Death After Death PLUS 217-219

Ch. 217 - A Final Secret

Though his chest was still heaving from the run, Simon drew his blade and started chopping through the wall, eager to push through to the next floor. Well, perhaps eager wasn’t the word. He was not eager to run up another flight of steps, but he would do so anyway. He urgently needed to. 

He had less than a half hour between now and when the creature he was hunting woke up, and things would get ugly if he didn’t get this resolved. Unfortunately, that didn’t turn out to be as easy as he’d hoped, even with a fancy magic sword that could cut right through stone. On the other side of the brick wall, someone had very creatively placed another brick wall, and he saw it as soon as he cut a hole wide enough to look through. 

“Well, would you look at that,” he complained. “Someone thought ahead.” The second brick wall wasn’t the problem, of course. It was the idea that there might be more. Even if it only took a minute or two to get through each one, those minutes started to add up after a while, and after his exhaustive search of the dungeons, he was running out of them. 

He was more sure than ever that this was the right way, now, but he was unable to say what other obstacles might exist between here and there. How many more walls would he have to cut through between here and where he was going? How many traps would he have to evade? Would he have enough time for all that? 

“Well, what other options do I have? I definitely don’t have time to run away and try again another day,” he asked himself as he raised his sword again. Then he stopped and considered it. “Maybe I could try going in from above. That’s almost certainly how this Dark Mistress lady gets in and out. So, maybe it’s easier to get in from the top.”

It was a precarious plan. Not only would it burn more magic, but he might very well misjudge the target. It had been a long time since he tried to use force magic like this. He considered that, and after he’d decided that it was worth the risk, he ran back down to the floor below and opened the window. Then he looked up to the top of the tower that rose four more stories above him. 

It was a simple, tapering structure without any obstacles, but if he was right, the way was probably blocked for the next two floors, which meant that he had to go all the way up to the fifth floor, then go down into the fourth, or maybe even the third. Still, it looked doable. He could probably get up there with two or three words of force, depending on where the window was. 

“What if the window is barred too?” he asked himself as he gazed out at the blood-red sunset, trying to weigh all of his options. “Then I’m coming in through the tile roof, and if that doesn’t work… well, then I guess I’m killing myself and trying again next life.”

That was always an option, of course. Simon didn’t like to think about it these days. It went against his worldview, but if he was ever in a situation where he was completely fucked, then he could always just off himself and try again. It would be a shame for the people of this valley, but no one could say he hadn’t done his best. 

Focus on the positive, he told himself as he shook his head to clear it of all the spiraling doubts. Believe in success, for now. Worry about failure when I’m falling to my death.

With that settled, he stepped out onto the large stone window sill, lined up his trajectory, and calmed his racing mind. No amount of what-ifs and worries about how low and red the sun was getting in the sky would help him now. Now, he needed to focus. 

Just as Simon was about to speak the word of power, the image of the last time he’d used the spell in Ionar so long ago came to his mind unbidden. There he’d been, half on fire and trying desperately to arrest his ever-increasing momentum as he edged toward terminal velocity. 

Stop. This is different, he told himself. And even if I fall and die, it’s not like a vampire can reanimate pavement pizza. 

With that comforting thought, Simon said the word and soared skyward like he’d leaped off of a springboard. Once he was in the air, it actually reminded him of the time he hopped around Schwarzenbruck more than the volcano. Back then, he’d treated his entire lifetime like a mana bar for a single level of the Pit. These days, he tended to be more careful because he’d long ago discovered that life was for living, not for speed running. 

Simon slowed as he reached the apex of that impossible leap and took in the scene. The castle was still empty save for the bodies that were still scattered in the courtyard far below him for only a moment before he chose his next target and said, “Oonbetit,” to execute a double jump and arc up again, toward the nearest window. 

That window, at least, was not barred or bricked up. It was just an open window with panes of bubbly glass in it. So, he put away his sword he’d kept out in case he needed it, and when the arc terminated just under the window, he grabbed the window sill and pulled himself up and over it. 

That, as it turned out, was the hardest part of the whole thing, and he grunted and struggled so much that he’d briefly considered using a word of lesser force to put him over the top. Then he lay on the wood floor for half a minute, resting from the exertion, before he forced himself to his feet. 

