Death After Death 210-212

Ch. 210 - Perfect Timing

Depending on what was going on, the right answer was either to linger for a long time until Simon was in excellent shape or if it was to immediately proceed to the next level. He chose neither and instead lingered only a couple more days, spying on the white cloaks as they came and went in the hopes that he could read the tea leaves to figure out what had happened to Aaric. 

When he finally jumped down the well in the dark of night a few evenings later, though, all he’d really done was get rid of some of the other Simon’s junk before he took the backpack with him. The gold and silver, especially, he dumped. Except for a couple silvers, in case he had the chance to use them in the next level, and one of the gold coins bearing his image, he left the hand-sized sack just inside the bakery’s oven where the woman that ran the place would find it when she woke up. 

Simon had no idea if she was a good person or if those coins would help or hurt the arc of history. He knew that the other him had anticipated he would be here at this moment, so he was trying to be a bit more unpredictable from now on. 

The ride down the well and out of the cave was just as wild as it had been before, but at least this time, he was a little ready for it, and he stood and dusted himself off on the trail without too much effort. 

Simon was just getting his bearings and mentally preparing himself to start jogging uphill, which sounded like about the most awful thing in the world when he noticed there was a large caravan of people coming up the road behind him. 

Most of the wagons were still behind the curve of the mountain, and he could only see the lead riders, but Simon immediately recognized them as the dragon slayer’s caravan. That confused him quite a bit. 

“Shouldn’t they be in the valley already?” he asked himself. In the past, they’d beaten him by hours or days, but now he was ahead of them? It didn’t make sense. 

“But really, what does in this run,” he said with a shrug as he sat down on a rock and waited for them to catch up. 

Truthfully, Simon had no idea what was going on, but it was giving him a lot of time to think. These were either changes he’d induced with his last run or something that had been inflicted on him by the version of himself that had left him the journal. He really couldn’t say which, and right now, he didn’t care. He just scrambled to figure out what he was going to tell the dragon slayers. 

It turned out that he needn’t have worried. He decided to pose as a mercenary and twice tried to tell his story, but each time he was rejected. The lead riders couldn’t have cared less once they decided he wasn’t a bandit, and the caravan master just laughed and said, “We need men with strong backs a plenty for butchery and gathering treasure if you're inclined to that sort of work, but dragon slaying? Well, you just stand back and leave that to Sir Anias unless you’re in a mood to be used as bait.”

That line got plenty of laughs from the surrounding men, and Simon feigned some embarrassment, but really, he didn’t care. He just shook the man’s hand, climbed on board the wagon, and endured the ribbing that the other men gave the new guy as he learned what he could. 

Though the timing was a day or two off what he was used to, nothing else seemed to have changed. The men still planned on getting up to Weldon and spending a day or perhaps two resting and scouting before they finally moved on to the dragon's peak itself. That seemed a bit fast to Simon. If he was planning on taking out a dragon, he’d want to spend days on reconnaissance alone, but no one seemed concerned when he raised that point.

“Sir Anias? Nah!” one big man blustered. “He’ll just walk in there with his big magic sword and cut the big scaly bastard in half.”

Another man insisted, “No, he uses a giant bow and shoots a magic arrow straight into its heart!”

The fact that none of them could agree told Simon only one thing: none of these men knew how the dragon slayer did it. According to those who did most of the talking, this was either the third or the fourth dragon that the man was going after, but even that they couldn’t decide on. 

Still, from those flimsy foundations, he was able to build a fairly solid thesis. If no one knew the truth about the knight, then that was because no one had seen him make a kill. Truthfully, if he hadn’t seen the body himself, he would have never believed that the man had killed anything. Since he had, though, that theory was right out. 

Which meant there had to be a trick to it. There were excellent reasons why a hunter might not want an audience, of course. They could be distracting. Their scent or sounds might alert the prey that it was in danger. In this case, though, Simon doubted that it was any of that. He’d seen the knight in person. He’d been a strong, bold-looking man covered in blood, but Simon doubted that anyone of any strength could kill a dragon the size of a small whale with steel weapons, no matter what he used. 

