Death After Death PLUS 267-269

Ch. 267 - Further North

Simon rode off and on for three nights before he decided that he was far enough away from whoever might be pursuing him to risk another act of necromancy and summon the spirit of the Magi he’d killed so recently. Those first few days were hardly wasted, though. Even before he did that, he spent several nights learning about the talisman that had been used to hunt him. Once he unraveled the golden snake that made the thing work, it was fairly straightforward. 

Etched in tiny letters by a craftsman with a steady hand were the words Aufvarum Barom Dnarth Karesh, along with a few connecting symbols. The spell, as Simon understood it, was The light of distant location detection or something similar. The words were written in such a way that Dnarth looked to be used twice, but without taking the time to sketch it out and do some experiments, Simon really couldn’t be sure.

It was a delicate thing, and he found it interesting. Still, the most concerning part was that it was only a lesser version. There might well be a greater version that could follow him to the ends of the earth. 

For now, he just assumed that was the case. That made his stops brief and his route circuitous. Even the night he picked to do his second attempt at necromancy, atop a rocky escarpment where he could see for miles in all directions, he didn’t stay more than a few hours. 

This attempt was just as successful and just as disturbing as the last one. The Magi, whose name turned out to be Zondarian, didn’t beg to be released, though. He begged not to be sent back as he spilled his guts to Simon. Whereas the first necromancer Simon had interviewed demanded to be released and was loath to share anything, this one had already been found by the devils and begged not to return. 

“Anything! I’ll tell you anything!” the tormented soul screamed while fire flickered around the edge of the binding circle. 

Even without sending him back, though, the ghost’s time in the real world was brief. Still, in that time, Simon learned a great deal. He confirmed that the Magi’s dark pyramid was a charnel house and that sometimes dozens of men and women were drained of their vital essence to power any number of rituals. Some of these were merely to keep them young, even if many of the leaders were old enough to put vampires to shame. 

There were other rituals, too, though. There were large-scale divinations and demon summoning. There were even enchantments fueled by violent deaths. The corpses and the souls were often bartered to demons for other diabolical boons, but the Magi could not offer Simon any details on that front. 

“I’m merely an acolyte. I’ve been with them for only a decade and know only a handful of the King’s own words,” the ghost pleaded, fading away. 

He told Simon the five words that he knew, but none of them were new to him. Ironically, if the man had merely read the talisman he’d been given, he could have learned two more, but Simon didn’t think his focus had been on learning. It had been on power. Specifically, power over others. The groveling ghost didn’t say as much, but it was evident by what he seemed to think was important. He kept trying to tell Simon the secrets of noblemen rather than the secrets of the universe, which showed Simon just how misplaced the man’s priorities were. 

“I don’t care who’s buggering who!” Simon exploded at one point. “I care about the talismans. Tell me about those. Why do you wear them?”

“They… they command our loyalty to the god emperor,” the man said cautiously, “They have a grip on our very soul and let him share his vast power with all of his anointed subjects.”

Simon didn’t see any trace of the amulet on the ghost before him, and it certainly didn’t seem capable of making the dead keep their secrets. So, while he thought the soul part might be a bit overblown, the idea that it could channel energy to the energy from their monarch was very interesting to him if it was even halfway true. What Simon most wanted was to study one of those amulets that the Magi wore, but each time, they were destroyed by their own blast.

He had some hope the spirit might be able to offer him some insight there, but before it could offer Simon any more details in that regard, it started to dissolve. No, dissolve was the wrong word. That implied the process was gentle, and the ghost of Zondarian was in obvious pain as he came apart at the seams, even if he lacked the strength to say anything. 

Simon couldn’t read lips properly, though with his mirror experiments, he’d certainly been trying to learn. In this case, at least it was easy, which made it all the more horrifying. No! Please don’t let them take me!

Those words were when Simon realized that the man’s soul wasn’t coming apart; it was being ripped back to hell a piece at a time. When he was almost gone, the runes that Simon had scratched into the dirt burned briefly with blue fire. Then they were gone, just like the ghost, and he was left with nothing but the smoldering hand of a dead man.  

“Well, that looked unpleasant,” Simon said to himself as he reflected on the bizarre conversation. It hadn’t gone the way he’d expected at all. He’d thought that he’d pry a few answers out of a reluctant ghost, but instead, he’d gotten more answers than he could have asked for, and most of them were worthless. 

