Death After Death

Simon made most of his preparations that day. He didn’t need much: a horse, his armor, and some supplies, along with a little ready coin, would see him through for a long time; it was more than he had in most lives. Still, he couldn’t shake the words he’d been told earlier that day.

They’ll likely kill the child and send you back out to find another. They kept him up half the night.

Up until this point, he hadn’t really understood why people had gotten so bent out of shape about skipping a step in their process, but now he did, and it brought the Unspoken one step closer to the Murani in his mind. Is it just a whole world of child soldiers? He wondered. There was a big difference between the Lord of the Flies-style magic school of the northern kingdom and raising someone from a young age to be a warrior and champion of good, but even so, Simon didn’t like the trend.

In the morning, he received a second surprise, but for once, it was a good one. He ate a simple breakfast of eggs and ham, and then, as he saddled his horse and checked his preparations, he was approached by half a dozen of his fellow knights, dressed in full regalia. For a moment, Simon thought he was about to get a beat down or worse, but it turned out to be just the opposite.

Instead, they embraced him as a brother and exchanged kind words as they pinned the cloak to his back that he’d been waiting for since he arrived nearly a year before. “It’s finally time for you to go out in the world and see it as it truly is,” one knight said before another finished the statement, “But that is the way of things; you are well prepared to meet and beat whatever evil you find.”

The way that the words switched off between speakers without any gap in the content certainly indicated that this was a scripted ceremony, but as each of them bid him well on his journey he was a little moved by it; he could only imagine how moved a fresh young knight who was going out into the world alone for the first time after spending a decade as a squire would have been.

Despite himself, Simon felt a flare of pride in his chest as he rode out of the gate a few minutes later. He knew the psychological tricks at play, but that didn’t stop them from working on him, and as he went, he considered how much more effective the Unspoken brainwashing was than its Magi equivalent.

If I ever have to make a secret cult, I’m definitely going to do that, he told himself before leaving the broken castle in the distance behind him.

After that, Simon turned his attention to the more important question of where he should go. All things being equal, he should go to wherever the most danger was, and fight it, but charging off half cocked like that would be reckless, at best, given the precarious nature of the levels.

“You do too much, you’ll reset a bunch of things you’ve already locked in,” he told himself. “You do too little, and the Unspoken won’t be happy with your performance. It’s quite a pickle.”

It wasn’t as if these were new concerns for Simon; it was the greatest danger of his current life, and each time he’d gone off on a mission, he’d come back and checked his mirror to see if he’d done any damage to his cause. So far, he’d been lucky. He only had the same five levels to deal with.

Level 19 - Lizard men in a swamp.

Level 20 - A Basilisk amongst the ruins.

Level 21 - A haunted cemetery.

Level 27 - Centaur raiders near Crowvar.

Level 34 - ?????

Two of those would be easy, one would be dangerous, and two were entirely unknown. He wouldn’t be surprised if he blew through all of them in one life and ended up in fresh territory before he knew it, but that would be complicated if he started accidentally changing things with his heroics.

Where he could go proved to be too complicated a knot for Simon to untie, so instead he started at the other end of the puzzle and started crossing off where he couldn’t go. This ruled out the capital, anywhere near Gregor’s home of Slany, Ordenvale, and any number of places he had history in the country. It also ruled out some nearby places, like Schwarzenbruck, the road to Abresse, and all of Ionia. Taken together, that ruled out nearly a third of the country, and half of the area he was most familiar with, but he could work with that.

By the time he’d camped, he’d half convinced himself that he should go to Montain,seek out Castle Gravenstone, and dig deeper into that. But by the morning, he’d chickened out. It wasn’t that Montain was a little far afield for the Unspoken and that the organization had no power there. It was that he worried he might find a vampire somewhere in that crypt, even though the place should have been empty, and he wasn’t prepared to deal with that.

So, instead, he decided on the wastelands around Crowvar. It was a dangerous enough area to do some good, and had little impact on most of his levels. The only portal that was even in the area that he’d seen so far was one he had to deal with in the future anyway. That last detail sealed it for him, and when he got up and dressed, he started south, thinking about the Raithwaite family as he went. He certainly wouldn’t be happy to see them again, but didn’t feel the same murderous rage he had for so many lifetimes.

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“Varten’s father won’t be much older than me,” Simon mused, “And his wife might still be alive.”

That made for an interesting thought. He’d never been in that region so early, and it wasn’t like Freya had a grave that he could accidentally erase at this point. The idea that the prick that had killed her would be a child made it harder to hate him, too. Simon had killed the man many times, but as a child, he couldn’t even imagine it.

Rather than try, he made his way south, happy that he no longer had to worry so much about toppling his fragile house of cards. If I just use the portals properly and go further and further into the future each time, then I won’t even have to worry about these problems, he reminded himself.