By the time they reached the village, and the giant caravan had descended on the place like a swarm of locusts, Simon had settled on the idea that the man had a rune blade and perhaps even runic armor to shelter him. While those weren't entirely disputed when he saw the man later, at the inn while Simon was unloading some crates, it was replaced by a new one.

Unspoken. Simon wouldn’t have bet his life on it, but he was almost certain that the clasp the man wore to hold his cloak closed was an amulet of protection against fire. It was a small detail, and he only glimpsed it for a moment, but it was enough for Simon to decide that it was probably him. 

Rather than make their amulets simple, hidden things, they made them into holy symbols of sorts, and though there were dozens of patterns for that, and some were more subtle in their symbolism than others, Simon had seen them all and helped to make most of them.

As strange as he found that detail, it made their only other encounter make a bit more sense to him. The last time Simon had met the man, he'd looked at him strangely. Simon had still been pretty deep in his karmic hole at that point, and if he remembered correctly, he’d still been floating somewhere below negative half a million experience points. So, the aura that cloaked him was almost certainly still black enough to warrant a closer look. 

That was only fair since now he was examining the other man more intently. Simon still wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen on this level. He was pretty sure that he was supposed to save this village or the dragon, or maybe both, but now that he knew who he was facing, he wanted to oppose them on principle. 

Simon cursed himself for not taking the time to look up dragons in the Black Library of the White Cloaks when he was there. He’d obsessed over magic and history, with only a little demonology and necromancy thrown in on occasion, before he’d been taken down to the forges. 

Wasted opportunity, he sighed inwardly, But not so wasted that I think I’ll go for another life without a tongue just for another chance to read through it. 

Truthfully, now that Simon knew where it was, there was nothing to prevent him from going and sacking the broken tower on his own. It wouldn’t be easy, but he could probably do it if he wanted to. Right now, he didn’t need to know more about dragons, though. He needed to know more about Sir Anias.

That night, as both the tavern and its courtyard overflowed with drunks and stories, he was surprised at how little he found out. Everyone had a story, and in that story, every dragon was named something different, but none of them had the ring of truth, and the only thing that came from the knight’s mouth were platitudes. 

Still, as the night wore on, Simon found a number of other clues that led him to believe that a few of the other lesser authorities in this circus might be White Cloaks as well. Or they might just be normal guys, and I’m just getting paranoid, he reminded himself. 

Simon had plenty of shadows to jump at these days. There was the doppelgänger and the White Cloaks, true, but there was also the Murian, lingering doubts about Helades, demons, and plenty of other strangeness from past levels to choose from. That wasn’t even the whole list. There were also warlocks and vampires and whatever else.

He could worry about everything so much that it paralyzed him, but that wouldn’t help any more than letting his paranoia run out of control and deciding that everything was a White Cloak plot that needed to be unraveled.

Still, as Sir Anias slipped out the side door with one of the other men that Simon was suspicious of, he whispered a word of lesser cure to flush most of the drunkenness from his system and staggered after them. 

They left the inn and the grounds, but not so far away that it would be easy to follow them. So, instead, Simon staggered to the back of the stables that wasn’t so far away from them and took a piss, which they ignored. 

He couldn’t hear what they were saying from that distance, but he could see their body language, and they were clearly in cahoots. Even as he tried to contemplate a spell that might let him eavesdrop, though, the conversation was already over, and the knight was walking to the front of the stables to ready his horse. Presumably, that was so that he could be in position for what came next.  

“Definitely a trick to it,” Simon said to himself as he watched the man mount up and ride into the dark toward the mountain. 

Simon didn’t know exactly how it worked yet, but at this point, he was pretty sure that it involved either springing a trap on the thing or using the town as bait to prepare a trap in the dragon’s absence. Simon couldn’t be sure, but the longer he thought about it, the more he leaned toward the latter, which made him angrier and angrier.

