Death After Death

Once they had better weather and a plan, there was nothing to do but start hiking down the mountains at first light the following day. The goal was to return to something like civilization, but for now, Simon would just take somewhere a little warmer, and at first, that went well.

Though it might go better if I could find that damn pony, Simon thought as he paused for the twentieth time so that Mille could catch up.

He didn’t resent her for it, of course, but she was slow and needed frequent breaks. Given the way she was dressed, it was hard to blame her at all. The dead men’s clothes didn’t come close to fitting her, and her skirts frequently dragged in the snow. While the drifts got smaller as they descended toward the valley floor, her skinny limbs were pale enough that he worried about her the whole way down.

If he were by himself, Simon might have used his shield as a sled. He wasn’t in a hurry, but it would have been a lot of fun. Millie, though, had enough adventures for the rest of her days, and brought up how much she wanted a “nice, quiet, normal life,” only every hour or two.

Simon could sympathize. That would never be his lot in life, but something about having a flock of sheep and listening to a beautiful woman like Millie sing while she spun wool into yarn sounded just about right to him. Toss in a dog and a fireplace, and he was sold.

But that won’t get me any closer to unraveling all of this, will it? he reminded himself as he helped Millie over a rough patch. I could have the best life ever, but I’d still wake up in that cabin when I eventually died of old age, and then what? Do I spend lives stalking my grandchildren to make sure they turn out okay?

Simon’s only real answer there was to avoid further emotional entanglements and just keep moving forward. In that way, it was almost the same as his current tactic of pushing forward in a bid to escape the snow before the next storm came.

Every day, they stopped before they lost the sun, and he used pages from the Magi’s journal to kindle a fire that did little to keep away the cold or the dark. Then, in the morning, after a night of sharing each other’s warmth, the two of them got up and started moving again. It was a simple, but dull rhythm that served them well until Millie started to get sick on their fifth day of sleeping under less than ideal conditions.

She tried to hide the severity of it from Simon for a day or two, insisting that she was fine, but as they summited the mountain on the far side of the snow-filled valley they’d just left, and saw greener slopes in the lower valley beyond, she finally gave in to her fever and collapsed.

Simon used the gesture of healing to revitalize her, but that was just a stopgap. He needed the word of curing to really heal her, and he lacked the gesture for that word. So, instead, he had to carve something.

“I’ll be fine,” she insisted as they started moving again. “There’s no need to fuss.”

Simon didn’t argue with her. He just kept the slender scullery maid moving until they got below the snowline. Then they made a defensible camp in the lee of a large flat boulder, and he got to work carving a curing talisman that wasn’t so different from the ones he’d made in other lives.

By the time he was finished with it, almost two days later, she was so sick she tried to refuse it when he gave it to her. “I’d rather die than lose my soul,” she explained weakly.

“No one is losing their soul today,” Simon sighed. “In fact, this one is powered by the campfire. As long as we don’t run out of firewood, you’ll get better.”

Millie was skeptical, but too weak to fight him, and took a nice, long nap while Simon kept their little campfire stoked. That night, he noticed a pair of goblins creeping around looking for the source of their smoke and cut them down without waking her. In the morning, he didn’t even mention the danger; he just congratulated her.

“It looks like you’re out of the woods now,” Simon told her. “With your soul intact, too.”

She thanked him for that, but now that the taboo about the magic she’d feared had been broken, she became quite inquisitive and bombarded him with questions.

“If magic doesn’t devour the soul, then how does it work?” she asked after they finished crossing an iced-over stream.

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“The way most warlocks use it, it devours their own life span,” he explained. “Think of it as throwing away years of your life to be smarter or stronger today.”

“Oh dear, you didn’t throw away any years for me, did you?” she asked with concern. “I’m hardly worth that sort of effort.”

Simon's first impulse has been to answer ‘of course not,’ but her pitious statement at the end momentarily short-circuited his brain. In the end, he said, “The talisman that chased away your infection didn’t use anyone’s life or soul. It’s as I told you. I used nothing but firewood.”

“Well, if firewood can become good health, and years can be converted in the same fashion, then can’t firewood make someone live forever?” she asked after a moment’s thought. The question took Simon entirely by surprise.

