Death After Death

What Simon did was stick around. The name of that hamlet he found himself in turned out to be Wolvram, and though they didn’t like strangers much, they did have a goblin problem that was causing increasing amounts of trouble in their upland sheep pastures. Since it was one of the few real skills that Simon had, he was happy to help and made quick work of them with smoke and arrows.

He was bitten, but only once, while he purged all the local caves that he could wedge himself inside over the course of a week. When he came back with over thirty ears, no one gave him a hard time when he decided to stick around. They didn’t quite treat him as a hero or anything, but they no longer shunned him either.

After that, there was no reason to leave. Well, not right away. He helped out around the town as he slowly got in better shape. He mended fences, scared away bandits, and once it got cold, he spent a lot of time helping out at the small smithy near the center of town.

That wasn’t just because he was bored, though. For some of the projects he had in mind for the future, he was going to have to get better at that sort of work. It was one thing to speak a word of power, but it was quite another to carve it into something and let the magic do its work for you, and for some of the hard stuff that lay ahead, he was going to have to do better.

Not that it would be hard to do better, of course, he recalled in embarrassment as he remembered just how ugly that flaming sword had been and just how quickly it had drained years from his life.

Honestly, the winter was a little cold for the barn he slept in, but by the spring, he was already rehabbing a half-complete cottage that had burned down years before. Part of him kept telling him that he should get back on the road and at least travel to Adonan and make sure it was the town he thought it was in the place he thought it was. Truthfully, he didn’t need to, though. Every merchant said the same thing, and he doubted they were all lying.

Truthfully, this was the biggest danger of the Pit to him after fighting so many evils. It was making friends and settling down. After all, as cool as it would be to slay a dragon or close a portal to hell, it couldn’t compare to the pretty redhead that had been flirting with him for the last couple of months.

Rose was the real temptation. She was a vision of beauty right out of a Disney movie, and in a village this small, they ran into each other nearly every day, which made it even easier to imagine a future that involved her. He might have stayed with her forever if he hadn’t accidentally learned from one of the men he drank with that she’d been married before.

That didn’t bother Simon, of course. Being a 23-year-old widow in this world might make you an old maid, but on Earth, there would have been nothing wrong with that. Still, it wasn’t that she’d been married before. It was the man she’d been married to. He’d heard the name Brul tossed around before, but Simon hadn’t put two and two together until he’d heard that the guy in question was a cruel giant of a man who had made a living in less than savory easy.

“That Brul was a real pieecce of work before someone up and split the bastard in two, but I reckon you’d be a better match for her than he ever wassss,” the town drunk explained as if he was blessing a marriage that had already happened, but that was all it took for things to fall into place for Simon, and he started to pack his few positions immediately.

Suddenly, it all made sense. She’d shown zero interest in him for the first few months, then suddenly, she’d been all over him. Rose knew exactly what he’d done to her husband. By now, she had to have. Neither he nor Ennis had told anyone, but the timing was impossible to hide.

“So she just wanted me to let my guard down so she could have her vengeance, huh?” he asked himself as he started walking in the dark back the way he’d come.

The idea of spending a night in Rose’s bed was probably worth a death or two as long as they were relatively painless. That said, he was done dying in stupid ways and letting a widow murder you in your sleep definitely qualified as stupid.

Besides, he’d slacked off long enough. Another couple of months like this, and he’d probably spend the rest of his life here. It was just too easy to put down roots and enjoy a quiet life after so much bloodshed.

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Simon spent a lot of time wondering about that on the way back to the river. Just what were all the heroes in the Pit doing? He thought to himself as he walked through the night.

If this place really was full of millions of people, all trying to accomplish the same goal, how many of them had gone insane? How many of them were living quiet, enjoyable lives? How many of them were even striving toward the larger goal after a few deaths?

