Death After Death (Roguelike Isekai)

For the next few weeks, reading was all that Simon did. Every few days, he snuck down into the Grandmaster’s study, deposited the book he’d borrowed, and then took the next one. Each time it went off without a hitch, but those quiet victories gave him no confidence that they would continue.

Each time, he feared that this would be the time it would all go wrong. Simon took a dozen trips into the Broken Tower’s depths before he even lit a candle to read through the Grandmaster’s journal, which was about what he’d expected. He only let himself leaf through it for a few minutes, taking pictures with a small hand mirror as he went, but the dense tome’s pages were thick with arcane knowledge and musings on old experiments as well as current events.

Simon would have loved to steal it, but that would have been noticed immediately. After I defeat him, he promised himself once he decided the experiments were cold-blooded enough that there was no doubt the man needed to go. While there was no evidence that he summoned demons or raised the dead, it was clear that some of the witches that were taken alive were all but mentally dissected in the Grandmaster’s search for answers.

He was looking for the same thing that Simon was. Really, he was looking for the same thing that most mages were: a true understanding of how it all fit together. In that sense, Simon could understand him, but not so much that he could accept the idea that the man dissected the souls of children as easily as farm animals as he looked for a difference between the two.

That was where they differed, both ethically and spiritually. Simon wanted to know how magic compelled the world to do its bidding, while the Grandmaster wanted to know, more than anything, how the human soul could grasp the divine strongly enough to make that equation work from the other direction.

It didn’t matter. Simon had difficulty looking at the man in public after reading about his innermost thoughts and the way he took pleasure in other people’s pain. Fortunately, that wasn’t often, and never up close; he’d lost all interest in Simon. Before, the strange colors had struck him as mysterious, but now they just looked poisonous.

Simon didn’t let himself fixate on the man yet, though. Not while he was still focused on absorbing the contents of his library. The prize was too great to let anything interfere.

So, day after day, Simon drifted from volume to volume, and since they were sorted by title rather than topic, the order he saw them felt almost random. He found one book on necromancy and three on the art of summoning demons, but those were among the least interesting of the collection.

The Choruses of the Underworld told him only what he already knew about summoning spirits and raising minions with corpses, just with more pomp and ritual. The demonic tomes, likewise, discussed the fires of hell and the demons that dwelled within, but offered him only a few names he didn’t already know. One, at least, spoke about how, “the circle is there, not just to bind your summoned devil until a pact can be made, but to prevent the sulfurous vapors of that pit from poisoning your very soul!”

Simon smirked at that. It would have been nice to know that a year ago, he told himself.

It wasn’t black magic he was after, though. He knew well how much that damaged his aura, and even if the Grandmaster couldn’t see such things, he suspected that the man had long since figured that out as well, since his aura was bright enough to fool the other Unspoken.

It was the one-off books, like the first one, that Simon found far more interesting. Fickle Fortunes was a book that seemed to be only about astrology, but had many lessons about divination. At first, he’d been tempted to put it away, because he had little interest in such frivolity. Only the fact that he’d spotted the word Celdura among its vellum pages made him keep going.

It turned out to be more poetry than superstition, and he learned new meanings to existing words. He learned that he could pronounce Celdura as boon and Gelthic as bane in addition to their former meanings as shape and ice. Both of those made sense. In fact, bane especially made the events of his life among the clanholds and the witches of Charia fall into place a bit more; it wasn’t just theft of virtues, but actual curses.

When he checked his notes, he found that the new meaning fit several of their witchmarks more than his previous assumption had. He’d thought that Gelthic had been used as weakness, but bane made for a more sensible and versatile curse. Boon was what he was really interested in, though.

“That would be even better than icons of healing,” he decided. “If I ever build another religion, I’ll make the symbol of it the word for boon itself.”

What exactly that boon did seemed pretty flexible. It still needed to be powered, of course, but healthier, luckier, even more peaceful all seemed like possibilities.

He’d be able to do all kinds of things, at least theoretically. He’d even be able to manage oddities, like banners that made the soldiers fighting under them braver, or an actually holy-type blessing on somewhere or something.

Would that be enough to fend off the undead? he wondered, as he tried to reinvent similar magics from first principles.

After that, Simon imagined building an Ionian-style palace, as a temple of healing, and sketched a bit of the layout. He filled it with careful mosaics that disguised magic as art and cleansed all who walked through its rooms, purging witchmarks and healing cancers and other creeping maladies. It would take years, but hiding the symbols amid the delicate patterns of the mosaic would be the hardest part. It was only a matter of time and money.

“It might make a nice distraction after I go deeper and ask Helades a few questions,” he decided as he moved on.

Benevolent Words of Grace was a book he got almost nothing out of, but it still interested Simon because it reminded him of the temple on level zero, where he’d first learned the word of healing. It contained the word for healing or curing in most of its prayers, but offered him little besides a glimpse into an archaic religion. Still, he made some notes to investigate the next time he returned to his cabin.

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Soon, Simon was devouring a book almost daily. Indeed, it wasn’t the boring books that took longer. It was the interesting ones. He could lose whole days reading and rereading interesting passages or novel concepts. It only occurred to him after two dozen books had been devoured that nearly all of them had been in different languages.

He found that interesting, and wondered how many of the works couldn’t be fully appreciated by their owner. Most languages of the region were similar enough that Simon figured there was a lot of crossover, in the same way there had been back on Earth between neighboring cultures. There were a few outliers, though.

