Chapter 129: Letting it Simmer
Simon was forced to live with the information that everyone in the north, probably even as far south as Slany, knew of him as the villain for months, and it ate at him. All through the cold winter and into the spring, when there was a sudden uptick in the number of people afflicted with the weeping, it was there, waiting for him in the quiet moments, ready to make him rage all over again.
It was so bad that he did everything he could to try to fill the quiet spaces of his life with more work. In the winter, that started off as an attempt to piece together a more accurate map from the knowledge of the sailors under his care. When those became too wildly divergent, he switched gears and spent the dark hours of the night studying the runes of the demon’s circle by candlelight instead.
Eventually, that was the only task that was engrossing enough to keep his angry thoughts about Kell at bay. He traced and retraced the way the runes fit together from his mirror notes on clean sheets of paper until he finally understood the way they would have looked without all of the distortion from the magics of hell straining against the summoning circle.
It was only once he’d done that that he understood a number of things. The first was that the reason some of the symbols hadn’t made sense to him was because they were twisted and mirrored. Once everything was in the proper scale and orientation, the whole thing felt a lot less dizzying.
The second was that he’d been using Dnarth completely wrong. Until now, distance had meant simply hitting something far away from him. That was all he used it for, but the summoning circle used it almost like teleportation. No, he corrected himself. It was more complex than that. It was like translocation - like that old show with the stargate he’d only seen a few episodes of. Simon had no idea how it worked or targeted its location or whatever, but he desperately wanted to. The world was a big place, and being able to move between far-flung points at a pace somewhat faster than walking would be a huge deal.
Even that idea, as big as it was, wasn’t as important as his third revelation, though. After months of nighttime study, after everyone else finally went to bed and he was left alone with the sick and the dying, he finally figured out which part of the structure he needed to strike out to make the whole thing collapse in on itself.
In a way, the last two revelations were linked because, at first, every attempt to defuse the circle would have led to the outer boundary collapsing first, letting hell into the world, which was exactly what he didn’t want. However, if he attacked the third layer of runes first and canceled out the line that connected the flow of power to the distant rune, then the spell would collapse inward, as the circle suddenly found itself surrounding nothing, and hell faded away with the barrier still intact.
Of course, he also realized he understood the whole thing well enough that he could summon demons on pretty much any floor now. He had no desire to do that, of course, and he still didn’t understand exactly what all the connecting pieces and the parts that might have been numbers or designators did, but he was sure he could copy them well enough to reproduce them. He’d been very careful in his copies to leave gaps in the lines lest he do exactly that.
Of course, Simon burned all of this research after he showed it to the mirror. The very last thing he wanted to do, besides accidentally opening up a portal to hell on something as fragile as paper, was to let anyone else see what he was doing. Not only would that stir all sorts of uncomfortable allegations, but it would release dangerous knowledge in the world that would have entirely unpredictable effects.