Death After Death
Chapter 259: A Second Conversation

As Simon rode north that morning, he told himself, “This life was supposed to be about solving levels, or at least seeing how things played out without too much interference, Simon. What happened to that?”

He couldn’t give himself a satisfactory answer. He truly wanted to return to the caldera city as he planned.

Instead, he wondered how he would have felt about the whole thing if his doppelgänger had never told him about this. If he’d lived long enough or gone far enough into the future, he would have figured it out, of course. Would he feel bad about it, though, in the same way he felt bad about not being there for Gregor some lives and letting him get crippled or worse?

It’s not like I can be everywhere at once, he thought with a sigh.

As he rode north to check on the fort he’d visited the previous month, he tried to imagine what a life like that would look like. If he could figure out every terrible thing was happening above a certain threshold, could he ride around the world and end them all like some sort of superhero? He could layer the events on his map by giving them all a date as well as a location and then zip from monster to injustice, changing it over time as the future changed because of his actions.

Even the barest outlines of the idea were hopefully confusing, though, and truthfully, it sounded exhausting. “I’d just be inventing a Pit inside the Pit,” he sighed. “I’d be adding a hundred levels to each level, with no real insight into what those changes would cause.”

Ultimately, his morals told him that something like that was the solution, but his intellect told him it was impossible, or very nearly so. If he walked the world for so long that eventually he knew everything that would ever happen and why, he really would be some God. He would have been tempted to say that was the Oracle’s true nature, at least in part, if he hadn’t seen the world briefly through her eyes.

There’s more to her than that, though, Simon reminded himself. If I could learn how to see the way she does or move the way the dragon did, then I…

Those were fine aspirations, but they were unrealistic. The glimpse of his own aura and the way that things connected certainly hinted that there were powers he could master that went far beyond the words of power, but it seemed unlikely he’d ever equal either of those beings.

With soul magic, it might be possible to steal that knowledge, his mind told him, but he shut that down immediately. That was the very last thing he was going to do.

His tempestuous thoughts continued to roil and swirl on the topic for the entirety of his ride north. Deep down, he’d been hoping that his Doppelgänger was just lying to him about the whole thing, but when he saw the gate of the fort part way open and a lightly squirming body on the flagpole, he knew that he’d been telling the truth. The zombies had come this far, which almost certainly meant they’d gone even farther.

Simon went through the fort, crushing skulls of the maimed bodies that still squirmed and looking for evidence. As he went, it wasn’t hard to see the way all of this had played out in his mind.

A few soldiers, not aware of the danger, had opened the door for a man scratching ineffectually at the wood, and the biting had started. A few minutes later, there wasn’t one zombie, but several, and even after that first one had been put down where it still lay in the courtyard, violence climbed the slender battlements and ran through the buildings.

From the amount of blood in the bedrooms, he could only assume this happened at night and that no one had been prepared for the ferocity of it all. That surprised Simon. He’d come to think of the Murani forces as being filled with mages, but maybe that was something that hadn’t happened yet. At the end of the walk, Simon was satisfied with the fact that he understood what had happened and that the threat was real. The question was what he was going to do about it.

He considered that as he gathered the corpses into a pile in the stables. The animals had long since fled, but it was full of hay and feed and would be the best location for a bonfire. He had no plans to break his back, digging so many graves, but he had no desire to leave so many corpses around either. Who knew what sort of evidence a mage would be able to get from them with a little effort.

“I do not want Murani wielding zombies in their next attack,” he muttered to himself. “Demons were bad enough.”

It was that thought that reminded him about the necromancer’s hand in the saddlebags of his horse. “I could always ask him,” Simon thought aloud. “Maybe there’s an off switch for these abominations. That would be useful.”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Simon didn’t think it was likely, but as a delaying tactic for him to decide what he was going to do about everything else, it was just about right. He had no intention of messing with his own soul, but using the necromancer that had caused so much harm in all of this? That was just about right.

He closed and locked the gate first, then cooked himself dinner from the fort’s provisions. While he ate, he reviewed the relevant passages in Vaustin’s journal, but there were no surprises. When he was done, he used a charred branch to draw the circle, along with the words of power, the name of the summoned, and all the requisite connecting symbols. Then, when all was in readiness, he sat there, unsure of how to proceed.

