Death After Death

Once Simon was well enough that the village’s matriarch began to find an excuse to ask him when he was going to be leaving almost every day, he rented a cottage outside of town where he wouldn’t have to see her as often. He still needed to visit Rivenwood two or three times a week, though. Not only did he rely on the townspeople for food as always, but no matter how careful he tried to be with his targets, he was always going back to the fletcher for another bundle of arrows.

He had to visit the smith fairly regularly at the beginning, too, of course. However, once Simon had the old man make him the tools he needed, that part at least was done. Though he’d spend most afternoons over the next month scratching the perverse symbols ever deeper into the steel short sword he’d bought for just this purpose, he didn’t need anyone else’s help with that. Light, patience, and his steel scribe were all he required.

It turned out that he’d gotten it backward, though. He’d thought that crafting a magic sword was going to be the hardest thing he was going to have to do, and getting better with his bow was going to be the easiest. In reality, though, it was the opposite.

It took almost two months of careful, painstaking effort to carve all nine runes and glyphs onto the steel, along with the 12 connecting lines, but that had merely been time-consuming. Learning to improve his skill with the long bow, on the other hand, was supposed to be easy, but even after a full moon, he felt like he hadn’t gotten much better at all.

Sure, standing there, he could hit the bull’s eye every time. Even for fairly far-away targets, that wasn’t too hard. But shooting like that would only be enough to get him killed. And that wasn’t enough. He was trying to master shooting and moving the way that they did in the movies, and it seemed to be almost impossible.

He was never going to be a Legolas, but he would have settled for at least a Robin Hood. Apparently, those skills took a lot longer to practice than a few months, though. In the end, he had to settle for learning how to arc his shots over cover and shoot blindly at his targets, but even that was hit or miss, and after spending weeks of time practicing the technique, he could hit a target on the other side of his cottage only one in four times from fifty yards away.

His other experiments went even better, though, especially with Ä̴̮̦̯́̅ű̸̡̙̩͛f̶͈̦́̃v̸͚̬̀̕ả̷̩͙̼r̶̦̀͊ú̶̪̮̉͝m̷͔͔̃͋ ̷̩̯̈́ Ó̷̙o̸̺̓n̵͓̾b̶̠̒ě̴̪t̷̳͠ỉ̸̘ṫ̵̼. Though fire and lightning were cool, lesser force quickly became the most useful of all his trump cards. He could apply it to himself, letting himself leap impossibly high and even granting him a double-jump-like effect. Though greater force would likely be enough to turn an enemy into paste, or at least break every bone in their body, lesser force had some real killing power too - as long as he was willing to lose the arrow, he thought with a grin.

“Ä̴̮̦̯́̅ű̸̡̙̩͛f̶͈̦́̃v̸͚̬̀̕ả̷̩͙̼r̶̦̀͊ú̶̪̮̉͝m̷͔͔̃͋ ̷̩̯̈́ Ó̷̙o̸̺̓n̵͓̾b̶̠̒ě̴̪t̷̳͠ỉ̸̘ṫ̵̼” he whispered as he let go of his arrow. The projectile was too fast for him to watch with the naked eye, of course, but he found it just where he knew he would: embedded in a nearby tree all the way up to the feathers.

“Pretty cool,” he said to himself as he examined his handiwork, “But figuring out how to bend the shot would be even cooler…”