Death After Death

Simon spent most of the next few weeks and months in the library. He started going on longer and longer walks, and eventually, he went to the gym. That was mostly for the restorative hot springs, though he did eventually try to spar with men he’d once been able to beat handily.

The results of those bouts were ugly, and when his opponents asked him what had happened to him, Simon told them a story about being set upon by a small pack of orcs while he was out gathering herbs one day. In the broad strokes, the lie was perfectly adequate; he’d fought more than his share, and few men alive knew more about the sheer unrestrained power of the brutes than he did. Still, all of the details were outlandish without the use of magic to back them up.

Eventually, he stopped going to the baths when his scars got a bit too much attention. Curiosity he could handle, but open disgust… well, Simon already thought little enough of his body, so he didn’t exactly need that.

The Queen noticed that, though, and eventually offered to let him use the Royal Baths. They were not so large as the public baths, but they were about a hundred times nicer, with white glazed tiles and marble statues. Either way, the water did him good, but after a couple mix-ups where he almost walked in on the Queen while she was using them, he decided that maybe he’d healed enough that he didn’t need that magic warmth for his joints anymore.

Magic wasn’t something he was doing a lot of these days. That wasn’t because the Queen's Vizer was supposedly keeping an eye on him, either. It was because he wasn’t sure what to fix after all the work he’d already done on himself.

In his games, when you drank a potion or you cast a healing spell, you were restored to full hit points and were as good as new. In this world, though, he still suffered from any number of aches and pains, even after the last bandages were removed and the last wound was closed.

He’d cast a few lesser healing spells to fix the cartilage in his knees when that had started to bother him. That had seemed to work well enough, but other problems were less easy to quantify. Was his poor balance brain damage, or was a bone that had healed crooked, or a muscle that had gotten weak during all this bed rest. He had no idea.

Simon had a couple options that he thought would fix that. The first would be to drain the life out of some miscreants or vermin. He knew from experience that definitely made everything feel better. He also knew how addictive that was, though.

He considered trying to filter lesser transfer through a sword or a dagger to see if that would mitigate that problem, but that solution had the same problem as the other one he wanted to try: he simply lacked the privacy for complicated magic in the palace. Whether this mysterious visor or anyone else was actually watching him didn’t matter.