Death After Death

Simon struggled with the line, spoken so casually. No, he didn’t struggle. He reeled and sat down on the corner of the duke’s bed as the fake duke walked to the wardrobe and began to pick through the outfits.

Simon studied him, passed the familiar clothes. His vision was too blurred to make out as many details as he would have liked, but one thing that was unmistakable was his aura was different than anyone else’s. Simon usually couldn’t see such details because he was at the center of it, but the way it spiraled and swirled, it stretched far beyond where a normal persons might stop, and even reached out toward him like it was trying to cross some un bridgable gap.

For a long moment, he was silent, but then he said, “You’ve already lived this moment too, then, because I’m you, right? If that’s true, then…” he paused, looking around the room, “Then you should be able to tell me what’s in this drawer, right?”

As he spoke, Simon pointed to the second middle drawer of a wide walnut dresser. His other self didn’t even look away from the outfits he was choosing between before answering, before saying, “That’s the duke’s handkerchief drawer. Most of them have his initials on them, but a few have AB instead. Those belonged to his second wife, and he seems to have cared about her more than his first or third.”

Simon opened the drawer as his other self spoke, and found all of that to be true, more or less. There were dozens of neatly folded white handkerchiefs made from white cotton, and hemmed in the blue of house Brin. Only a few were more decorated than that. They had a flower motif and the mentioned monogram.

Digging through them, even after everything Simon had seen, made his heart beat faster. As the other him spoke, his words came true, like he was narrating a story. He could have rigged all of this, Simon told himself. He could have come in here beforehand and staged all of this.

He instantly scolded himself for that. If his future self really had done all of that, then that only proved he was a time traveler in a different way, didn’t it? Just thinking about the loops and the causality of all of this gave him a headache, but he kept searching, and eventually, in the back of the drawer, wrapped in a ratty old handkerchief, he found a locket.

“That’s what she looked like, before she died,” his other self called out with the duke’s voice. “Go on. Take a look. You’d remember her, too, after all those years.”

Simon did as bidden, and found a beautiful young woman painted inside the locket. For a moment, he thought he’d find someone familiar in there. Really, he feared he’d somehow find Freya again, but instead it was just a striking redhead he’d never seen before. As he studied her face, his future self practically narrated what he was seeing, moment by moment.

That was when Simon set it down and looked up as the false duke was buttoning a new shirt. “Why? Why would you… Why would I do this, why now?” Simon asked.

“The answer to that question is obvious if you think about it,” the other him responded.

For a moment, he got a whiff of the same arrogance that he heard whenever he tried to get answers from his evil twin, and Simon almost snapped and repeated the question. Instead, he took a deep breath and thought it through. It turned out that his other self wasn’t lying, and the answer appeared almost instantly in his mind.

“Because the death of Duke Brin fouls up too many future levels,” Simon said.

“And…” the false duke asked.

“And… because he’s going to be the next king,” Simon said after only a short delay… “because I’m going to be the next king… Why would I want to be the king?”

“Why wouldn’t you want to be king?” his other self asked. “You’d make a great king… at least I think so,” he said with a smile that Simon no longer recognized. “You could change the course however you wanted, within reason.”

“I can change the world however I want already,” Simon said, but his words sounded hollow, even to his own ears.

As the king of Brin, even for one life, there was a lot he could do. He could prepare for war with the Murani, replace the worst of the nobility, and even make better alliances with the rulers of neighboring kingdoms. He couldn’t imagine all the ripples that would cause, and future levels that would undo, but he could see the appeal, and clearly it appealed enough that at some point he’d decided to pull the trigger.

For a second, Simon’s mind boggled as paradoxes related to freewill and predestination battered his mind, but before he could put those into words, his other self calmed him. “It will be fine,” the false duke smiled. “Trust me. You learn a lot about yourself, and about time between here and there.”

“But you’ll have to kill the prince, won’t you?” Simon asked. “Duke Brin doesn’t take over the Kingdom without a violent coup. I’ve lived that life before, and I don’t think—”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“And you found other ways,” his future self answered. “Why would I do anything different? You and I want the same thing, well, mostly the same thing. We’re the same person afterall.”

“What do you mean mostly?” Simon asked, seizing on the skepticism.

What followed was a long conversation on the subject of desire. Simon started out arguing he hadn’t changed, but eventually surrendered that point. He might not have changed much in decades, but he’d changed substantially since he’d come to the Pit, and his other self barely needed to twist that knife before he dropped it.