Though he wouldn’t have thought it possible in the beginning, he now thought the latter hazard was bigger than the former. It was easier to be happy than it was to be insane once you had a little magic up your sleeve. He reminded himself of that as he left this small bit of happiness behind. He’d find more somewhere. The world was a big place.

These thoughts occupied Simons's mind more than they should have, so it wasn’t a complete surprise when he suddenly realized he’d walked at least a day past his intended destination. Normally at this point, he would have sighed, grumbled a bit, and turned around, but as he looked at the familiar thing, he found himself smiling as another piece dropped into place.

Right now, he was looking at a covered bridge, which was not something he'd seen every day. What was more, in the distance, on the far side of the river, he could see a windmill slowly turning in the breeze. That was when he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’d been here before. Standing on the side of the river he'd never reached on the way back to his cabin, Simon made one more unintentional discovery. He hadn't even been looking for this spot, but suddenly, he had a new location for his map.

The woods where he’d heard an owlbear were the same woods where he’d killed an owlbear. “Imagine my shock,” he said with a smile as he turned and headed back toward the cabin.

Simon arrived at his little home away from home three days later. He encountered a second surprise: the place was trashed. Not in the goblin way, either. It was more like he’d seen it the one time he’d come back up through the trapdoor in level two. It was almost like someone had been looking for something. The mirror was shattered into tiny pieces and strangest of all, there was a single muddy footprint just inside the door that belonged to a boot, not a tiny clawed foot.

“Weird,” Simon said, not sure what to make of all of this.

The trapdoor was closed but exposed, and for a moment, he allowed himself to hope that whoever had done all this had accidentally fallen down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, but he knew that wasn’t possible. Without him around to open the portals, it just led to the root cellar.

Simon sat there for several minutes, trying to decide what more he should do before he finally shrugged and headed downstairs. He had a date with the knight and a plan for what he was doing next with all that armor.

Simon went into the crypt only slightly cautiously because, for once, he didn’t have his mace, thanks to whoever had ransacked the cabin. He needn’t have worried, though. These things moved so slowly now that he was in halfway decent shape again that he couldn’t believe he’d ever found them difficult. Once that was done, and the skeleton knight was lying beheaded on the floor, Simon began removing the man’s armor a piece at a time and giving it a good look. It was cold, even though his leather gauntlets, but the lines and markings on the armor itself were strictly heraldic and decorative. He would have to change that.

He didn’t plan to do that right here, though. Instead, he wanted to study the dark heart and better understand the careful designs that had been inlay on its ebony surface. After he stacked up all of the armor he was going to need and stuffed it in a sack along with its matching sword, he moved back to the glittering artifact and began to unravel it one glyph at a time. There were still parts that he didn’t understand, but what he found was a circuit dominated by life and transfer runes, just like the golem, and powered by something he couldn’t quite tease out.

It was a complex, compound glyph that was surrounded by a boundary rune. It’s almost like a name, maybe? Simon thought, studying it. It could be. It could be powered by heaven or hell or a god or the soul of a dead archmage. He had no idea how to read that mark, and that meant that the mystery was still very much beyond him. Still, he spent hours on the floor going back and forth between the mirror-bound notes on the golem and even the hell circle and the dark heart before he finally gave up and rubbed his aching eyes.

Part of him thought about smashing the thing right there, but he knew he couldn’t do that. Not yet. He wasn’t done with this level. So, instead, he did the next best thing and hid it in the helmet of one of the dead knights in pieces on the floor. Simon doubted that would be enough to reset the level, but it would be enough to give whoever came here to use it later a hard time.

Then, when all that was done, he used the key to unlock the gate, and he entered the very familiar inn. He found it crowded as usual, but there were no zombies, and for now, that’s all he could hope for. Simon smiled when he didn’t see Freya around and then flagged down his least favorite barmaid, Brenna. Then, while she smiled and tried to pretend like there was a heart in there somewhere, he used a couple of his coppers to order a beer and get the lay of the land.

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