Death After Death

After he collapsed at the end of the last battle, as disappointing as it was, Simon expected to wake up in his cabin all over again. That’s not what happened.

Instead, he drifted in and out of sleep in a bed that was much more comfortable and far too white to belong to him. It occurred to him only after several days that he was not, in fact, dreaming it. He was lying in a bed somewhere in the palace. He could barely move, and even opening his eyes was too much work at first, but in time, he could feel Elthena’s dry, cool hands holding his. Eventually, he could even squeeze them back, but only softly.

It turned out that she’d been talking to him the whole time, but it took days to differentiate that from the background birdsong or other people speaking in the same room. He had to focus to a painful degree to understand even part of what she was saying. He didn’t need to understand her to know that they’d won, though. If they hadn’t, the sound of birds would have been replaced by the sound of battle, and the smell of Elthena’s perfume would have been lost in the smell of burning.

In a way, the fugue state he was trapped in felt like brain damage, and that idea sent a chill down his spine. Given that he could still think and reflect when he was half asleep, though, it was probably something closer to exhaustion, complete and utter exhaustion.

He was certainly tired. He’d burned through years, or perhaps decades, of life in a single hour. He’d channeled enough energy that he should have become a bonfire himself, but somehow, he did not. Somehow, he didn’t even die, but he was dying now; he was sure of that much.

In the days that followed, even as some parts of him healed and his mind became clearer, other parts of him, like his heart and his lungs, labored ever harder to keep up. He’d burned through an entire season of his life just to win a single fight. But I did win it, he told himself. That’s all that matters. I won. It would have been worth it at twice the price.

It took days for him to be able to meaningfully interact with the woman who should have been his wife or the boy that was his son. Each of those moments was brief because sleep was always chasing at his heels, but they were still nice. Most times, he would wake up to find Seyom or Elthena sitting by his bedside. Whether this meant that they were always there or he only awoke when they were, Simon couldn’t say, but he found their presence infinitely comforting.

All he could do was bask in their affectionate words or listen to them offer updates on the situation. One thing he couldn’t do, though, was answer them. His efforts had completely fried his vocal cords, and when he tried to talk now, only hacking coughs came out.

So, he stopped trying to answer. Part of him regretted that he couldn’t tell them to burn his papers or destroy his weapons, but he didn’t let that bother him too much. His notes were cryptic enough that copying them would be difficult. Instead of worrying about what he wanted to say or do, he simply did his best to bask in the time they had left together because he knew it would be over soon.