“Maybe not forever, but it could certainly extend life for a long time,” he answered cautiously.

While it was an insightful question, he wasn’t sure where she was going with it, and he was relieved when she moved on to other, more frivolous ideas. “Well, is that true for everything? Can you turn sunlight into moonlight? How about stars? Can you transform them into butterflies?”

While he’d been about to seriously address the former, and explain that magic light wasn’t precisely like true sunlight, the idea that something as small as a butterfly could be made into something as giant as a star made him laugh. Suddenly, for the first time in a very long time, Simon wanted to paint. He wanted to make a giant mural of a sphere of luminescent butterflies.

He tried to explain why that didn’t make sense to Millie eventually, and why he found it funny. Sadly, he lacked the words to do so to any coherent degree. She was unwilling to believe that stars were distant suns, and he no longer had the knowledge of science to argue seriously that it was the case, and for some reason, it felt wrong to tell her he knew because of magical insight.

As they walked through the second, slightly warmer valley, they spent a few days talking about all the things magic could do. Could it bring the dead to life? After a fashion. Could it make the blind see or curse your enemies? Absolutely.

What it couldn’t do was harder. While Simon understood that he himself had plenty of limitations as a mage, he was fairly certain that with the right words and enough time to craft a spell or a talisman, he could do almost anything. He had no idea how planes worked, or even cars, but he had a pretty good idea how he could use words of force to propel something similar. The only question was what he would power them with.

During this time, they dealt with nothing worse than howls in the night and a shepherd boy who pointed the way to the closest clanholds, though Simon didn’t plan to stop at either. He did, however, note that the level now counted as solved during a brief consultation with the mirror in a stream. That surprised him.

Well, I guess it wasn’t that the Murani needed to live, it was that their notes needed to die, he reflected. That was all he’d really done since he’d checked previously, after all. He’d burned the scout’s notes, and apparently, in doing so, he’d changed something important.

Simon didn’t share that detail with Millie because she wouldn't understand. Still, he did spend the rest of the day smiling to himself and toying with the idea that it had been nothing he’d done, but something to do with the escaped pony. Somehow, that was funnier than the idea that a moment in history pivoted on a single pack animal.

He waited until Castle Gravenstone was on the horizon, though, before he told her the truth. “Some time will have passed since we were here last,” he explained. “More than a season, at least. That magic that sent us so far away did something with time, too.”

She seemed relatively unfazed by that, at least until they could see that the castle had been halfway leveled and bore a number of burn scars. After that, she became more frantic. Truthfully, Simon did too, but only for a moment. Once they stopped a farmer on the road and asked him, the man filled them in.

“Oh, you didn’t miss much,” he told them when Simon confessed they hadn’t been around in some time. “After someone struck down the bloodsuckers, the King tried to send a new lad around to put his boot on our necks, and a few of the lads decided to burn the old place out first.”

“So there’s no new lord?” Millie asked hopefully.

“Nah, Count Viscaro is still here, but he don’t have high walls around his manor, so he’s still stepping lightly, at least for now,” the farmer answered.

They talked for a while, and a number of things became clear to Simon. The first was that they’d moved about half a decade into the future. Except for the ruined castle, the valley was the same; it was only the people who were slightly different. Simon was unsurprised that a new lord was administering the region, too, though he did wonder why the vampire problem had been allowed to fester for so long.

If I was or am the king, why would I have tolerated that? Surely, a brave knight could have found and fixed the problem in months, not years.

For now, it was a mystery, but one he didn’t have to solve. Instead, he focused on his next project: finding Millie a home.

Simon suggested they try to find her work in the lord’s service, but she made a face at that and insisted that she “didn’t want to work for a vampire, no matter who he worked for.”

For a moment, Simon believed that she’d taken that metaphor at face value, and it was only when he started to explain the true situation that she laughed and revealed the prank. “I’d serve again if I had to,” she confessed, “but after all this… surviving those monsters would be a horrible waste if I didn’t do something more joyful, you know?”

Simon nodded at that and agreed. “Well then, let’s see if we can’t find you something better.”