More than anything they’d discussed, Simon wondered if he could summon the man’s spirit again in a day or two. How does necromancy interact in a world with heaven and hell, he wondered. 

He had already summoned a spirit that still wandered the world in pain, and he’d very clearly just dragged someone out of hell. Could he do the same thing to someone in heaven? Normally, he would have considered those questions to be too metaphysical to worry about, but given the strange place his soul occupied, he thought he should add it to his list of things to do. 

Simon saved a few charred finger bones in case he wanted to experiment with this more later, but he didn’t plan to summon the dead again any time soon. Just thinking about it creeped him out quite a bit. Simon had gotten used to some weird shit. 

He could kill goblins and even men without batting an eye, as long as they were bad men, but watching souls rent to tatters, of men who didn’t want to be sent back to hell? That was rough by anyone’s measure. 

Still, all of these developments put him in a bit of a quandary. He’d planned to cause some strife that might foment into a civil war and then go back to being zen for a few years, but given all these strange developments, he wasn’t really sure what his next move should be. 

“Seeing a giant would be cool,” he said to himself as he rode north in no particular hurry. It would be cool, but it would also be a complete waste of time. 

The problem, he decided, after several days, was that he’d taken far too much for granted. He’d assumed that magic was rare because the white cloaks had kept it that way, but only in his neck of the woods. Although he still couldn’t speak with any authority where it came from, he suspected that it was infernal in nature. It was quantifiable and understandable. So, Simon had already figured out how to do a great many interesting things with it. As much as he'd learned, it seemed to him that the Magi of Muran knew more, and he coveted that knowledge. 

Do I want it more than what I’m learning from the Oracle, though? He asked himself. On the one hand, there was that strange feeling of connectedness that made everything feel right, and on the other, was learning ever more powerful ways to use magic. Even knowing that he’d lived enough lives to learn both in time, it was still an impossible decision for him. 

So, at least for now, he resolved not to make it. Instead, he tried to get his head right. He brushed up on his archery and hunted for his food instead. He hadn’t had to do that in lives, and despite the gamey, stringy nature of the food, it somehow made it taste better. Although he lacked the frames or the tannins to cure the hides, he traded them as he went for other useful objects. 

The clans of the area didn’t give him much trouble; only once was he forced to fight, and even that had more of a ceremonial nature to it. If anything, the lack of violence toward a lone rider surprised him and highlighted the distinct lack of monsters that existed in this part of the world. Despite the fact that this region would have made the perfect domain for centaurs, there were none to be found.

Rather than face off against monsters, there were only men, and usually, he’d be welcomed as a guest and offered fermented mare’s milk to tell them news of the south. Simon didn’t know much about Muran, of course, but he’d heard many other stories in the tea houses of the capital, so he told some of those as his own instead. 

Several times, Simon was tempted to use magic simply to skip other riders altogether. A word of illusion would make him all but vanish amidst the tall, wispy grass until he was over the horizon. He didn’t do that, though. 

In fact, for the first time in a long time, he entirely abstained from magic in an effort to make his soul less turbulent and murky. He had no idea what to do next. So, while he waited, he decided that he would at least try to put the Oracle's teachings to good use. 

Somehow, all of that helped. It didn’t give Simon any special insight as to what was going to happen or anything, but as he rode, he calmed down and stopped living in fear that each rider on the southern horizon was another group of men bent on hunting him down. After that, the days started to blur together. The weather was starting to get colder, but it was only when he saw the mountains start to poke up above the northern horizon that he realized how far he’d gone. 

“Top of the world, man,” he said to himself as he looked at the vast, glacier-dotted peaks that only got taller as he got closer, day by day.

This wasn’t the sort of place he should be when winter started, of course, but given that he was unlikely to ever come this far to the north again, it was something he wanted to appreciate, even if that appreciation only took the form of a few days of sketching. 

Ch. 268 - Laying Low

Once he entered the territory of monsters, the Murani horse clans were unsurprisingly absent. There was no market for goblin slaves, nor were there glorious combats to be had. Simon was sure that a battle with a giant would have counted as glorious combat, but no one seemed eager for that either. It wasn’t like someone could bring back a trophy from that fight very easily, and without an ox train and a wagon-sized skull, no one was likely to believe that such a battle had even taken place. 