Bricks of the Infinite Palace was a work that he would have said belonged to the Murani, except the language looked nothing like theirs. It was closer to hieroglyphic pictographs with blocky shapes that didn’t immediately correspond to the meaning, even though the goddess’s magic allowed him to translate them.

This book was about how great works of power were too much for anybody to have, and that even gods and god-kings needed infrastructure to translate such might. It even had illustrations of step pyramids that bore an uncanny resemblance to the ones he’d seen up close, too, but other than that, it looked like it was from a foreign land.

It had none of the Murani's cultural touchstones. There was no talk of hospitality or horse clans. Even the few people who were drawn showed no signs of desert garb.

It was a puzzle to Simon, but one he lacked the information to solve just now. Instead, he focused on the deeper lessons of sacred geometry that the book described. Unfortunately, he couldn’t decide if those were valid or just very well thought-out pseudoscience. It was impossible to say. He knew about the importance of smooth essence flows from the glyphs he carved and the talismans he built, but the strange book took it a bit far, describing architecture with the flowing stroke of a calligrapher.

There were dozens of interesting books like that. He took copious notes and pictures in the mirror as he went, and took breaks only enough to allay suspicions. Most of those happened whenever Varten returned to the Broken Tower. The rest of the time, he was always sneaking away to read new books.

He was at it for almost a year. That was a long time, but not enough to make a dent in the hidden basement library he was slowly pillaging.

Some let him glimpse other lands he’d never been to, and others helped him gain new insight into magic from another perspective. Many taught him new meanings of words he already knew, and one, Dexandrantheos: The Secret Language of Knots, taught him most of the gestures for the words of power he didn’t know up until now.

He’d almost skipped that one and was disappointed when he saw the title in his room. While weaving interested him on an intellectual level, the last thing he wanted right now was a new art project. That wasn’t what the book was about at all, though. Weaving was just a metaphor.

Well, not really a metaphor, Simon decided as he read the book. It was the way the author visualized the gestures.

It was written in Ionian, which told him that there was clearly a magic culture hidden somewhere in that nation that they hadn’t discovered. That made sense. What made less sense was the idea that magic could be woven.

It was the author’s contention that the motions your fingers made were about weaving and unweaving reality. Simon didn’t entirely buy that. The Murani had needed no such metaphor to make similar magic work, and after studying the older, more limited notes in his mirror, he verified that the motions were identical.

Of all his side quests, it was the most rewarding. He continued this for a long time, replacing the book he’d just completed with a new mystery title. The fear waned in time, but he still made most of his trips in the dark. Every month or two, though, he would light a candle so he could flip through the most recent pages of the Grandmaster’s grimoire to check in on the man’s experiments.

Simon learned lots of things that way, like the fact that the civil war he’d expected had ended with unusual alacrity. ‘Not at all as the portent of my divinatory efforts indicated,’ the man wrote. ‘At this rate, I might see no zombies at all. We may have to wait for the Murani to have a proper bloodbath to test my great work.’

That great work troubled Simon, since it was never fully spelled out within the voluminous pages. Whatever it was, though, the man had clearly been planning it for the best part of a century.

So, he kept checking, and one day, when he went and set his candle down on the Grandmaster’s desk to see what it was he’d been working on the last few days. Then, he looked up at the mirror on the wall above it, and the trap was sprung. One moment, he could move normally, and the next, he was frozen almost completely in place as he read the word, Weylera, which he’d come to think of as the word of permission, because of the way it operated.

He could move his left arm as well as his eyes, but only a little. Presumably, that was because of one of the antimagic talismans he’d carved into place inside of it, but he couldn’t say which one. He couldn’t even figure out what was binding him in place. There was nothing on the ground. He hadn’t stepped on any glyph or in any circles that he could see.

Such a word triggered more complex magic, but he didn’t see anything more complex until he looked deeper into the reflection, and he found the true source of the magic behind him.

On the far wall, there hung a complex scroll pinned to the wall. That was the one that trapped him. It showed a complicated working. It was too detailed for him to read from this distance, but that didn’t matter. Whether he could read it or not, it didn’t matter to the trap. Strangely, though, the fact that it was invisible in the dark did, for it had not been set off immediately.

But how? Simon wondered, straining against the magic, even if he could do precious little. What’s he using to hold me?

His mind flicked through all the words he knew, and he tested and disregarded theories. At first, he thought it might be a word of force with complicated instructions. When that seemed unlikely, he decided it had to be a compulsion effect related to the word of command, Dnarth.

He strained against that for a long time, telling himself that he could outthink it. He couldn’t, though. As seconds turned into minutes, and minutes into an hour, nothing worked. He could move his eyes and make his stump twitch spasmodically, but that was it. Otherwise, Simon was a statue.

He stayed there, a long time, watching his candle slowly burn down to the nub, but the whole time he willed it to burn faster. As soon as it’s dark, I’ll be free, he told himself again and again.

The situation was uncomfortably similar to his time as a statue, but it wasn’t the claustrophobia that weighed upon his soul. It was the time. At some point, minutes or hours from now, the Grandmaster would return to check his trap, and when he did, if Simon was still here, he’d be completely helpless.

The candle flame was guttering before Simon heard the distant footsteps, and his heart sank before he even heard the voice. “So it’s you, Sir Enis. A cripple like you was the last person on my list. I thought it might have been a truculent sister out for revenge,” the Grandmaster said, even though Simon couldn’t turn to look. “But you’re the rat that’s been nibbling away at my library.”