Here, there was a trapdoor, and it was not bricked up. Hell, it wasn’t even close. It was just lying there, with a steep set of wooden stairs on the other side. Suddenly, just like that, the impossible obstacle he’d faced had been bypassed. 

Simon hurried down the steps and was rewarded by the sight of an empty room and a coffin. “Thank god,” Simon sighed as he went down into the small room below and finally saw the coffin he’d been looking everywhere for. 

This one was different from the others. They’d been made of plain wood, but this one had been covered over in a layer of hammer brass, which made it look much more intimidating. “Definite Boss-level vibes,” Simon whispered as he moved to open it. “It’s a shame that you went to all this effort to avoid your fate, and it’s still going to happen. Better luck next life.”

Well, at least he tried to. The thing didn’t budge. Simon dropped the clever dialog and grabbed the lid with both hands, pulling with all his might, but it didn’t move. 

“Huh, locked from the inside, huh?” he asked. “Good thing I brought a key.” 

He shook the handle harder for good measure, just to make sure, but once he was sure that there wasn’t another way to open it, he gave up on trying and pulled out his sword. No matter how it was locked, it wouldn’t stand up any better than the gate had. 

Simon thrust the blade through the coffin, just under the lid, and sliced it from one end to the other, taking out locks, hinges, armor, and anything else that might be in his way. He’d been tempted just to cut it in half, but he knew that wouldn’t kill the vampire inside, and he didn’t really want to get splashed with vampire blood if he didn’t have to. He had no idea what the consequences of that would be, but he didn’t exactly want to find out. 

Definitely do not want to spend a run as a vampire, he told himself after he’d opened the thing like a soup can. Then he put away his sword, took out a stake, and pushed the lid off onto the floor. “Better you than me, I…” he said as he raised the weapon up. What he saw, though, stopped him cold. 

Simon froze. Despite the fact that he only had minutes, or perhaps even less, he couldn’t move. It wasn’t some dread power of the vampire’s hypnotic gaze, either. He was just utterly shocked. 

The woman he’d been looking for the last few hours, the Dark Mistress of all the other vampires he’d slain, was someone he recognized. It wasn’t some evil creature for the pits of hell. It was Freya. She looked nearly the same as when he last saw her, except for the deathly pallor that made her already pale skin nearly translucent. 

“What the actual fuck,” he gasped. “What? How? This is impossible.”

He knew that this changed nothing and that he should still kill her while he had the time, but knowing and doing were entirely separate things. He couldn’t even begin to conceive of how such a thing might be possible, and the shock that ran through him in that moment was as powerful as any spell he knew. 

That shock cost him his moment. In those last few seconds, while he stood there, completely dumbstruck, the last limb of the sun disappeared below the horizon. That was when her eyes flew open then and snapped him out of it. 

He drove the stake down with all his might then, using both hands. The vampiress, though, on the other hand, reached up languidly with a single hand and stopped his best efforts cold. It shouldn’t be possible, but there was more strength in her slender fingers than there was in his whole upper body. 

She looked at him then, not in anger or hunger, but with a sense of faint recognition. “I know you from somewhere, don’t I?” she asked, almost ignoring the stake hovering only inches above her heart. As calm as she was, he could see that she thought he had no chance to hurt her, but that overconfidence was something he could take advantage of. He just needed to get her out of his head. 

This isn’t Freya! He screamed at himself. Even if it was once, she’s dead now!

Finally, after several seconds, her eyebrows knitted in irritation as she sucked in her breath and said, “It’s you!”

Simon opened his mouth. He didn’t do it to respond, though. Instead, he growled, “Gervuul Oonbetit!” and directed all the force he could into staking this bitch’s heart to the bottom of her coffin like he had her minions.  

Ch. 218 - Regrets

Simon’s magic surged within him, applying tons of pressure to the stake, but still, she held it. It jittered and shook in his hand as irresistible force met immovable object. Then it exploded, sending wooden shards and jagged splinters into both his hands, her hand, and her chest. 

Simon cried out in pain as he took a step back. Freya seemed almost nonplussed by it, though, and even as she sat up, the jagged wounds that the stake had inflicted on her chest began to heal. 