He wasn’t looking to forge any more legends, though, and while he would love to see one from a distance, he was happy to spend his time in the wilds fighting more inglorious battles. Just two weeks, he told himself, notching a tree near the boulder mound that had become his campsite near the edge of the forest that stretched out to the north of him. Just two weeks, and if no one comes for me, I can turn around and go back. 

While Simon wasn’t sure if that was overcautious or not cautious enough, he certainly wasn’t going to underestimate these mages again. In those first few days, he spent a lot of time thinking about all the various magics he’d been exposed to recently and how some grand unified theory of magic might go together, but such things were still far too complex for him to understand and once the killing started those vast intellectual constructs pieced together with what-if’s drifted away like the castles in the sky that they were. 

Once he started going on nighttime raids against the nearby goblins, none of those theoretical concerns mattered. By day, he would hunt rabbits, pheasants, and the occasional mountain goat or elk to keep his little base camp well-fed. By night, when no Magi appeared to drag him back to their ziggurat-dotted city, he would creep out in search of combat that only fed his soul. 

At first, it had started as an activity to make sure that the hungry little bastards stayed well away from his mount and supplies. Gradually, night by night, it became more than that. It became his main source of entertainment, and for once, he didn’t even blame the little jolts of life energy he was getting from his blade. He’d long since grown used to those tiny jolts and didn’t feel any trace of the creeping addiction he’d worried about for so long. 

It was that there was something thrilling about skulking through the shadows, wondering if you were the hunter or the hunted in any given moment. If he’d remembered them more clearly, he would have said this was the same feeling he’d gotten from playing video games once upon a time. That was too long ago, and Simon could no longer remember it. Truthfully, he wasn’t even sure he’d enjoy sitting there and clicking on words and images on the mirror-like screen if there wasn't any real danger in it. 

Out in the night there was danger, and whether he was sniping the beasts with his bow or gutting them with his dagger, he enjoyed it immensely. “I’ve had too many safe lives lately,” he told himself. That didn’t reduce his desire to return to the Oracle and to Zoa, of course, but those desires didn’t make it any less true. Neither relaxing by a volcanic lake nor fighting a zombie outbreak in Schwarzenbruck for the fifteenth time was particularly dangerous to him anymore. 

With magic, very little was dangerous at this point in his many lives. It was only his abstention from that which made fighting goblins in the forest a challenge. For a few nights running, Simon lost himself in that little guerilla war of his own making. It wouldn’t change history, it wouldn’t save any villages, and when he was done, no one but him would ever know that it had happened. 

That was very freeing. Normally, he spent so much time thinking about how everything he did might impact everything else he was going to do. Here, he was so far off the map that no one cared either way. The most impactful thing he did was focus on understanding the advantages of the scimitar in certain situations, even if he preferred the longsword he’d long since left behind.  

Simon ranged further and further afield as the days progressed, and when two weeks had passed with no further sign that he was being pursued, he decided to move on. However, instead of moving back to the south, as he’d planned, he went further north. It wasn’t quite on a whim, but it certainly wasn’t planned, either. 

I still have time before the first snows, he told himself, And I have even more time to stop the coming war. The truth was that since he doubted he’d ever have to come this far north again, he wanted to see a giant. Well, that was mostly the truth. The rest of it was that he wasn’t sure what to do next. 

Going north wouldn’t help with any of that. It was a side quest at best and an indulgence at worst. He wouldn’t even really think about what it was he should do next until he was riding south again. Still, he could resist delaying things a little longer, and he told himself that confirming the existence of giants would be enough. 

So, day by day, the things he needed to do percolated at the back of his mind as he navigated through forested ravines and found the right slopes to lead his horse further and further into the uplands. Even as he climbed, though, the mountains rose inexorably before him. 

These weren’t the climbable, almost picturesque mountains he navigated when he dealt with the Wyvern. These were rugged, jutting peaks, and behind them, there were only higher, icier peaks. Part of him wondered if he’d find a new kingdom hidden away if he went far enough, but Simon knew it was too rugged even to be compared to the mountainous Kingdom of Charia. 

That was the reason that he was eventually forced to turn around. Above the treeline, there wasn’t much in the way of danger, but without grass, he could take his horse no father, and when he finally reached vast snowfields, he decided that was as far as he could go. 