Simon wasn’t sure if he had to speak the words of power himself, but as he set the man’s hand in the center of the ring, that proved to be unnecessary. Before he could say anything at all, the marks that he’d made began to glow now that they had something to anchor their magic to. Does that mean that spirit is both power source and summoned subject? Simon wondered as he watched the faintest shape of the man he’d met once before slowly fade into view.

He looked much like he had in life, only he was more wretched and emaciated now. Before Simon could ask a question, the man let out a piteous wail. “Nooooooooo!” He moaned. “Release me…”

That made Simon smile, but only a little. He wasn’t one to take pleasure in someone else’s torments, but for someone who’d not only done exactly this to others but who had murdered over a hundred people just to mine gold… well, it seemed just about right.

“Tell me your name, spirit,” Simon said as a test.

“You know my name!” it wailed. “I am Vaustin, and you murdered me…”

“I didn’t,” Simon clarified. “But I wish I had. I have three questions for you. Answer them, and you may return to whatever pit you crawled out of.”

“Nooooo, that is much too many… I will answer nothing for you!” the ghost answered.

It had stabilized a bit more now, and Simon could make out many of the man’s features. It was prowling the circle now, like a nervous cat, looking for some way to escape. Simon hadn’t considered that escape was possible when he’d drawn the thing, but for now, it didn’t seem to be a problem. The man could press against the boundaries, but he couldn’t escape any more than demons could.

“You suffer because your soul evaporates to power your own prison,” Simon declared, reasonably sure it was true. “You will answer me, or I will leave you here until you are nothing but dust. Now tell me where you learned this spell!”

The shade flinched from the force of Simon’s words. He doubted there was any true compulsion effect, though, in retrospect, he probably could have added one. At least for now, he didn’t seem to need one. “My… Ahhhh, it hurts…my master… Winthrop… he was an alchemist. When he told me about his hidden books, I turned him in to the authorities, but only after I stole his secrets for myself.”

“And did you find what you were looking for?” Simon asked.

“I wanted the words to turn lead into gold!” the spirit screamed, in agony as much as pain. “I didn’t want to consort with the dead! It’s his fault I ended up this way!”

“It’s no one's fault but your own,” Simon answered. “You were the one that learned to raise the dead. You were the one that—”

“No! I only did what I had to do!” Vaustin’s ghost yelled in its strange, echoey voice. “This isn’t how it was supposed to end!”

“But it’s how it did,” Simon answered. “Now, tell me more about that terrible spell. Is there any way to stop it or cancel it?”

“I… What has been done cannot be undone!” the spirit shouted. “Perhaps if you had the original body, but it is long since destroyed! My curse of unlife will spread forever now, in all directions.”

“It’s all but extinguished already,” Simon said with a shake of his head. “I just need to—”

“Impossible!” the spirit shouted. “It will spread forever. No one can stop it!”

Simon ignored the spirit and continued. “The last thing I want to know is what happens after you die.”

“What happens? What Happens?!” it screeched, in panic and confusion. “I drift between life and death, running from the devils that seek to drag me to hell! That is what happens. There is no peace when you die. That is all that any of the men I have ever summoned have said to me! No, let me free before they find me!”

That didn’t match up with Simon’s experiences at all, but then he hadn’t been an evil mass-murdering son of a bitch. So, it was unlikely they’d have the same sort of death, even with Helades magic involved.

I wasn’t awful, he reminded himself. I was just pathetic.

Simon considered asking the ghost more questions, but his suffering seemed real, and he wasn’t a sadist. Rather than continue on, he scratched out the word Eszloum, and the man began to dissipate almost immediately. It took Simon longer to decide which part of the spell should be struck out than it did for the ghost to vanish.

After Simon dismissed the spirit and that strange cyan glow had faded, he reflected on the moment. “If I used magic to destroy my own soul, would I stay stuck in the Pit, or would I finally be allowed to stay dead?”

It was an interesting thought, but it no longer mattered. He’d come a long way from the person he’d been at the start, and he no longer wanted to die. Sometimes, he wasn’t even sure he wanted to solve the Pit. He just wanted to save everyone, even if that was an impossibility.