He waited for a few minutes for the commotion to die down and the hoofbeats to retreat into the distance. Then he saddled the nicest horse left and rode up the mountain after the man. Simon had no idea if this was the right way to solve the level, but even if he had to do it again, he would learn a lot from watching whatever it was that was going to happen next.

Ch. 211 - The Trick to It

Simon didn’t catch up to the knight by dawn, but then he didn’t really want to. While he didn’t really want to sacrifice the village he’d just left as an experiment, his own experiences told him that he wasn’t in too much of a hurry. Whatever was going to happen wouldn’t happen until well after sunrise, regardless of what he did. He’d been cooked alive in the midst of a very late breakfast once upon a time, and none of the drunks he’d left behind would be up for hours yet. 

Still, Simon wondered the whole way up what precisely he was getting himself into and how the man planned to bring the dragon down, but that mostly devolved into what he would do to slay a dragon. Mostly, he decided that using a word of greater force, a spear right into the thing's giant heart, was probably the right answer. It used maximum force against the smallest possible defense profile and was almost certain to be fatal. 

“What if dragons are resistant to magic, though?” he wondered aloud as he spoke to the strange horse. “What if a greater word can’t get through its scales? Hell, what if the thing can use magic itself?”

Simon’s backup plan was to drop it out of the sky, the same way he’d done with the wyvern. That would let gravity do the dirty work, but that assumed that his wards would stand up to liquid napalm for any length of time. 

The longer Simon considered it, the less he really wanted to fight a dragon. They were the bosses in half the video games he’d played for a reason. They were strong, fierce, and often terrifyingly tough. The idea that this one might be the intelligent sort worried him, but he wasn’t really sure what to do about that either. It would theoretically open up negotiation as an option, but it would also make the thing ten times more deadly. 

Simon went back and forth on all of these issues throughout the night as he slowly ascended the mountain. He only slowed to a stop when the giant crag that was the dragon’s lair appeared in the distance at the top of the meandering trail. Simon noted that the knight’s horse had been tied to a tree not so far up the slope. That much made sense. What did not make sense was that the man seemed to be changing out of his armor. 

Piece by piece, he set it aside, along with his sword, and then when he was down to his small clothes, he put on peasant’s rags instead. It was quite the transformation. Simon wouldn’t have recognized him if he’d not witnessed it himself. Really, the longer he watched, the more his anger grew.

So this motherfucker plans on tricking the dragon in some way, then getting dressed back up and splashing some blood on his armor like he was in a fight so that his men sing his praises? Simon asked himself as his blood started to boil. 

Still, he didn’t interrupt the man. He watched and waited as Sir Anias was dressed and rubbed his face with dirt. Then he took a satchel from one of his saddlebags along with a fat scroll and started walking toward the lair. Simon chose that moment to spur his horse to life and quickly cut the man off. Though he desperately wanted to see how he was going to kill a dragon like this, he wasn’t about to sacrifice a village full of people to do it.  

“So what’s this game, then?” Simon shouted, riding up to the man. 

Sir Anias spun on his heel at the sound with a look of horror on his face. At first, Simon thought that was because the man realized his ruse had been discovered, but as he raised his finger to his lips, Simon realized the truth: he feared the dragon could hear them, even from here. 

It’s not impossible, Simon supposed, quieting down even as he watched the cave for any signs of activity. 

There turned out not to be any, but even so, Simon couldn’t really bring himself to care either way right now. The man who had been masquerading as a hero on his last few visits was a White Cloak and a fraud, and finding that out was almost worth burning to death. 

“What are you doing here!?” Sir Anias hissed as Simon “Everyone should be leaving the base camp and starting their way—”

“Obviously, I’m not part of your little LARP,” Simon interrupted. “I thought something stank about all of this, and now I know the truth.”

“You?” the man sneered. “The uninitiated know nothing. It is better that—”

“That those that do not know, do not speak,” Simon finished the saying as he dismounted, watching the knight’s eyes light up in surprise. “Yes. I know all your stupid little sayings. The voice of wisdom? The men who hide behind history’s pages? The silence that makes magic mute? I got all that. What I want to know is, what in the hell do the White Cloaks want with a dragon.”