“What a pity,” she said, “I loved that dress. Please don’t tell me you’ve killed my tailor. It will be ever so troublesome to replace it if she’s gone.”

“You, you can’t be alive!” Simon answered. His denial overpowered even his pain.

“Well, technically, I’m not,” she admitted, still fussing with the shredded top of her dress as she showed far more concern for it than for him. “According to the books on the subject, I’m undead, but you should know all about it. You’re the one that did this.”

“What?” Simon gasped. “I would never! I—”

Freya flickered then. As soon as he started to speak, she glanced up at him with her murderous red eyes. Then, in an instant, she’d bridged the gap between them. She didn’t move or even dash. She just disappeared by her coffin as she reappeared by him and slapped him hard enough across the face to send him sprawling. 

He got back on his feet as quickly as he could without putting any pressure on his ruined hands, but she was not waiting there to pound on him. Instead, she looked down her nose at him from where she stood before. 

“Do not lie to me,” she shouted, showing real emotion for the first time. “I remember you. The blacksmith. You claimed you would cure me so that I would not become a zombie like my beloved Kel, and I didn’t. I became something so much worse than that. All that I’ve become… All that I’ve done is because of you!”

Simon flinched under the weight of those accusations. He didn’t even try to defend himself. He just tried to understand if it could be true. 

“I… All that I did was use the energy of the environment to power the words of greater cure to purge the curse that was within you,” he said. “I don’t even know how one would go about creating a vampire. You have to believe me.”

She laughed coldly then. “All this time, I thought I’d been cursed by some servant of the gods for failing to save my beloved, and the truth was it was just a bumbling fool. I’ll bet you’re the one that killed my darling Hidaran last night, too, aren’t you?”

“The vampire that attacked those villagers?” Simon asked as his mind raced to figure out how he was going to kill her. “Yeah, he died as he lived, violently.”

At this point, it would probably be easier to just kill himself and do this again. If it had been anyone but Freya in that coffin, he already would have. Hell, if it had been anyone but her, he wouldn’t have hesitated. They’d be ash, and he’d be victorious, but this? This was entirely unforeseen, and it made his heart ache as surely as if he’d driven the stake through instead of his own bleeding hands. 

Even now, he was sure there was some way to reverse this. There had to be. 

“What a pity,” she sighed. “He was an excellent lover. That will only make what happens to you next all the more painful. I suppose that while I consider the correct punishment for someone, I shall have to be comforted by Gavarall or Prince—”

“The two bozos in the basement?” he interrupted. “Yeah, gone too. I cleaned out most of the castle while you—”

She flickered again and pulled him off of his feet by his breastplate despite being nearly a foot shorter than him. “How dare you murder my harem. First, you condemn me to this life, and then you destroy it? I will make you rue the day that you—”

As she threatened him, he brought his knee up hard toward her face. He hadn’t expected that to do any good, of course, but then he didn’t expect to be able to actually strike her, either.  He was right on both counts. In response to his blow, she released him, and then, grabbing him by his calf as he fell, she swung him hard into the stone wall.

For a moment, his vision was full of gray fog and afterimages, and it took him several seconds to realize that the world around him appeared to be spinning because he was rolling down the stairs to the next level. He never made it that far. Somewhere before the doorway that would have led to the third floor, there was a brick wall. He was trapped. 

Simon struggled to clear his head as Freya strode down to him one fluid step at a time. She was saying something. Either she was trying to tell him how much the deaths of her pet vampires had hurt her, or she was telling him what awful things she planned to do to him. He had no idea. All he could hear was ringing. 

He couldn’t hear, he could barely think, and his hands were so mangled he might never grip a sword again. He could still speak, though, and right now, that was all he needed. 

He shouted, “Gervuul Barom!” 

Even as he started to speak, Freya figured out what he was up to and dashed toward him again, but somehow, the stairs slowed her down, and by the time she was inches from him, the entire stairwell was bathed in the blinding light of faux sunlight as the tiny sun that Simon imagined faded into existence. 

Freya screamed and staggered backward, even as she started to smolder. Simon had never tried to cast greater light before, and though it worked very well, it obviously wasn’t enough to kill a vampire. It looked like sunlight to him. He could feel the warmth of it on his skin from here, like a real summer’s day. He had no idea how long it would last, but he imagined that was a function of intensity. 

