexpected and finally stopped somewhere near the beginning of the conversation. “This moment should answer all the questions you ever had about Freya,” Helades whispered as time resumed its forward course.

Time started to move again after that, but it flowed forward again at normal speed, granting him insight into a moment he’d never should have been able to experience. Well, mostly.

The violence he’d just seen was gone, and instead, the two sat there having tea like old friends. Freya was busy laughing at something Varten said, and Simon had no idea how this moment could possibly lead to the violence he’d already seen in the future only a couple minutes from now.

“Varten, for all his faults, thanks to his tutors, he’s one of the few people in all of Crowvar that spoke the North Tongue fluently,” Helades whispered. “He’s actually been quite a good friend to your wife until now, though you don’t need to look into his heart like I can to see that his intentions were anything but honorable.”

Simon would have nodded in agreement if he’d still had a head to do that within this strange disembodied experience. He could see the hunger radiating off the man and watch his eyes glance at her breasts or ass whenever she looked away.

The conversation continued politely for another moment, but then it all fell apart when he leaned forward to kiss her, and she jerked away sharply even as she slapped him hard enough to leave a red mark on his cheek. “What do you think you’re doing!” she cried out, “I’m a married woman!”

“Married to a man that’s never here,” Varten said, smiling coldly as he rubbed his cheek. “I could fix that, you know? I could make sure he’s sent on safer missions and that he’s home more often in return for certain considerations.”

Freya’s eyes widened as she realized that the very reason that Simon was in jeopardy so often was exactly because this man wanted to get her alone like this. She was already rising to her feet as he spoke, but that comment was enough to make her take a swing at him.

“You… from the beginning… You did all this on purpose!” she said as he caught her arm effortlessly and twisted it before releasing her, sending her spinning.

“Come now,” he said, “Don’t play coy with me. We both knew what this was from the start. You’re a beautiful woman, and you obviously have needs that a commoner like Simon could never hope to satisfy.”

“I… I thought you were my friend…” she said, but even as she turned around, he was drawing his knife, and her words failed her.

Her strength didn’t, though, and she immediately grabbed the broom and struck out at her tormentor, trying to swat him away enough to open the door and run. Varten was an able duelist, and after playing with his prey for a moment, he disarmed her and pressed her into the corner.

“Don’t make this more difficult than it has to be,” he sneered. “I’d hate to make you sew your pretty little dress back together after I cut it off you.”

Simon’s heart went cold as he watched this terrible moment. It hurt him more than he would have thought possible that this happened and that he’d not only been unable to protect her, but he’d never even known about it. That mystery, more than anything, made him fear what awful thing the Goddess was going to show him next.

Freya didn’t flinch or cower, though. She definitely didn’t give in. Instead, she stepped forward until the knife was inches from her throat.

“Go on,” she dared him, “Do it. Kill me.”

“I don’t have to kill you to have my way with you,” Varten snarled.

“If you do that, I’ll just kill myself, and it will amount to the same thing,” Freya shot back. “When my husband finds me cold and dead on our floor, he’ll know what happened, and he’ll know who did it; you know what will happen then?”

“How could he possibly—” Varten asked, but Freya ignored him and continued stepping close enough to his weapon that he was forced to pull it back a little bit.

“He’ll rip your black heart and burn your city to the ground,” she continued. “You’ve never seen him. Not the way I have.”

“Him? Simon?” Varten laughed. “I’ll have him shot from the wall before he ever reaches the gate. Even if he really is a warlock, that will be enough to put him in the ground. You place an awful lot of confidence in fairy stories.”

Freya grinned ferally, “Like that’s the first time Simon has been shot. I know you’ve heard the rumors. The way he heals? The way he kills?”

Varten swallowed hard. He said nothing, but the look in his eyes said he had indeed heard the rumors.

“He fought through a city of zombies… he walked through worlds to save me,” she bragged, acting like she didn’t have a care in the world. “What are you to him? You’re just a little prick with a little prick.”

“I’m not afraid of him or you,” Varten said, but there was no conviction there.

Instead, all he could do was lick his dry lips and decide whether or not he wanted to call her bluff. In the end, he decided that he did not and moved his knife quickly down to her arm.

“Your husband won’t always return home,” he gloated. “One day, he’ll die for the glory of my Barony, and when he does, I’ll be coming by to console you personally.”

“I will never be yours,” Freya spat.

“No? I’ve already marked you along with everything else that belongs to me,” he smiled cruelly as he looked at her now bleeding arm. “When the time is right, I will be back to claim you myself.”

Varten slammed the door behind him, and when he was gone, she slumped against the door and slid down it until she was sitting on the floor. All her bravado and her fearlessness drained out of her then, and she began to sob. “Simon,” she cried, “Where are you?”

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