Sir Anias ignored everything Simon asked and instead asked, “Were you sent from the tower?”

Simon ignored the question and punched the man right in his stupid face. “I’ll ask again. What is going on here, and how do you plan to kill that dragon? Why do you have to sacrifice the town to do it? Does this involve blood magic?”

Simon’s final accusation seemed to annoy the man more than the fact that his nose was bleeding. “Heresy!” he said, louder than he meant to. “I would never use magic to fight my battles, not even this one. I simply seek to use the dragon’s own greed against it. That is all, and if you are a part of the order, then you will stand aside. This is my mission, not yours, and unless you bear the seal of a Master or the Grandmaster himself, your opinion about my methods is not relevant.”

“No magic, huh?” Simon asked. “Then what’s in the scroll?”

The man paled a little at that and reflexively took half a step back. The fighting didn’t start in earnest, though, until Simon reached for the man’s satchel. If he wouldn’t talk, then Simon would seize his answers by force.

He didn’t feel the need to draw his sword, though, not when he could simply beat it out of him. Sir Anias was a competent fighter, so that was harder than Simon expected, but he was armored and had at least thirty pounds on the guy, so it was only a couple of minutes before he had the other man in a chokehold, though they were both bleeding and gasping by then. 

Simon would have happily choked him into unconsciousness and taken the scroll himself, but partway through the fight, he felt a cool breeze, and suddenly, there was a shadow over both of them. He didn’t have to look up to realize what had happened, and he immediately released the other man before stepping back and raising his hands in the universal gesture of surrender. 

“What’s this then?” a seismic voice rumbled, passing right through Simon. “Don’t stop on my account. Dinner and a show at my very doorstep. How delightful.”

The dragon’s voice was proportional to its bulk, and it was impossible not to listen to it without hearing an undertone of malice. Slowly, Simon turned to face it and found the giant beast looming over him. It was larger than an elephant, which was one of the biggest living things he’d ever seen before, but it was hard to make comparisons after that. Its bus-sized body was covered with slightly tarnished brass scales, but with its wings spread as they were, it looked three to four times the size it really was. 

Suddenly, he really wanted to know how this weasel had brought it down on all of those other times. Now wasn’t the time to be demanding answers, though. In fact, now wasn’t the time for any sudden movements. Instead, Simon waited, slowly taking a few steps back. That was when Sir Anias stepped forward and started to say, “Icefang, your eminence. I come with an urgent warning—”

“Measure your words carefully, little mouse,” the dragon interrupted in its deep base. “You only get a handful of them, and they will decide your fate.”

The knight swallowed hard before he continued. “In the village. I came to warn you. There’s a professional dragon slayer. The Red Knight comes for you.”

The dragon seemed amused by that answer and turned to Simon, as it said, “Very amusing. And what about you, little mouse? Have you come to warn me of something as well?” As the dragon spoke to him, it seemed to sniff him in a way that was both exaggerated and terrifying. 

“I… No. I came to stop him,” Simon said. “That man before you is Sir Anias, the Red Knight.”

“Oh, is it now?” the dragon asked, practically purring with interest as it turned back to the first of the humans it had spoken to again. “Have you come to slay me and take my gold for yourself? Where is your sword? Where is your armor?”

The man froze solid and tried another lie. He started to explain that he was just a simple villager, but Simon ruined that by pointing to where the man’s armor was neatly stacked in the trees just beyond the path. 

“To mean me harm is one thing, but to lie to me about it…” The dragon chastised Sir Anias. He opened his mouth to protest, but in the space of a second, the dragon’s sinuous neck darted forward, removing his head and his shoulders from the rest of his body and leaving only two-thirds of a corpse to bleed out on the ground. 

“You seem to speak true,” it rumbled. “So you may have a little more time to explain this to me before I decide if you are to be a snack as well.”

“I, well, I come at the behest of a Goddess, I guess you could say,” Simon started, not sure how to make this sound any less crazy. 

