Death After Death

There was confusion at first as the survivors tried to figure out what had happened. That gave Simon’s group an early lead of a dozen yards. However, after the survivors watched their brothers die around them, a cry of anger rang out, and soon the survivors were giving chase.

Four horses chased after two as Simon, Aaric, and Carelyn blazed out into the night. Simon didn’t know where they were going, and he wasn’t entirely sure that Aaric did, either, but he followed the young man just the same. While they rode, Simon cursed his unwillingness to aim the spell a little lower and kill all the horses that the white cloaks were riding while he was at it.

In the moment, it wasn’t that he’d worried it might have blunted the spell’s effect. It might have, of course, but he was far more concerned with Still, there was nothing he could do now. His magic had winded him, and though he could certainly spare another word or power of two so long as they weren’t major ones, he was unwilling to unless it was absolutely necessary.

In the Pit, Simon had died a lot of times. So many that he’d lost count. He didn’t think about mortality often. Even now, he wasn’t worried about dying. He was shepherding his remaining years more like a mana bar in a video game. The way things were going, he might have twenty or thirty years left, but he wasn’t sure all of those years were created equal, and he doubted that Helades quick sketch of how cosmic powers worked was the whole story. So, he was leaning toward the lower end of that scale.

It might even be less than that, he thought as the horse's hooves pounded away at the muddy road. At this point, every major word burned five percent of his power, every word burned almost half a percent, and every minor word was about a tenth of a percent. None of those were big numbers, but he could see that he was approaching the bottom of the barrel, and it made him think about the big picture more.

He had his bow on him. Unfortunately, he’d barely practiced archery from horseback, and unlike the centaurs he’d fought for so long, he doubted that skill would ever come naturally to him. Regardless, four pursuers became three pretty quickly as one peeled away because of their wounds.

After that, he didn’t have to let off too many shots before the other three pulled up short to avoid becoming another casualty. Just because he was very nearly firing at random didn’t mean that they knew that. In the dark, they could only hear the whistle of the arrow as it flew somewhere nearby in the darkness.

It seemed too easy, and Simon’s first instinct was that it was a trap. It didn’t seem to be, though. As they dropped further and further behind the group, he expected some large spell to ring out and kill them all. He had the word for barrier and protection on his lips, but he never needed to speak them.

Maybe they don’t know any magic, he thought to himself. He was incredulous, but he had to admit that it was true. They knew at least one word of power, but it was possible that they did not know the rest.