It was only when they finally addressed his evil twin that the false duke offered real insight. “I’ve met him… since where you are and where I am,” he volunteered. “I’m even pretty sure he’s still us… You know, like a future version of me interacting with us the way I am with you, right now, but it's hard to say. I have some suspicions, but don’t want to bias yours.”

The other Simon chuckled then, as said, “You’ll come to agree with me in time.”

“But why would he do that?” Simon asked. “Like this, I mean. Why not simply be honest with me… I mean, with us like you are?”

“Some things have to be experienced to really be understood,” the other Simon said with a sigh. There was a distant look in his eyes for a moment that made him look much older, like the man he was pretending to be, before he said. “The point is. I can’t tell you everything. Really, I can’t tell you anything more than I was told where you’re standing right now. If I did anything else, it would break the loop.”

“The loop,” Simon growled. This time, it was his turn to sigh, and it annoyed him how much that impulse made him feel like the two of them were the same person, deep down. “The damn levels are always getting reset.”

His other self nodded and sympathized for a bit before he said, “Sometimes I want to reset a level or two, but it's hard to figure out how, exactly.”

Simon pressed him on that, but he wouldn’t explain. Instead, the false duke said, “You need to focus on this life, not the lives to come. It’s important.”

“It was supposed to be,” Simon grumbled, “But it feels like a waste. I wanted to learn the Whitecloak secrets to fighting witches, but so far all I’ve done is lose my arm and—”

“You’ve learned plenty, and you have good answers to those questions. You know that hell can infect your soul now, and… Well, I don’t want to say much on that,” his other self answered, waving away the idea that it was even a problem. “You don’t have to do everything in one life. Don’t forget to enjoy yourself. Varten grows up fast. You’ll miss him when he’s gone.”

Simon wanted to deny that, but the truth was he missed him now. Instead, he changed the subject back to the white cloaks, insisting that, “They’ll probably never let me work with the lad again.”

He only realized it was a stupid thing to say to a future version of himself when the false duke smiled and said, “Well, less than before maybe, but there’s plenty of life to live, and then it's on to the next one.”

“I don’t suppose you can give me a hint there,” Simon asked. “You said I’d be here in a life or two?”

“I think the less said about your future lives, the better,” the false duke said with a smile that seemed less than genuine. “You’re going to go deeper in the Pit, you’re going to learn some things, and when you know enough, well, you’ll be standing where I am now.”

Simon tried to drill down into a number of those points, but his other self stonewalled him whenever things got too specific. Finally, in frustration, he asked, “There are so many problems… There are so many ways I could handle everything. How will I ever handle it all?”

“You could become everyone, I suppose. You could eventually be everyone, everywhere, and the world would finally spin exactly how you want it to,” the false duke teased with a crooked smile and a shake of his head. “I kid, of course. Don’t worry about what I’m going to do. You just focus on your life with the white cloaks. Pretend we never met, and this never happened. It's easier that way.”

Simon thought that was pretty close to impossible, but he didn’t say that. Instead, he nodded. For a brief moment, he considered reaching out to shake his other self’s hand, but the way that the false duke stood one step too far away made that seem like the wrong move.

That sparked something in his brain, and he was about to ask if there was some sort of reason that the two of them couldn’t touch, but before he could ask, his other self said, “Actually, I don’t know. I’ve been afraid to test that. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to touch, but… Well, you know, science fiction, right?”

Simon nodded. He still distantly remembered those sorts of stories. Not so much the details as the convoluted plot lines, and the way that magic was given legitimacy with math formulas. My own magic could use a little more math, too, honestly, he thought with an inward sigh, before he said his farewells and left.

As Simon departed, he felt strange returning to the room he’d been assigned for the night. He’d left it only a couple of hours before, but now he felt entirely changed by the events of the evening. It wasn’t the murders, either. It was meeting himself, and learning about the future.

No, it’s learning that I haven’t been imagining things, Simon told himself as he lay there sleeplessly, staring up at the ceiling. Until now, he’d suspected that his doppelganger was just himself a little further in the future. He’d thought he could accidentally run into himself in past lives, but now he knew. That just raised so many more questions, though. What kind of paradoxes were possible now? What kind of damage could he do by accident?

Could I use his mirror and see what he knows that I don’t? Simon wondered. Even as he considered whether or not he should try to stay awake until the false duke fell asleep so he could try it, another thought sprang to his lips.

“I’m going to be a king someday.” He had never planned on doing such a thing. Even if he’d married Elthena, he wouldn’t have been the King of Ionia; he would have only been the queen’s consort. Still, he found he liked the idea more than he expected.