For the first couple of days of his journey, he had the solitude of the plains to keep him company, so those sorts of thoughts dogged him, along with other random ideas, like branding himself with soul protection marks on his body every time he restarted in the cabin. Tattooing was a complex process, but with some carefully bent metal, he should be able to burn and heal them even without magic, and of course, if he used magic to mark himself, it would be even easier.

“But what if it blocks Helades' magic and the reality knot doesn’t work?” he asked himself at one point. That one stray question was enough to push the whole idea aside. After all, what would be more ironic than trying to protect yourself from one form of death and permanently causing another? He’d feel like an absolute moron if he did that.

While the soul damage he’d suffered had affected his reincarnation for several attempts, the idea that protective measures would do the same thing was less certain. So, while he passed the time riding a couple of dozen miles every day, he started trying to come up with experiments to prove that, one way or the other. Those efforts became harder to focus on as he encountered more people.

Intellectually, he knew the way that people treated Whitecloaks. They didn’t talk about it, and certainly not in public, but they gave the knights a wide berth, and no reason to take offense. Simon had seen it countless times before, both in their service and when he encountered them in the wild.

Still, it was one thing to see it and another thing to feel it directed at him, and it left Simon uncertain of how to react. When he sighted a caravan from a distance, they needn’t do more than wave or offer him a few respectful words.

However, once he reached a main trade road and encountered looks of fearful respect on a regular basis, those interactions became much more frequent, and at least once a day, men would stop him to ask him a question or help him adjudicate some disagreement. Simon had expected to fight monsters and bad men, but before he drew his sword in anger for the first time, he’d been forced to decide a number of disputes ranging from the damages owed for a lamed horse to deciding on whether the name ‘Alyteya,’ for someone’s daughter, was auspicious or not.

Those interactions were complicated, but finding bad men wasn’t. Simon had spent a year amidst the Whitecloaks, without murder or magic, and even the worst of them glowed a light gray. That wasn’t so true in the wider world. He saw many people on the road who were polluted by shadowy auras. They weren’t the majority, but there were still enough of them that Simon could have made a full-time job of cutting them down if he’d been a zealot.

He refrained, saving interventions for those who had the blackest souls, and before he reached the first inn, he’d strung up three murderers. All of them denied it with their last breaths, but all of them would do it again if given the chance.

“Please have mercy on poor Tyrel!” one woman begged when Simon dragged him back to the group after he’d tried to run. “He wouldn’t harm a rabbit! He’s a gentle soul…”

“Maybe not a rabbit, but your sister?” he asked.

They both paled at that response, which told Simon he’d been right, but really, he’d been guessing. He could see that the man was a murderer, and that the murder had affected his wife in some important way, but whether she was a sister rather than a mother or a cousin was tenuous.

“He didn’t do anything to Mara!” she insisted. “She just disappeared one day! You can’t blame Tyrel for something that happened in the woods!”

Simon noted that the condemned man no longer argued his own innocence. So, after he’d hung the noose around the man’s neck and thrown the rope over the tree, Simon asked him, “How about it? One last chance to unburden your soul and give your wife the closure she deserves.”

These two were part of a larger group, but no one else tried to interfere. They were too afraid of what Simon might do to them. That didn’t stop Tyrel from looking around for a savior, but when he found none, he turned to his wife and said. “I didn’t do what he’s accusing me of, at least, not on purpose. I need you to know that I’m a good man—”

Simon had heard enough after good man, and with a flick of his reins, his horse yanked half a dozen feet of slack out of the rope, raising Tyrel two full feet off the ground and leaving him to sputter and choke. “I gave you a chance to confess to the one you loved,” Simon spat. “Not explain why what you did wasn’t your fault.”

While he didn’t have a legal code for which aura colors worked out to which crimes or anything, he was fairly certain that the soul of someone who slew men in honorable combat looked different than those who choked women to death in the woods. To her credit at least, his wife stopped screaming and started crying; when her husband was finally still, she turned to Simon and asked, “What did he mean by on purpose?”

“He meant that he’d done something terrible but wished he hadn’t,” Simon asked, resisting the impulse to comfort her any further before moving on to the rest of the group.

Simon lectured the men they’d been traveling with, outlining the man’s black deeds in the broadest strokes, before pointing out some of the lesser criminals among them and their individual misdeeds in a similar fashion. “It is not my place to punish drunkards, gamblers, or wife beaters,” Simon finished as he selected several men to dig Treyl’s roadside grave. “But if you do not mend your ways, and graduate to worse deeds, then I might just come for you next.”

That took hours, but by nightfall, he and the group were on their way once more, moving in opposite directions. In the past, he’d thought that the common reaction to the white cloaks had been the fact that they sometimes killed good people in suspicious circumstances. After that day, though, he could see how some people would hate him forever, even though he’d done nothing wrong, and there wasn’t an easy way that he could see to fix that.