Death After Death

Nothing had changed when the gates to the caldera-city were finally opened to Simon, not immediately. He wasn’t even fed right away. Instead, he was given water and given robes to change into. As he was led through a part of the cliffside city to do that, he looked for the sisters he’d brought here along with any familiar faces, but found none.

Well, most of the acolytes will be swimming already, he realized as he went. He wasn’t looking forward to that daily ritual, but he couldn’t deny the effectiveness, even if he doubted he’d be particularly effective at swimming down one hand.

The robes he was given hit him with a wave of nostalgia, and it was only after he stripped, put them on, and stepped back out into the thin morning light that he realized they were several shades darker than he really deserved. He could still see auras, even if not half as well as he could a few weeks ago. He doubted he could see the currents in the water, so he probably deserved somewhere in the gray spectrum.

Still, he didn’t complain about that, either. If they’d given him black robes, he probably wouldn’t have complained. He was just glad that he’d gotten the Whisperers and the other sisters to a place where they’d be safe.

He only asked what was going on when he wasn’t directed to go swim and join the rest of the acolytes and initiates as he’d planned. “We require your help in other ways today,” the man escorting him said. “Your own clarity will likely have to wait for some time.”

Simon had a few minutes to wonder what that meant as he was brought to one of the larger temples, where most of the sisters were housed. They were, to a woman, wearing black robes, and obviously unhappy about it. White was their color, and they were being denied it.

Taking a look at everyone’s expressions, it was clear they were about to have a mutiny on their hands about the issue. So that’s why I was finally allowed in, Simon mused. Trouble in paradise.

He spent the next twenty minutes explaining what the colors symbolized and why they were wearing black. None of them was happy about it.

“But you’re not wearing black,” one of the older sisters insisted. “What makes you special?”

“The Unspoken do not speak magic,” he answered simply. He started in on a lie about how laymen didn’t always wear back, even though they almost always did when another argument started up. This one was about how the word of nullification, Uuvellum, wasn’t magic. Several of the women spoke it aloud, and Simon could see the acolyte who had led him here blanch at the sound. He did too, even if he had nothing to fear from such a benign word; it just felt wrong in this place.

Simon responded to that immediately and shouted all of them down. “The Whitecloaks that gave you this life might have told you that it wasn’t a magic word, but a holy one, but I tell you, they lied, and you must never speak it again. If you do, you will shorten your lives, but even more importantly, you will almost certainly be exiled from the only sanctuary you are ever likely to know. Magic is forbidden here.”

It wasn’t, not completely. He knew that the Oracle was capable of magic, and in some of her sessions with her most advanced and loyal devotees, he was fairly sure that she taught them some as well. The rules for Hepollyon were not applied evenly, though, and a serious breach of them like this was far more likely to result in someone going for one last swim in boiling water than in being shown the door.

He didn’t tell the women that, though. While not everyone believed him about the nature of the word of nullification, they were sufficiently cowed that they didn’t argue. After that, when he’d apologized for their outburst, the day's work really began; that was when Simon understood why they’d been given this temple, at least for now.

“You are to teach them the basics, at the very least,” they instructed him. “Greetings, simple objects. Enough to eat and work. Once they understand our tongue, they can swim and work and learn the rest for themselves.”

The white-robed acolyte who told Simon this smiled neutrally as he told him, like it wasn’t that big of a deal. It was, though. Even the basics of a very foreign tongue would take weeks to months for most of the women in attendance to learn.

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“Could I perhaps get something to eat?” Simon asked, not bothering to argue. While he hadn’t planned on it, teaching was the most valuable thing he could do right now.

“You can break your fast at the midday meal,” he said, twisting the knife one final time before departing. It was honestly the least hospitable that this place had ever been to him, and as he began to teach, he sincerely wondered if the foretold death the Oracle had hinted at was going to be starvation.

Simon used a chunk of raw chalk and a dark basalt wall that had clearly been used this way a thousand times before, and laid out the alphabets of both languages, one atop the other. They had only a few characters that were different, so that part wasn’t so hard. He then spent the next few hours repeating them with his new class and quizzing them until he could finally eat.