Still, it was a gorgeous view, and Simon took the time to appreciate the vast sea of grass to his south, past the mountains he’d climbed to get here, and the forests that separated the two. They continued into the distance so far that he could only see a long sweep of yellow, unmarred by fortifications or settlements. Only the smaller rivers and streams that would eventually become the mighty Serpent River broke it up as they meandered across the plain. 

Despite that simplicity, Simon wasn’t sure that he had the skill to capture that beauty, even if he had proper paints and canvas. Still, just for a moment, he couldn't help but feel like everything was connected again in some deep way. He had no way of knowing whether that was simply an aesthetic projection or some deeper intuition, but he hoped it was the latter. Simon had been abstaining from magic ever since he’d left Zurari, and he was sure that the Oracle would tell him that such things would pay dividends eventually if she were here. 

Perhaps you could find a way to avoid killing too, the imaginary version of the woman quipped in his head. Maybe then you’d find out what true clarity is like. 

It was nice to do without magic, but he didn’t see that he’d ever be able to do without a blade, at least in this sort of life. 

When he turned around the following day, he took a different way down than he had up, just to do a bit more exploring. It was there he finally found his first and only piece of evidence that giants were real. There, in a half-melted snowy meadow two valleys over, he saw regularly spaced ovals a dozen feet apart. At first, he’d assumed they were springs or a partially frozen stream, but as he traveled along them for a short time, he was eventually struck by the idea that they couldn’t be anything but footprints. 

For a moment, Simon was tempted to free his horse and continue on, tracking the thing down that much further, but he resisted. That would have been too self-indulgent, even for the mood he was in lately. It was enough to see the tracks, he decided, and he took a moment to study the outlines before deciding they were too melted to bother sketching. 

On his way back toward the plains, his own goals and responsibilities began to stalk him once more like an invisible giant. Prevent a war, then go gain clarity and solve some more levels. He told himself. That’s not so hard, right?

It was hard, though. It was a heavy burden, and now that he was proceeding back toward it once more, it weighed on him every bit as much as his supplies weighed down the saddlebags of his horse. It might be overburdened with things, but it was his mind that was overburdened with ideas. 

“What I need to do is worm my way into the Murani’s Magi the same way I did with Brin’s Whitecloaks,” he told himself as he dismounted and walked his horse to the edge of a stream to water it after a long ride. “The problem is they only allow children to join their ranks so they can properly brainwash them, and I haven’t been a kid in centuries.”

He sighed at that. It wasn’t the first time That Simon had come to that conclusion, but it still annoyed him. He’d considered stealing the identities of one of the existing Magi and worming his way in that way. He felt confident enough that he could sculpt his face into someone else's. Surely, he could follow them around enough to learn enough about them to fool their colleagues for a couple of days. 

Would that be enough? Even if he faked his own identity, faking those amulets that they wore would be harder. He’d never gotten a close look at one until after it had blown up, and though they vaguely looked like a very curved shuriken or a flattened lotus flower, he didn’t think that would be enough to pass even a cursory inspection. 

“No, I need to infiltrate them the proper way, but I can’t…” his words trailed off as he looked at his own reflection in the water, and he noted how young he looked. 

Simon had been killing for weeks with his blade and hadn’t thought much of it. He’d barely been around a mirror, and he had the patchy beard to show for it. He also apparently had smooth skin and a hairline that he hadn’t had since his twenties. 

During his time in Ionia, he’d de-aged himself decades, but never very quickly. The result had been that he’d stayed the same oldish man for a very long time. Throughout his last month or so in the wilderness, he’d devoured years from goblins, a few weeks at a time, and it showed. 

Really, it creeped him out a little. He’d gotten used to this new face of his. It was strange that he looked sort of Central Asian or Middle Eastern, but he’d looked very Mediterranean in his last life, so that was tolerable. The idea that he could look like the son, or at least the younger brother of the man he’d been in Zurari.

Until this point, he’d considered it completely impossible that he could infiltrate the Magi properly because he would never be young enough, but this presented an interesting option. “Could I get young enough to fool them?” Simon wondered. “Is it even possible?”

Ch. 269 - Complicated Patterns

Is it possible? That thought weighed on Simon for the rest of the day and kept him up half the night, even though he was deep enough into the plains that monster attacks were practically a nonissue. Whether it was possible to make himself younger and how he might accomplish such a miracle eventually took a back seat to whether or not it was a good idea. 