It’s not real sunlight, he thought incredulously. Does that mean if I use a word of metal to make silver, it won’t kill a werewolf? 

He didn’t know the answer, but right now, that was unimportant. He’d gotten what few answers he could, and it was clear that he was entirely outmatched by Freya. So, while she screeched in pain and tried to crawl to safety, he used his teeth to pull out the biggest chunks of wood, then used a word of healing to get his hands working again. His hands were big, deformed mitts that made him look more like a troll than anything. Because of the way his flesh had knitted back together, he had only three fingers on one hand and two fingers on the other, but at least he still had opposable thumbs, and that would have to do. 

Simon grabbed another stake from his belt and charged up the stairs at the burning corpse. He still wanted answers, but he’d come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t getting any, not this run. Hell, maybe not ever, he realized, because the right thing to do here was clearly to go and reset level six so that none of this ever happened. 

He didn’t think about that now. Instead, he ran up behind her, careful not to block the light from his glowing orb, and jammed the stake through her rib cage. Well, he started to. He brought it down hard, but with charred skin, seeing where her ribs were was impossible, and it glanced off one of them. He raised it back up to try again, and then She reached out and dug her claws into one of his calves, ripping through flesh and muscle with equal ease. 

Simon screamed and tried to pull away, but she didn’t let go. Instead, his movement rolled her over. This wasn’t a motion that she seemed to have the strength for under the withering beam of light, but with his help, she could now gaze at him with her lidless eyes. 

He instantly realized his mistake, but it was too late to do anything about it. Once he met her gaze, he couldn’t look away. In fact, he couldn’t do anything at all. All he could do was stare slackly while his leg bled and hope that the light had weakened her enough that she couldn’t speak.

For several seconds, it seemed as though it might have. We might both stand here until sunrise, he thought, hopefully, before she managed to croak, “Extinguish that infernal light at once!”

Canceling a spell was not a thing. Once the power had been invested, it continued until its essence ran out. He couldn’t explain that to the vampire, though. He couldn’t even turn away from her gaze. All he could do was try the option that was the most likely to work.

“Aufvarum Barom,” he said flatly, willing the words of disperse light to dispel the effect. 

It wasn’t enough to extinguish the blazing orb, at least not at first. It muted it by half in seconds, though, and then it slowly dimmed from there. Simon would have loved to turn and watch it so that he could understand how the two magical commands had interacted. He couldn’t, though; there was only one command that mattered now, and she was lying beneath him, claws still sunk deep into his flesh.

“Stay,” she rasped. “Like the dog you are.” Her words lacked strength, but they were full of poison just the same. 

Her flesh was starting to return to her now in patches. Freya’s dress was all but ruined, and she looked like the corpse of a much, much older version of herself, but even as she came alive again, she said nothing. Instead, she rose slowly to her feet, still locking her hateful gaze with his, and when she stood, she hissed and sank her fangs deep into his neck and began to drain him dry. 

It was an uncomfortable sensation, but it didn’t hurt like he expected it to. He ignored all of that, though, and instead tried to will himself to whisper Meiren. It was a word that was both fast and irrevocable in the damage its flames would do. He didn't have time for a greater word, of course, but a fire spell aimed squarely at his cerebellum should be enough to end him forever. 

Still, he couldn’t do it. It was only two syllables. It was pretty much the easiest thing in the world, but all he could do was stand there like a statue. She told me to stay, not to stay frozen, he raged, but it did no good. 

It was only when he was so weak that he collapsed to his knees that she finally stopped drinking. She was a young woman once more, and though she wasn’t quite as lovely as she’d been laying in her coffin, she was far from the charred hag she’d been moments before. 

“Now we will begin again,” she commanded, nearly as youthful as she was when she started the night. “You will tell me everything I wish to know without falsehood or magical trickery, and then, I shall lock you in the bottom of the lowest dungeon and torment you for decades to come. Is that understood?”

“Y-yes…” Simon tried to fight the word that clawed its way out of his throat, but in the end, he couldn’t. 

Freya smirked, and said, “From now on, you will address me as Mistress or Your Majesty. Is that understood?”