That was the highlight of his day. Even though it was a simple meal of seared goat meat strips and fragrant rice, it tasted like mana from heaven, and he had to force himself to slow down, just so he wouldn’t inhale the entire dish.

After that, the day was better. They focused on simple things, like hello and goodbye, and by the time they got to the inflection differences between good morning, good day, and goodnight, it was time for dinner. Just like that, his first day of teaching in lifetimes was done, and he found he’d enjoyed it.

Still, as much as he might have enjoyed stepping back through the curtain of nostalgia to some of his oldest and most important lives, all of that fell away when he saw Zoa, or more like when she saw him. He didn’t know how he’d feel to see her again, but before he had time to think about it, he knew what it was like to feel her again as she wrapped him in a hug.

Public displays of affection, especially in places as public as the dining area, were generally frowned on, but everyone met the moment with amused smiles and good-natured jokes. This was clearly a long-anticipated reunion, and not just by the woman he’d grown to care for in one life.

Did he care for her now? Of course, in a way, but he doubted he ever cared about her as much as she did for him in this moment. Eventually, they both ate, which allowed a reprieve from the conversation he dreaded, but he found no acrimony in her words, her soul, or even her bottomless eyes.

She was closer to forty than thirty at this point, but he didn’t much care about that. He was certainly older than he’d been when he was here last, too. He was a cripple, too, which didn’t generally bother him, but in this moment, it did.

They drank white wine with dinner, and celebrated their reunion in a series of toasts that left them both half drunk. Afterward, they walked along the shore of a boiling lake, and held hands, and really, it was like he’d never left. In that moment, as much as he thrilled in her presence, he couldn’t help but think that this was how his meeting with Elthena was supposed to go when they were reunited so long ago. It was just too perfect.

When he walked her home after their foggy, moonlit stroll, he intended to leave her with a kiss at the door, but instead, he was half dragged into her room, and as soon as they were on the thin mat that was her bed, their clothes came off.

“I want you,” she whispered, biting his neck. “No, I need you. It’s been so long…”

Simon could hardly refuse that invitation, as much as part of him wanted to. He felt a twinge of guilt at that, like he was somehow using her, even though that was ridiculous, but only in those first moments. After that, his need for discussion and disclosure burned to ashes in the heat of their shared passion.

Their first round didn’t last very long, but it didn’t need to. It was about the union more than the act, and the physicality more than the pleasure. It was raw and desperate, and only slowed briefly as they lay there in the dark.

She ignored his maimed limb and kissed him with passion anyway, and as he tried to explain his absence, they melted into each other. He didn’t love her, but he could see how easy it would be to change that. After all, she didn’t carry a torch for him. She carried a bonfire.

The two of them got very little sleep that night, mostly because every time he tried to apologize or explain himself, she silenced him with kisses. It wasn’t until the following day, after he’d finished another round of teaching, that there was much talking between them. This was mostly to catch him up on other events.

She did eventually ask him about the other women, but explaining that they were refugees from a terrible religious order didn’t do much to assuage the jealousy he could see at the edge of her words. “I haven’t been with anyone else,” he promised her. “And the sisters? None of them mean anything to me, at least not like you. I’m just tired of seeing them living crippled, shortened lives.”

She quickly changed the topic, but even as he did so, he tried to figure out if he’d slept with Elthena since their last parting, or if that was before. Without checking the mirror, it was impossible for him to remember, and he resolved to forgive himself for it, either way. He’d been drunk then, and he’d been drunk now, so it seemed somehow fitting.

They fell asleep in each other's arms, and Simon slept as well as he had in lifetimes. He almost resented the sun when it came and forced them from their thin pallet and from a warm embrace back into scratchy wool robes.

“I’m sorry we didn’t get to… well, we didn’t get much talking,” Simon confessed. "At least as much as I would have liked."

“It’s fine,” she said with a smile and a hug, “You’ve got the rest of your life to make it up to me.” After that, they parted ways, but Simon knew that they probably wouldn’t do any more talking in the nights that followed, at least not anytime soon.