Death After Death
Chapter 260: Loose Threads

As Simon rode north in search of the three zombies that his evil twin had noted on the map, he had a lot of time to think about life and death. He spent most of that time contemplating what he knew, or at least what he thought he knew to be true for people who weren’t quite so confined to the Pit as he was.

He imagined that the same cycle of endless reincarnation that he’d been subject to before all of this applied to them, too, and that when they died, they were either reborn to an appropriate fate or consigned to hell. As far as he understood it, no matter how many worlds there were, there was only one hell. That was one point he was pretty sure was true.

He wasn’t sure how the dragon’s words played into that, though. Was he reliving different lives in the same world over and over as it changed from his actions, or was he living in different, nearly identical worlds each time? What made more sense? Did it take more energy to unscramble an egg or to create a copy of one?

So we’ve gone from the chicken and the egg to the egg and the egg, I see, he told himself. That’s real progress right there.

Simon had devoted a lot of time recently to deep thoughts, but he was still no philosopher. He was just a guy that was edging closer to the truth, whatever that was. There weren’t exactly many people he could ask about it, though. He could probably ask the Helades or the Oracle, though he wasn’t sure they would tell him.

Demons might, though. He had the names of a dozen demons in his mirror. Summoning any of them to the world to have a conversation would be trivial at this point, but still, he resisted. He wasn’t sure what good would come of it.

Even if the chance of a mishap where he ended up in hell was very low, he was just as likely to find lies as he was to find truth from the words of any of the devils. There was probably a lot of stray magical knowledge, too, but he had no desire to barter his soul or the lives of innocents to get it.

Simon was still trying to decide how he might be able to summon a demon and have it end up going well for him when he found his first zombie on the second day. The thing was nearly whole, and at first, he’d thought he was merely a traveler. It was only when he got close enough to see that the sword on its hip was actually thrust through its guts instead of tucked into a scabbard that his mind let him see the rest of the gruesome details.

He kicked his horse into a gallop and unsheathed his own longsword. The thing never even saw him coming. It didn’t even turn toward him as he rode by, separating its head from its shoulders in a single clean cut.

Simon circled back as it slumped to the ground in two pieces, and he examined the desiccated, sun-damaged skin. When he was satisfied that the thing was no more, he took off and wheeled around, cutting to the east. It was straight across the rapidly desertifying grasslands, but his evil twin’s first x had been spot on, so it was likely that the others were as well.

That, at least, he understood. He might not know how many worlds there were or how exactly they connected to hell. He didn’t even know if there was a heaven, but he knew precisely why his doppelgänger was helping him in this instance. It was to rub his face in the awful dichotomy.

The sketchbook he’d seen just before his lengthy stay in the coffin had been the same sort of trick. Whether that was supposed to radicalize him against Helades or make him see that she was right, he really couldn’t say. All he knew was that it seemed to be a long con more than a trap, and he wasn’t going to fall for it.

He found the second zombie almost immediately on the third day. It was right where it was supposed to be, as well. This one he found long before he saw it by the distinctive trail it left in its wake. Only the right foot made clear steps. The left one dragged behind it half useless, leaving behind a trail that blind man could follow.

This one at least turned and looked at Simon with dead, milky eyes before he put it down. This corpse had been a watchman on duty when everything had happened. It was still wearing its gorget but had long ago lost its helmet, so Simon bashed its skull in with his pommel and left it in the dust as he rode off in search of his final quarry.

After I get rid of these monsters, I’m going to have to keep going north, he reminded himself. I have to find some way to forestall the war that’s coming without using innocent lives.

That was sensible. It was even the right answer, but still, he wanted to go back to Hepollyon and be with Zoa. He’d been gone a couple years, but he knew that she hadn’t forgotten him any more than he’d forgotten her.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“You need to stop getting attached to women, Simon,” he told himself as he rode. “There’s literally no point. It’s not like you can have a future together.”

He meant what he said, but he couldn’t bring himself to take it too seriously. A flower wasn’t any less beautiful because it wilted at the end of spring. Nor were any of his lives, the good ones, at least, any worse off because they were forever in his past. That was easier to see now that he wasn’t obsessed with Freya anymore. Whether each of them took place in the same world or different ones, it didn’t really matter.