Simon gritted his teeth and fought again. He might have loved the woman she’d been once, but he was going to find a way to grind the monster before him to dust. 

Ch. 219 - Spilling His Guts

Simon spent the rest of that night telling her everything she wanted to know. On some topics, he was happy to be as forthcoming as he could be. That was especially true when it came to proclaiming his innocence. On others, though, she had to drag the words out of him one painful sentence at a time. It was those Freya delighted the most in. 

He learned some things, too, in the course of their discussion. He learned that it was not his spell that had caused her vampirism but a bite she’d gotten later that day when she was saying goodbye to her boyfriend Kel, and he got free. 

She’d recovered from that one, too, but the hunger started almost immediately after that. Within two weeks, she could no longer tolerate the light, and within three, she was murdering strangers just to keep going. 

She hadn’t known what was going on then, of course, but as she made her way east, she heard stories of similar creatures and followed them to try to learn what it was she’d become. 

“I came all the way to this blasted castle, though, and no one was even here!” she growled when she got to that part. 

She’d journeyed hundreds of miles over unfamiliar areas where she didn’t even speak the language, and she’d arrived at the source of the rumors only to find the castle abandoned at the previous owners long dead. She couldn’t even read the writing in the basement that was supposed to tell the story. 

“I had Hidaran read it and explain it to me once, but it just seems to be another version of the blasted story that lured me here,” she sighed. 

Simon had never heard this story nor found it in the Unspoken’s forbidden library. If the original really had been written down there, he would have loved to read it, but the way that Freya told it, it sounded like a fairy tale. 

Once upon a time, there was a powerful witch, and her husband was dying of a wasting disease beyond the power of herbs or even spells to cure. So, she sought more power and used forbidden blood magic to save his life at the cost of six others. That only worked for a time, though, and after a week of howling in pain at the light of day and crying out at night in hunger, he finally escaped his bonds and feasted on her flesh. Apparently, he went on to rule the region for decades after that but was slain by heroes long before Freya turned into a monster. 

It would have been an amusing tale if not for the fact that he was in almost the same situation now. He hadn’t killed anyone or brought anyone back to life with forbidden magic. However, after his experiments with goblins, perhaps using a magic circle to heal someone wasn’t the best idea when the environment was saturated with death. 

It was very easy for Simon to believe his magic had set the conditions for this to happen exactly as she’d described them. The ground around that barn had been littered with the corpses of zombies that had been attacked by his incessant hammering, and magical contagion was definitely a thing. 

She wouldn’t hear any of that, though. She had no interest in any explanation except for the one where he admitted to doing all of this on purpose. 

That deluded certainty carried over into every aspect of this awful conversation. Simon found all of that easier to believe than she found any part of his story about how it was they knew each other. She scoffed or mocked him every time he brought it up. 

“You mean to tell me that you and I were once married? In another life,” she laughed. “Preposterous! As if I would ever sleep with a bridge troll like you.”

Simon had long moved past insults affecting him. In some lives, he was handsome, and in others, he was not. It just depends on what torments he put himself through. Freya’s words stung, though, even though he knew this wasn’t the woman he loved.

“You have forbidden me to lie,” Simon insisted. “Why do you believe the other things I say but doubt this?”

“What is you think you’ve said that I believe?” she countered. “I believe you’ve ruined my wonderful little life for however long it takes me to undo all of this damage. I believe that you’ve killed my men, and I believe you are in possession of terrible magics, but that is all. Everything else you say is only to amuse me.”

“Then why not kill me and be done with it?” Simon snapped. 

“Kill you?” she laughed. “Even if you did not seem to believe you would come back to life in a fresh, new body, I would never dream of killing the man who has done this to me. You will suffer for as long as my rage remains, and I assure you that his longer than this castle will stand. How long did you say you were turned to stone again?”

“I don’t know, perhaps a century or a little less?” he said. 

“Well, then I hope for your sake you aren’t telling the truth because I intend to keep you imprisoned much longer than that,” she said with a cruel laugh. 

Simon’s heart sank. Not at the idea of being imprisoned again. He could make his peace with that in time. It was the idea of becoming another monster that upset him. He still lived with the memories of a zombie’s eternal hunger. He didn’t need anything else to add to his nightmares. 

