Death After Death

Simon woke up in bed, in a dark room. At first, he feared he’d returned to the cabin, but when he didn’t feel the familiar lumps in that straw mattress, he calmed down. Well, woke was perhaps not the right word. His dreams tore at him violently, and he would have sworn that he’d woken up and fallen asleep for a week's worth of nights, but when he asked the gray-robed priestess about it, she said he was brought back only a few hours ago.

His clothes and other things had been folded and stacked neatly beside him in the dim room. Part of him felt like what had happened last night was just a dream, but he knew that it wasn’t. Even without the headache, he would have known that.

Food was brought to him evenings and mornings by Diara, and when he asked her how long he was supposed to stay there, she just smiled patiently before explaining, “Seeing through the mists of time can be very hard on even the most prepared.”

“But I didn’t look through time,” he insisted. “I just had… strange dreams.”

“That is what they all say,” she agreed, “But if such things were easy, then they would not be valuable.”

Simon meditated on her words and on those dreams. He even explained as much as he could remember to his mirror. Still, it was two days before he rose once more.

When he emerged from his room armed and armored, she asked, “Will you be leaving already?”

“That depends,” Simon answered with a smile, “Is there any chance I could get a tour of the city before I go?” Even before she opened her mouth, he knew the answer was going to be no, but some part of him had to ask.

“You could,” she said, “If that is what the mists showed you, but our city… it’s not a place people come back from. Those who stay must stay forever.”

“Oh?” he asked, somewhat surprised by her answer. “I thought it was just for the priests and priestesses and the like.”

“It’s for that too,” she agreed, “But we do not leave the mountain either, so that distinction hardly matters. Did your visions tell you that you should stay?”

He shook his head. Maybe they told me I should take one more bath with you, he told himself, but he didn’t say any of that out loud. Instead, he thanked her for her time and hospitality, and then, with one last look at the stunning caldera city, he started traveling down the mountain.

Just as he’d suspected when he’d first seen the narrow trail, it was a dozen times easier to traverse than the trail he’d blazed. It had taken him over a week to climb up the mountain, but he was only forced to sleep a single night under an overhang on the way down, and the weather slowly got warmer approached the ground.

The trail was never wide, and sometimes it was damaged by beast men activity or landslides. It was never perfect, but it was a thousand times better than sheer cliff faces and gravel-strewn slopes.

Most of the way, his view was obscured by the same clouds that had plagued him on the way up the mountain. There were occasions where he got glimpses of the wider landscape, though, and they were enough to make him understand Diara’s fascination with the sea. Even in those foggy glimpses, it appeared endless from here, and save for the occasional island, it probably was.

“I could get enough money together to buy a ship and outfit properly,” he told himself. “There’s a whole world out there just waiting to be explored.”

While his fume-powered visions had given him some hint of what lay out there, those could in no way be trusted. Still, he longed to test them, if only to understand everything else he saw that much better.

The way down ended not so far from where he started, near the monastery that he’d spent the night at, making him feel stupid. He’d read their interest in his destination as protectiveness of it, but in reality, if he’d simply confessed where he was going, they probably would have sent him here.

“Well, they would have tested me and sent me here if they’d found me worthy,” Simon decided. “If they’d found me unworthy, they still probably would have killed me.”

After a couple days of reflection, Simon felt like he had a wider view of what it was he was doing. He felt like he could see the outlines of all of this in broad strokes, even if he had trouble putting it into words. Even without that, though, this would have been worth it, iif only for the beauty of the trip, and he made several sketches that he wanted to try to turn into proper paintings one day when he had the time and the skill.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Once he reached Thebian again, though, he had some hard choices to make. He had years to waste yet, and he no longer knew what he should do with them. He’d planned to solve a curse for Elthena as a sort of wedding present, but he had found no real evidence that it existed. Indeed, now that he’d seen the Oracle, he wouldn’t be surprised to know that the whole thing had been made up by her Grandfather after he’d come down that mountain or been rewritten by someone after the fact. None of that helped him.

“I suppose I could just make up a new prophecy and try to spread it around,” he told himself while walking through the market the day he arrived, as he tried to put all of this together. “Some theatrics here… maybe an ancient carved tablet there… I could probably make it happen.”