Leaving Zoa like this by choice, though, wasn’t fair to her, and Simon vowed to make his little side quest as short as possible. Maybe there’s someone I can bribe, he thought hopefully. He had a lot of gold. Maybe he just needed to find the right baron or whatever titles it was that the Murani used in the north and convince him that it was better to invest in his mistresses instead of his armies.

Though he’d never tried to probe for such fault lines to stop the wars in Brin, he was fairly sure that they existed, and if he just explored the Duke’s social life for a pressure point or two he was sure he’d find one. With any luck, his money could do just as much damage to the war effort as hordes of zombies, and he’d be heading back to Ionia within a season or two with tens of thousands of lives saved.

The following day, Simon spotted another in a long scattered chain of oases he’d been using to water his horse on the horizon. It was toward sunset, and though he only planned to stay there for the night, that plan changed as soon as he heard a distant scream from that direction. That was when he knew he’d found the third zombie as well.

It might just be bandits, he reminded himself even as his horse started to gallop, kicking up a trail of dust behind him. There are many dangers in the desert, and just because he hadn’t seen anyone except for a few riders at the very edges of his vision didn’t mean that there wasn’t more to be afraid of than zombies.

“Are there even goblins in the desert?” he asked himself as he got closer. “Orcs and centaurs, yes, but what else might there be?”

All of that speculation was pointless. As he got closer, he discovered that it was in fact zombies. Specifically, it was some poor caravan that had been putting up camp for the night when the zombie he was looking for had found them. That annoyed Simon and he couldn’t help but feel like that was an Easter egg his doppelgänger had left for him. The man could have very easily marked the map with ‘do this one first,’ but he chose to let these people die instead.

That was enough to really piss Simon off, and he shouted a battle cry as he dismounted and drew his blade in the hopes that the zombies would focus on him instead of any survivors who might be left. As an idea, it was fine, but as a strategy, it might have been too successful. Simon had grown too used to fighting dried-out aged zombies, and when the corpses of tonight’s fresh victims charged him in a wave as he swatted his horse away, he decided that he might have misjudged the situation.

Simon took the heads off the first two that came at him, but the dozen behind them forced him to use a word of force. “Oonbetit,” he said calmly and clearly, visualizing the neck-level guillotine-like shockwave that radiated out from him in a 90-degree arc that was just wide enough to encapsulate the horde.

The ripple that followed his word was nearly invisible, but even as it spread, most of his attackers lost their heads, or at least half of them. Some of the shorter women didn’t have their heads cut off at the neck as he'd intended. Instead, they had their skulls sliced in two at nose or eye level, which was far more gruesome.

The spell was as ugly as it was effective, and it even cut down a few of the closest palm trees just behind the boiling mob at the same level before its force was entirely spent. Unfortunately, as powerful as it was, its focus had been very limited, and it didn’t get everyone.

A couple of the child zombies kept charging at him even after that, and Simon shook his head in disgust as he cut them down. It was harder to get over his revulsion to the act that it was to smash their skulls, but he knew it was the right thing to do. He’d been in their shoes, and the last thing he wanted was for anyone to live a second longer than they had to in such a hellish state.

When that was done, he looked for survivors, injured or otherwise. When he found none, he checked every corpse with a prod of his sword and decapitated anything that even twitched. That took longer than the initial fight because the oasis was decently sized. Once that was done, he dragged the corpses of men away from the water, then used his horse to do the same for the carcasses of the animals. He remembered the last oasis he’d seen poisoned, so no need to repeat the process.

Maybe that’s one way you could prevent a war, some dark impulse whispered to him. The army can’t travel to the South to fight a war if there’s no water.

He could do more than that, he suspected. He could wander the region using words of greater earth to fracture the bedrock and drain the natural wellsprings, or shift sand to bury them. It might even work, too, he realized, but it seemed too cruel.

“Poisoning the wells is for bitches,” he told himself as he started to dig through the tents and wagons, looking for both zombies and valuables.

He had a new mission now. He’d just saved the people of this region from being devoured by a wave of death, even though they’d never know it. Now, he needed to figure out how to stop, or at least slow, the war that was to follow without doing something awful.

That last bit might seem like an unnecessary qualifier, but it was important to him. He had no real idea where to start, but he had money and magic, so surely he’d be able to figure out something.