There was nothing he could do to stop it, though. He couldn’t even stop telling this Freya every gory detail about all the other Freyas he’d known. “You should understand, then,” she said with a smile when he finished the story about how he murdered the man who killed her. “You got your revenge, and now I’m getting mine.”

The second time she drank his blood, it was to the very brink of death. She said something cruel then. He could tell from her expression, but he was too enervated to hear what the words were. He still knew what was coming next, and when she ripped open her own wrist with her teeth, she drizzled her poisonous black blood across his face. 

Still, he refused to open his mouth to drink it. He didn’t have to. He couldn’t hear her dread commands or focus on her eyes. Instead, he simply lay there on the stone floor of the tower and waited to die. He knew Freya wouldn’t let that happen, of course, and instead of letting it all go back, she picked him up by the breastplate, kissing him hard with her cold, dead tongue and forcing as much of that awful blood into his mouth as she could. 

Her evil smile was the very last memory that he had before his body started to burn with a terrible pain. Every last one of his blood vessels started to burn as his heart continued to slow down. It was a nightmare, but the paralysis that came with it made it impossible to do anything.

Simon was surrounded by darkness until his heart slowly came to a stop, one slow beat at a time. At the end, it seemed like those beats were hours apart. Then, there was only burning. Somewhere far above him, he could feel the warmth of the sun. He even feared it despite the fact that he wanted to die, which was a singularly strange sensation. 

When he woke next, he didn’t know if hours or days had passed, but he was alone in a locked room somewhere beneath the castle. He was sure he’d seen it before in his search, but his mind was too jumbled to remember the layout very clearly. 

All he knew was that he was naked in the dark and as weak as he might have been if he’d spent days in bed with a fever. He was also still in pain, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been in some of his other lives, and he tuned it out as the background hum it was. 

It took him a few minutes to figure out that he was able to see without any light whatsoever. The world was reduced to a flat gray place, but he could see quite clearly, and he could see that there was no way out. Though he’d wrecked the place, there were stones stacked on the other side of the door, and it resisted his every effort to knock it down. 

“That’s okay,” Simon told himself. “I don’t need to escape. Dying here is fine.”

He took a deep breath and centered himself. Then he whispered, “Gervuul Meiren,” willing himself to blow apart into a thousand flaming chunks of dead flesh. 

But nothing happened. It was strange and disturbing. There wasn’t even the taste of sulfur or the feeling of essence moving through his body. It was like nothing happened. 

Simon tried again, but the result was the same. He tried a regular word of fire after that, with the same effect. It wasn’t until he tried lesser fire that he felt even the hint of something stirring inside of him, and it was only when he finally tried lesser lesser fire that he was able to make a single spark appear in his cupped hands for a few seconds before it faded. 

That tiny spell left him feeling weakened, and he sat back down to contemplate his situation. 

“Well, that’s fucked,” he said aloud as he considered the new problem. “When Helades explained that years of my life fueled magic, I never took it quite so literally.”

He’d only just started to consider this problem, but he was almost certain that the reason he couldn’t cast spells was because he had no life energy to fuel them. He was no longer alive after all. He could move and speak. It was also clear that the vampires he’d fought had some magic in their nature, but wherever that was in him, it was inaccessible to his spells as he’d cast them, which was more than frustrating. 

Simon considered that after he’d fed on someone, he might get enough energy back to cast a spell or two. It was a grisly thought and the very last thing he wanted, but he wasn’t sure what else he could do. He should be able to stake his own heart. He was pretty sure there was no rule against that. 

It was only after he’d decided on that course of action, though, that he realized why he was in such an empty, boring room. If she’d given him a coffin, he could have smashed it and found a piece big enough to end him. 

“Well, weak as I am, is it possible to die other ways?” he wondered aloud. 

Simon had no idea, but he decided it was worth a try. He forced himself to his feet, then staggering over to the wall, he smashed his head against the rough stone wall as hard as he could. It was painful, but he managed to do it twice. Then, he heard something crack and fell to the ground. His head was in agony, and he was no longer able to feel his legs. A few minutes later, he was mostly fine again. He just needed a minute to catch his breath before he could stand again.