Still, it seemed like an awful lot of hassle just to get back together with a woman, and he wasn’t sure making up a new religion for the region just to make things work with her was the right idea. So, undecided, he continued further down the coast. This time, he was on foot, though he was tempted to get another mule just for old time's sake.

Bandits accosted him once, a week north of Ionar, but they scattered when he took the hand of their leader in a duel. The man screamed bloody murder, even as Simon helped him tie off the stump with a leather thong. “Losing a hand is an appropriate punishment for theft,” he said, unperturbed when the man asked him why he didn’t kill him outright. “But murder would not be.”

The man seemed confused by that, but he was even more confused by what Simon said next. “The sad part is I could reattach your hand, but you’d just keep using it to make the world even worse than it already is.”

“It is no crime to steal when you are hungry,” the man shot back, basically agreeing with Simon. He used a word of lesser healing to stop the bleeding and ease the pain for that honesty at least.

“If you must steal, then steal from those who have stolen from others, or else from the sea, not your fellow man,” he said, rising and continuing on to leave the maimed bandit to his fate.

He took his time walking down the coast to consider what it was he wanted to do. He’d already done medicine and research. Art might be fun, but then again, fighting the Viscount had been a wonderful time. On some level, the idea of leading an armed insurrection appealed to him the most. Being a rebel was fun. Hell, even running Crowvar until he’d been assassinated had been enjoyable. He was pretty sure that he could have made that whole area better with a few more years of work.

In the end, Simon took up the hammer again, in the little village of Olven’s Narrows, which was close enough to Ionar that he could see the volcano and ships leaving the port. This wasn’t by choice so much as happenstance. He was walking through the half-abandoned place when he saw a dozen men crowded around a blacksmith's shop that had seen better days.

He decided to take a look and quickly found the problem. A medium-sized merchant ship had damaged their rudder just enough that they were unlikely to make it past the rocks into Ionar’s harbor, but the village blacksmith had died years before, so they were trying and failing to do it themselves.

Simon watched the sailors take turns trying to hammer the brass fitting into shape, making it worse and worse until it finally cracked. Eventually, he volunteered to do it himself.

“You?” one man laughed. “Look at those soft hands. Are you an artist? A scholar?”

“I’m no blacksmith,” Simon agreed, causing a wave of laughter, “Not usually. But I spent years at the forge in my youth, which is probably more than all you lot put together, isn’t it?”

“What’s your price then?” the merchant asked testily. “The red wine I carry from the north is in no hurry, but some of my other goods are perishable, and I aim to be on my way!”

“For me? Nothing,” Simon answered with a shrug. “But for the people of this little town, how about you throw a proper feast. Food, drink, the works. You know, as gratitude for their assistance to you in their time of need.”

“A feast?” he asked, “growing red in the face, but that could cost a fortune with what I'm carrying.”

Simon shrugged, setting the two halves of the broken rudder strap back down. “That’s fine. Good luck on the remainder of your voyage.”

“But… I’ll pay you in gold!” the portly man said. “We can work this out!”

“I already have gold,” Simon answered, jingling his own purse. “And a strong sword arm to go with it. I was just going to do this out of the goodness in my heart, but I can see you have no goodness in yours.”

Simon only got a dozen steps away before the man caved, and a cheer went up among the sailors. Simon let them go to their tasks while he got the ramshackle forge back in some kind of order. Then, after he fetched some driftwood, he got to work.

The villagers came up to him, wondering what he was doing, but Simon just smiled. “Just getting you guys a good dinner out of the deal. There's nothing wrong with that, right?”

No one harassed him after that, and it took only a few hours to rework the metal into the shape it needed to be and repair the crack. He didn’t deliver the work until the evening when the pig was roasting, and the wine was flowing, though. He even rowed out to the ship with the quartermaster, reattached it, and restrung the steering ropes while everyone else celebrated.

Afterward, he joined them but didn’t get drunk. After he’d flashed his own wealth to make a point, that would have been more than stupid. Instead, he socialized with the locals and the sailors and learned a little more about what was going on in the area. Given that another version of him was currently living in Ionar right now as a healer, though, none of it was a surprise to him.

In the morning the little ship was gone, but Simon stayed behind, and no one gave him any trouble about setting up in the old smithy if that was indeed what he intended to do.