“I know that much,” the dragon responded. “I can still smell her touch upon you. We can speak of that later. For now, tell me of this man’s plot. I’ve seen many men try to slay me, but never without a sword at least.”

“Well, I hadn’t quite figured out how he’d planned to do that,” Simon admitted, sidling over toward the remains of Sir Anias, “But if you’d allow me to check, I think the answer is in here.”

Simon moved toward the satchel with deliberate slowness, and the dragon did nothing. When he took out the scroll and started to open it, the dragon reared up slightly, but it did not strike him dead.

Simon had expected there to be some new magic spell on here that he hadn’t seen before. He’d hoped he might even learn another word or two. None of those things happened, though. Instead, he found a fairly straightforward example of the Uuvellum Oonbetit runes chained together in a way that made this scroll the medieval equivalent of monofilament. 

It was disappointing, and worse than that, it was clumsy. Still, as he remembered the last time he’d been here and seen the dragon’s corpse, he supposed that could have explained the injuries. He’d assumed everything was due to butchery, but a single terrible blow that had partially descaled one side of the giant beast as it reentered the cave would explain most of it, too. 

For a second, Simon tried to imagine that as he tore the thing in half in front of the dragon. He tried to picture the giant, majestic predator blasting the town into ruin and then soaring to the edge of its cave as it returned. 

It had certainly done just such a move a thousand times before, and it would have let its momentum carry it the last dozen feet as it folded its wings and landed, only to have already been dealt a fatal blow. It was horrifying but definitely possible. However, when he explained that to the dragon, it only laughed in unabashed ridicule of the idea. 

“You think that he meant to kill me… with paper?” it asked incredulously, between uproarious bouts of sulfur-scented laughter. 

“I think that he thought it would work, too,” Simon answered, trying not to sound annoyed. “If you don’t believe me, feel free to check out the caravan currently making its way up the mountain to butcher you and steal your hoard.”

That got Icefang’s attention, and its eyes narrowed immediately. “I shall investigate this, at least,” it rumbled. “You stay here, and we shall speak of other things when I return.”

The dragon took off like a hurricane without any warning. When it did so, Simon struggled to stay standing. Still, as soon as he was no longer buffeted by the terrible winds, he turned around and yelled. “The village did nothing wrong! You hear me? Weldon didn’t do anything!”

The dragon gave no sign that it had heard Simon, but he knew it had the hearing to if it wanted to. Still, inwardly, he vowed, If that thing kills all those innocent people after I saved its life, I swear I’ll kill it myself. 

Ch. 212 - Flight of Dragons

Simon waited there for almost an hour for the dragon to return, but almost the entire time it was gone, he could hear the carnage. He saw the dragon swoop high enough that he could spot it a couple of times, but mostly everything happened behind the bulk of the mountain. He could hear the things that he couldn’t see. He heard the screams and the battle cries, along with the whoosh of flames echoing off the valley walls. Eventually, he could even smell the scents of wood smoke and burning flesh from where he stood waiting. 

What he didn’t see, though, was the valley going up in flames. Simon couldn’t quite see the village from here because of the angle, but he could see points past it, and if it had gone up in a curtain of fire like it had a few lives back, then all he would see was a wall of smoke. 

Simon accepted that as evidence that the dragon had not simply slaughtered every human it could find, which raised further questions. Did it spare them because I saved its life, or did it spare them because it was the right thing to do? He wondered. 

Living within a day’s ride to a dragon’s lair didn’t seem to be the smartest thing in the world. Still, it was even less clear what relationship they might have had to each other than it was why the Unspoken were in the dragon-slaying business. 

On some level, that made sense to Simon, of course. If they were killing witches and warlocks, why not kill mythological creatures while they were at it. Still, that didn’t quite feel right to him, and by the time Icefang had returned, he decided that it probably had at least as much to do with money as anything else. 

After all, according to some of the books he’d read, they certainly weren’t above condemning rich men as mages in order to seize their wealth now and then, and Simon wasn’t aware of any man in the world who was as rich as a dragon. Even Queen Elthena probably had less than a quarter of what he’d seen in the cave lying around in her royal treasury. 