Of course, it’s possible, he assured himself after thinking about it for almost 24 hours straight. If I can make myself a little younger, I can make myself a lot younger. The Magi already keep themselves young, and the leaders of the Unspoken probably do too. 

However, if he was going to do it, then the means were obvious, too. Gervuul Zyvon. 

He hadn’t used a greater word of transfer in a long time. His last time had been in Darndelle, and before that with the black swarmers. It was too powerful and too dangerous. He’d long since learned to cope with the low-grade euphoria that came from draining through a piece of steel. It was like drinking animal blood as a vampire: effective but far from ideal. 

If he was going to do this, then it was almost certainly the right tool for the job, and Simon feared that. “I shouldn’t,” he told himself as he rode. “I’ve gotten used to the effects.” He hadn’t, though, never on that scale. It wouldn’t be just one word of greater transfer, after all. It would be a dozen, at least. It might be twice that. Simon had no idea if he’d have to use words of flesh shaping or if his body would naturally ungrow as he got young enough, but that wasn’t what put him off of the idea. 

If he messed up his body too badly trying this and ended up as some deformed monstrosity, he could always kill himself and reset that. He’d miss leaving this life undone, but that would be recoverable. If he screwed up his soul and ended up hopelessly addicted to draining the life force of others for life after life, well, he’d be no better than a vampire, even if he could walk around in daylight. 

Maybe I could slip my soul into the body of a child instead. Simon thought, trying to find another, less risky solution. 

That was even worse, though. Even if it was somehow possible, the idea of killing some innocent kid just to borrow their body for a covert op seemed too ghoulish for words.

As he made his way south, he considered all of the options and slowly worked out how he would do this if he decided it was the best plan. Instead of draining people or even beasts, he’d draw from nature itself, near the river in places that would be easily replenished by floods in the spring. He even worked out the circle he’d used to accomplish this strange project. It wasn’t so complex, and though technically they were the words of greater youthful flesh siphoning, given the proximity he planned to the water, he ended up thinking of the whole thing as his personal fountain of youth. 

Eventually, when he’d covered half the distance back to Zurari, all he was missing was the will to move forward. To some extent, that was the problem with all of his lives. He wasn’t sure how to move forward, and even when he was, things rarely went according to plan. 

In that regard, at least, this life had gone better than most. He’d found somewhere to wait until the zombie outbreak, and when it was time, he’d found the true cause and resolved it. If not for his doppelgänger, he would be back in Hepollyon meditating on the nature of the universe or something until it was time to address the next unfinished level. 

“You can still do that,” Simon reminded himself. “You can breeze through Zurari on the way back, splash up a little graffiti to get the masses riled up, then use a little terrorism to set 'em loose and be gone before the city falls into civil war. You don’t have to go further than that.”

He did, though. Simon had found another vast source of knowledge, and he desperately wanted a peek inside. Even if it was only a few more words of power or new meanings for the words he already had, that was worth taking a chance.

Well, if you believe that, then you can start summoning demons any time, man, he told himself, mocking his glibness. I’m sure they’d trade you your soul for just about anything you might want. 

Even on nights when Simon was greeted by horse clans, or he sat around the fires of traders, telling him about the giant footprints that he saw in the snow to a mixture of astonishment and laughter, these thoughts never left him, but none of these options became a certainty until the night of a full moon on a windy night after the first snows. 

The grasslands were not the sort of place where snow stayed for any length of time until the winter was as deep as its grass. It would come and swirl about, then melt away again after a few days. Still, that night, he’d gotten a little drunk as the other traders had talked about how a war between the clans was likely to make the northern steppes a place that was unwise to travel through once spring arrived. 

Simon made his excuses when he realized he was slurring his words, but even that caution wasn’t enough to stop him from taking a tumble on the icy grass and patchy snow between the fire and his simple tent. 

As he lay there laughing at his own clumsiness and his drunkenness, he wasn’t even tempted to use a word of lesser cure to purge the alcohol from his system. Instead, he lay there, appreciating the moment as an accidental snow angel. 

He stared at the stars for a few seconds and the way they burned sharply in the deep black sky before he forced himself to rise. When he was on his feet, he turned and looked at his footsteps. For a moment, he thought they looked just like the giant’s footsteps in the mountains weeks before. It was only their scale that was different. 

