Death After Death

Chapter 67: A Life Well Lived

Moments later, the monster’s head rolled free of its body and tumbled down the sandy slope, leaving a smeared trail of purple blood behind it. Exhausted, Simon stabbed his flaming sword into the creature’s corpse one final time and shouted, “Helades!”

He paused for breath a moment, then started walking back toward the front of the temple where most of the other statues were. He thought he’d made it through the fight completely unscathed, but after a few steps, he discovered the truth. The basilisk had almost gotten him on his last run, and his left leg from the calf down had been turned to stone.

Simon paused partway to his destination and shouted again, “Helades! I’m on level twenty, and you owe me my question!” Then, before he kept moving, he tried a couple of middle-powered spells to see what could be done about his foot. Healing did nothing, but curing returned it to flesh, though he noticed that he’d lost all feeling, which made it worse than before. As a stone limb, it had been like walking with a peg leg, but now it was like walking with a dead piece of flesh.

“Which it probably is,” he muttered to himself as he staggered on and tried not to think of the leg rotting while it was still attached to him.

It was fine. He’d rest and then use a greater heal or something in a few hours. As he limped up the slope, he wondered if it might be smarter to cut the possibly dead limb off and create a new one with greater heal. He wasn’t sure. He’d reattached a finger on one of his men with lesser heal once, and that had worked well enough, but he’d never tried to grow a new limb before.

Simon shrugged. There was a first time for everything.

When he reached the first statue, he toppled it over with a shove, shattering the thing. He took the head and threw it further up the slope towards the center of the group and then staggered on to the next one. “Helades! You told me I could ask a question, and last time I was here, you did all the talking!”

Simon looked around to see if she’d appeared, and when she was still nowhere to be found, he continued breaking statues. God, he was exhausted. In the movies, they always said things like, ‘I’m getting too old for this shit.’ He’d always thought that was dumb, but right now, he felt literally too old for this shit.

Still, the exhaustion of the fight wasn’t enough to stop him, and slowly but surely, he made a pile of heads. When he had almost two dozen of them there on the flagstones of the temple’s stairs, he finally took cover behind a pillar and whispered, “Ó̷̙o̸̺̓n̵͓̾b̶̠̒ě̴̪t̷̳͠ỉ̸̘ṫ̵̼,” imagining them being crushed downward like a vice.

In the immediate aftermath, he heard stone shrapnel spray out, and he felt himself go dizzy, but when he looked up, he could see that most of the heads were still largely intact. It hadn’t been enough.

“Ó̷̙o̸̺̓n̵͓̾b̶̠̒ě̴̪t̷̳͠ỉ̸̘ṫ̵̼.” he said again, grinding the bigger parts down into smaller chunks and noting that not all of them were destroyed yet.

He couldn’t save these people’s lives, but he could save their souls. He could get them out of the hell that they were stuck in. He might be the only one who ever would.

Simon knew he should rest. He knew he shouldn’t push himself much further, but he still yelled. “Ó̷̙o̸̺̓n̵͓̾b̶̠̒ě̴̪t̷̳͠ỉ̸̘ṫ̵̼!” again. Simon’s vision greyed briefly as he poured out his power to destroy the stone. He needed this. He needed to vent his rage because of all the other things he should have been able to do but hadn’t.

He felt the tears well up in his eyes as he thought about all the things he hadn’t been able to do, but wiped them away so he could get a good look at the pile of gravel in front of him. One more hit would almost certainly be enough to reduce them to sand and dust. Hopefully, then he’d be able to—

“Enough,” Helades called out from further up the slope, standing in the shadow of the temple.

Simon looked up, with his mouth still open, and sighed. Saying anything without carefully considering his words might be construed as a question. He hadn’t actually thought he’d get this far. He hadn’t actually thought he’d kill the basilisk, and if he did, he hadn’t expected that she would actually appear to talk to him, so Simon hadn’t actually picked a question to talk to her about. So, he took the opportunity as he slowly strode up the wide, shallow staircase to consider that.

“You know, this used to be a temple dedicated to me, in its way,” she said nostalgically before she turned and started walking into the half-collapsed thing, leaving Simon to catch up. “That was a long time ago, though.”

“More specifically, you’ve always died violently before it’s gotten around to mattering,” she corrected him gently. “But this time, you lived for... well, almost a year. That’s a lot of soldiers to mend and a lot of monsters to slay, and then there’s the sword...”

“What about the sword?” he asked, feeling like she’d mentioned something important.

“Well, Simon, when you copied those runes, you tied it to the only source of power you had available: you.” Helades saw his look of shock, she added. “Where did you think all of that fire was coming from exactly? Nothing is free in this world, not even magic.”

“I... ” Simon started to speak, but he forgot what he was going to say, and for a moment, he felt like he was going to faint.

“It’s fine,” she said, pulling him down into her lap. “Spells themselves aren’t so bad. They take perhaps a month, but—”

“A month?!” he gasped. “Each? That’s worse than smoking!”

“Well, the minor command throttles the life force. They’re more like a day,” she said with a shrug. “It’s not an exact thing.”

“What about the greater spells then?” Simon asked, not sure that he wanted to know the answer.

“A year,” she answered without hesitation. “That’s a lot for anyone but you. With magic items, most of the evil mages throughout history will use the life force of less-than-willing victims or other clever tricks, but between your sword and your armor, you’re bleeding more than a week a minute from your soul right now. That’s why you’ve gotten so much older. Magic can be very dangerous.”

“Like the orb and the hellgate,” Simon said, feeling exhausted. He felt more at peace now that he understood what had happened.

“Yes,” she agreed, reaching up to stroke his hair softly. “No matter how much the good men of the world try to purge the magic of the past, there will always be someone out there that discovers some old secret. Nothing can stay buried forever.”

Simon wanted to ask her about that, but he was too weak to do so. He was all used up. All he could do was lay there and appreciate the cool stone beneath him as he looked up at the beautiful Goddess.

“You’ll figure out all of that eventually, Simon,” she whispered. “I have faith in you. You’ve become what you always wanted to be - A hero.”

He closed his eyes then, imagining that Freya was the one who was holding him and telling him these things. He’d often wanted to die in the pit, but never more so than he did right now. If he were to die right this moment, he was sure that he’d be reunited with his Freya in the afterlife, and then he’d finally have his answers. Instead, he was going to have to do all of this all over again.

Simon reached up and clutched the ring around his neck as he felt himself start to slip away. This wouldn’t stop him, he decided, as he imagined that flaming sword burning down like a candle somewhere outside. No matter how many times he died, he was coming back to finish this thing. He’d go as deep as he needed to until all of his questions were answered.

His hand gripped the small piece of jewelry around his neck, and then it slackened... and fell to the floor as he experienced an entirely new death in The Pit: old age.