Death After Death

That night, Simon lay awake for hours. It wasn’t his fear that one of the two people he was sleeping beside might off him in his sleep that kept him up, even though they might. It wasn’t even the nagging worry that they were sleeping in the same place that Aaric and Carelyn had stayed the night before and that their pursuers might have that information.

Simon didn’t let that bother him, either. If there was going to be a fight, then there was going to be a fight. Instead, he thought about everything he’d spent the last few hours learning from the conversation before everyone was tired enough to go to bed. Now, his mind was spinning with the implications of it all.

Nothing anyone had said had offered a hint about evil Simon, of course, but he’d solved a couple other mysteries that put a number of events in a new light. First was the word of power, of course, but more than that was the whole aura thing.

Thinking about it while he lay here, he realized he couldn’t actually prove that this cult was wrong, of course, at least on this issue. He’d already tried to explain to both of his companions that the other white cloaks had been wearing items inscribed with words of power to protect them from his magic, though they insisted those were simply ceremonial items.

That was ridiculous, but it was possible that only those that only he and those who had the ability to see things could cast magic. He wasn’t a part of this world, so the rules might not apply to him, but he wouldn’t know, one way or another, until he did some experimentation.

Another thing, though, was why there were so few mages. To date, the only one that Simon was sure he’d seen in the wild besides the ones he’d killed was the one that had killed him as a zombie. He hadn’t even seen a dozen of them yet. Not in the whole world, across all his lives. He’d always assumed that they kept themselves to themselves, and there was some secret wizard school or guild, and he just hadn’t discovered them.

That wasn’t the case, though. They were being picked off pretty methodically, and if you could pick them out of a crowd, though, then things became more complicated. Not just in general, either, but for him specifically. Until he got his experience a little more under control, he was going to have to keep an eye out for them.

That thought was enough to make him wonder if he might have died to any of these assholes in the past without knowing it. It was impossible to say, though.

When they talked about the nature of looking at people’s auras, both of them pointed out that even non-warlocks could swirl with shadows if they’d done enough bad things in their lives. Aaric actually argued that it wasn’t even the magic that tainted the aura but the terrible things they did with it that probably caused the problems, but Carelyn disagreed and argued that every use of magic tainted the soul; she argued that was the only way to argue what happened with the Whisperers, but she did not elaborate.