And that was all it took. In that instant, Simon’s entire world reoriented. Suddenly, everything was composed of those same lines that he saw back in Hepollyon. These weren’t red and blue currents in the water, though; they were white lines of fate that made up everything. They were the ice that he’d slipped on and the snow he’d fallen in. They were the fiery constellations above him and the canvas tents around him. They were everything, even the cities that lay far to the south. 

This was a moment of clarity that was far more powerful than his last one had been. It wasn’t that he could see the fork in the road; it was that he was the fork in the road. Far to the south, in a winding road made of choices, lay the city of Zurari, and past it, despite the enormous distances involved, lay Hepollyon. There were other cities, too. Abrese and Darndelle were just as easy to find, like the intersections of a spiderweb.

For that instant, Simon knew that he could go anywhere and he could be anyone. That was the curse of his life in the Pit. He had true freedom in the midst of what might be permanent imprisonment, but even so, he was only just starting to understand it. 

Right now, he understood that his choice was the right one. He understood that he could go anywhere, but eventually, the Murani would be everywhere. He couldn’t say why Helades might want that. Truthfully, he didn’t even think to ask. It was like the moment with Oracle where he viewed the world through her sight, and the further out things were, the hazier. Past a certain point, the entire South was nothing but fire and blood. Whether Ionaia or Brin stood longer than the other didn’t really matter. If he wanted to prevent it, all that really mattered was Zurari. 

A thousand ways that he could navigate himself to the heart of power that he’d never considered before flicker through his mind. Some were war crimes, like recreating the demon seed or the frost orb. In one version of events, he saw very clearly that he could save the world for a time by detonating the grand pyramid in the center, though he did not precisely understand how. All of those were too far from the way he lived his lives for him to truly embrace. 

Sneaking into the Magi by becoming a child, though, wasn’t impossible. That had a chance of paying off and giving the world exactly the sort of reprieve he wanted. Those details didn’t matter, though. What mattered was how he could achieve it without directly channeling the forces of creation through his soul until he was a burned-out dilettante. He needed another vessel, like the circles and the weapons that he used. In a flash, he finally saw what it was he needed to do, and though the answer, as it turned out, was quite unpleasant, he could bear that too.

“A vessel,” he breathed as he stood there in a fugue state, trying to process everything that had just occurred to him. “Magic requires a vessel.”

He’d known that, of course. Weapons with words of power were more potent than those that were spoken, and they weren’t as hard on his body, even when his own soul fueled them. He’d limited himself in that regard more than he should have. 

Simon had no idea if he stood there amidst ten thousand crisscrossing lines that made up the possibilities of his future for seconds or hours. However, when the world unfroze, the night was just as it had been, and the other merchants still laughed and chatted by the fire not so far away. Bleary and overwhelmed, Simon made his way back to his tent to sleep it off, but before he could, he had to make a few notes so he wouldn’t forget what he needed to do next. 

The next day, he threw away his original plans to scratch a fountain of youth in the dirt. It would work, but such a ritual would likely leave him hopelessly addicted to the thrill after using it only a handful of times. What he needed instead was something that worked only once and was far too awful to enjoy. 

So, he rode south, and when he found a large copse of trees, he tethered his horse far away from it and made camp there. Then, he walked into the grove and chose the tree near the center because he was pretty sure it was a paw paw tree. 

The exact tree didn’t matter, just as the exact grove didn’t matter. An oak would have made this harder, and less digestible. All that mattered was that he was okay with destroying it because what he was about to do next was probably going to kill everything on this spot for years. He didn’t expect that to be very visible now since only a few yellow leaves remained on these already skeletal trees, but it would still weigh on his concise more than any number of goblins. 

Once the tree was chosen, and he shaved off the bark on one side, Simon took his time carving a series of runes into the tree, though he left them unconnected and nonfunctional. Then, when that was done, he retreated from the area as well because he was pretty sure that what he was about to do next was going to suck the life out of anyone that was close enough to power the spell he was about to unleash. 

When Simon was a hundred feet away, which was about as far as he could get without losing sight of his carving, he took a deep breath and pictured the last marks he needed to make, then he whispered, “Dnarth Vrazig,” and unleashed a word of distant lightning to complete the inscription with a single precise bolt from the leaden sky above.