Still, when the giant bronze dragon returned, trailing smoke and streaked with blood, all of those thoughts vanished. Simon prepared to cast a greater protection from fire spell, just in case. It was impossible not to. His primitive fight-or-flight mechanism all but overwhelmed him, and it took lifetimes of self-control to stand there while the beast bore down on him like an avalanche. 

Still, it didn’t incinerate or crush him. It just flew inches over his head before snapping its wings shut and letting its momentum carry it just inside its lair as Simon had pictured earlier. For a moment, he imagined the thing sliced almost in half as it garotted itself on a well-placed scroll, but then he shook free of that gory image and walked toward the giant cave. 

“You spoke true, human,” the dragon rumbled as he approached the cave. “They came not just to kill me but to slaughter me and skin my corpse. I have seen the implements of butchery and the flammable solutions they meant to use in tanning, but they are no more. You alone may keep your life.”

Even at this distance, Simon could smell the scents of death and carnage on the beast. It had almost certainly just feasted on the bodies of dozens of men and nearly as many horses and oxen. He was grateful that he wouldn’t have to come back down the mountain that way to see the massacre as he left.

“Thank you, Icefang,” Simon said, trying not to stare at the giant crystalline teeth that were undoubtedly the reason for its name as it spoke. “Now, if we could talk about what you meant when you said that I smelled like her?”

“That can wait,” the dragon answered, brushing his question aside. “Tell me again how this man meant to kill me with paper.”

Icefang was incredulous, but it was obviously a bit more willing to take it seriously now that it had seen so many men bent on carving it up. So, Simon took his time and went through the whole thing again. He simplified things a bit and explained the way the runes would turn the paper’s edge into an infinitely sharp sword blade, not unlike the wide logging saws that the men had brought to cut into the dragon’s flesh. 

Though the dragon found this ridiculous, Simon eventually tore a page from his doppelgänger’s journal and used a similar spell to slice through a fist-sized stone near the entrance, cleaving it in half. 

“Troubling,” the dragon answered, “Human magic can do something even this impossible, then?”

The phrase human magic implied the existence of other kinds of magic, but Simon ignored that for the moment and said, “I’ve seen your corpse before, in another life, I suppose you could say.”

“This does not surprise me,” the dragon answered sagely. “I have no doubt that I have killed you in other lives as well. Such things are well known to dragons of any age.”

“How is that exactly?” Simon asked. 

“It is likely more than your tiny mortal mind can understand, but I will try,” Icefang answered. “When you look outside my lair, you see a world of greenery and life, but if that was my only hunting ground, there would be nothing larger than a rabbit within a hundred miles in any direction. Can you guess why that might be?”

“Because you can fly far afield?” Simon answered after a moment’s thought. He knew it was wrong, even as he said it, but he’d never given it any thought before now. 

He knew that whales grew huge from infinite plankton in the ocean and that ultra-large herbivores on land did much the same thing with foliage, but he had no idea how dragons kept themselves fed. He tried to do the math on what it would take to keep a beast of this size healthy and well-fed, but he honestly had no idea. The best he could come up with was a small herd of cows or a large herd of goats or sheep every day or two. 

“What if I tried to tell you that there are an infinite number of valleys beyond that entrance,” the dragon explained like it was talking to a child, “and that most of them looked almost identical, save for the placements of certain outcroppings and the number of houses in the village below?”

“An infinite worlds theory,” Simon said, nodding, as he figured out what the dragon was saying. “But wouldn’t each of those worlds have its own dragon, and wouldn’t each of those dragons flit from world to world as well?”

“In most of those worlds, there would be another version of you. I am sure. There would be many of my assassins, as well, but if you searched every world, you would find only one Icefang or Embermaw,” the dragon answered with a note of pride. “Dragons are singular beings of magical power, and beyond the limitations of lesser species like humans.” 

“If that was true, then, well, the implications are staggering,” Simon answered. 

“If?” the dragon rumbled with laughter. “If you are brave enough, I will show you, and we will see if your mind shatters under the weight of the true shape of the world.”

Simon was stunned at the offer, but there was no way he could refuse it, even if he didn’t know exactly what it entailed. The two discussed it for a moment, and then, with the help of a long piece of rope tied around the base of Icefang’s neck, Simon mounted the terrifying creature and sat astride its neck on the thing’s clavicle. 

Then, with a few steps and a brief attempt to shake him free, the dragon pronounced him secure and strode toward the lair’s exit. “It has been a long, long time since I have allowed a human to mount me,” it proclaimed as it unfurled its wings. You should feel honored.” 

Simon started to answer, but no sooner did he start to speak than the dragon launched itself skyward. 

It was a violent motion that was the closest he’d felt to a roller coaster in a long time, and he squeezed the rope even tighter. It would be a hell of a thing to solve the level and then die from a fall, he told himself, but that didn’t phase him. If the dragon had some unique magic and was willing to offer him some insight, he would be a fool to turn that down. It was definitely worth at least one death. 

Still, as they spiraled slowly up into the sky, he didn’t even get close to falling. Even though he feared the worst, Icefang seemed to be taking it easy on him. 

“Look there, at that river,” the dragon boomed over the wind, as the dragon soared through the sky and briefly used its long sinuous neck to point before banking. “That will be the first marker.”

Simon did as big, not bothering to try to answer as he looked down on the world from at least a thousand feet in the air. The river in question was wide and shallow and seemed to be fed by dozens of minor streams as it slowly wound its way out of the valley to the plains on the far side of the mountains. 

Part of Simon’s mind whispered excitedly about the updates he could make to his maps now that he knew exactly where he was, but the rest of him focused on the river, making the details. So, as soon as it started to twist and morph, he was paying attention. 

First, the large rocks that were scattered along its length by various floods started to move back and forth. Sometimes they were further downriver, and sometimes they were pushed back. Then the oxbows themselves started to shift as the river seemed to break its restless banks, looking for other courses down the mountain. Some parts of the view never seemed to change, but others, like the boulders, eventually became a blur as they changed constantly. 

That was when he noticed the rest of the landscape was growing equally restless. The forests moved closer and further away from the river, and the mountains even started to slowly lose their shapes, rising and falling, apparently at random, to become different mountains in other places. 

As Simon watched all this, he could feel the familiar feeling of magic thrumming around him, but he couldn’t say what word he would use to attempt to replicate this effect. Still, it was fascinating. 

“We are hundreds of worlds away from the one we were in a moment ago,” the dragon bellowed. “If we fly far enough, we might find another dragon or even the edge of the world itself, but no matter how far we flew, it would never be me.”

Simon thought that answer was a little solipsistic. He’d seen Icefang dead before. Indeed, the dragon had already acknowledged that Simon could see dead versions of him. Was that implying that the dragon thought itself immortal and that there would always be a version of him, or was it simply declaring that any copies of it that Simon found could not be the real thing. 

Simon had literally no idea. Trying to answer complex philosophical questions when you were soaring through the air on the back of a dragon over a writhing landscape was pretty much impossible. Instead of trying, he simply watched, listened, and held on tightly. 

It occurred to him very briefly as he watched a volcano that hadn’t existed a moment ago erupt that if he were to die here, outside his level and his world, he might well die for good. He might well be beyond the reach of the Goddess’s reality knot. That should have been a positive realization, but he recoiled from it. 

Although the ride seemed to take forever, that was mostly just Simon feeling overwhelmed by the images he was being assaulted by. In less than twenty minutes it was over. Slowly but surely, as they wheeled around and started back toward the dragon’s lair, the world started to settle down, twisting into familiar shapes, until only the river twitched and jumped from moment to moment. 

When they at least returned, Simon’s backpack lying by the entrance, along with the rock that he’d sliced in half, were both a testament to the fact that, indeed, they had returned to where they’d started and not a different version of the same place. At least, he hoped it did; he tried not to think about it too deeply. Instead, he dismounted, removed the rope from around Icefang’s neck, and tried in vain to make his legs stop shaking.