Death After Death

“So there are actually other people here,” Simon said, testing his voice again as he lay on his bed. “Cute ones too.” He smiled as he lay there. Sure, she’d killed him, but that was almost understandable. That sort of thing happened all the time in zombie movies. What really mattered was that there were cute girls in The Pit and that zombies weren’t so tough after all. There was even beer! He just had to get down there, without trashing his voice again.

Somehow he’d have to find a way to kill the slime with one spell, or with none at all. Even if he did that, though, it raised a whole new series of problems. It was easy enough to copy a single set of sounds from one goblin, but did the pit really expect him to learn 50 different languages for 99 different floors? That was more than a lifetime of work, assuming he could even find a tutor.

Simon sat up. “Mirror - how do I improve my magic skill? How do I make it, so I don’t feel like shit every time I say those words?”

‘Focus and practice,’ was its cryptic reply. Because of course Simon hadn’t thought of either of those things before himself.

“Fine, if you’re not going to say anything useful about that, then I want to talk about a very serious problem with this place with Helades.” Simon got up and picked up the wine bottle. This time he didn’t plan to throw it, though, he just wanted to enjoy a drink without having to swallow with a throat that felt like it was made of broken glass. “The UI for this whole place is kind of awful, but the languages are going to be a real problem.”

‘What is the problem with the languages in The Pit?’ The mirror asked, one character at a time.

“Well, since the main point of language is to be understood, and I can’t, you know, understand them, I’d say they aren’t doing their job very well,” Simon’s voice dripped with sarcasm, but he was sure that it went over the head of the machine or spirit or whatever was inhabiting the mirror.

‘I could teach you,’ the mirror typed. ‘Which language do you wish to learn?’

“Teach me? You? You can’t even tell me basic facts about this game… I mean, place.” Simon laughed derisively. “Tell me - how many languages are written or spoken in The Pit?”

‘There are 5,486 languages spoken in the pit, and there are 8,933, different forms of writing.’ The mirror displayed that like it was a perfectly reasonable fact, but the numbers staggered Simon.

“So you think that in addition to learning to fight 100 different kinds of monsters, I should learn a thousand different languages? You think that that’s reasonable?”

‘What alternative would you suggest?’ the mirror asked. ‘Strictly speaking, no communication is required to complete all 99 levels.’

“I’d suggest that you let me talk to the boss and let me work it out with her before I have to break you again,” Simon threatened. “I’m sure she can cast a spell or give me an amulet of translation or something and fix this problem with a wave of her magic wand.”

The mirror stayed dark for almost a minute, and for a second Simon thought that he’d scared the thing off with his threat. Finally, it started typing, and as it did a potion appeared on the table in a flash of light.

‘Her radiance, Goddess Helades, lady of life and death, has seen fit to answer your plea,’ the mirror typed. ‘This potion will enable you to understand all languages in The Pit…’

Simon liked the sound of that, and looked away from the mirror even though it was still typing, to focus on the potion. It was dark like ink, with the faintest swirls of light inside. He was grateful that she’d finally seen reason on something, but the way Simon saw it, this potion just proved his point. If she could have solved his problems so easily, then the fact that she hadn’t done so was just further evidence that she wanted him to suffer.

He pulled out the cork and started to down the vile contents. It turned out that it didn’t look like ink. It tasted like ink, too. Ink that had been vomited up by an evil librarian in the depth of hell. That didn’t stop Simon, though. This was the first magical item he could actually touch without burning himself, and he wasn’t going to screw up something as simple as drinking a potion. That’s probably what that screwed up goddess wanted - to give him the answer and watch him waste it. The joke was on her, though; he was going to use it to beat her at her own game.

It was only when he’d finished downing the vile potion that he looked in a mirror to finish reading the rest of its message, ‘...though it should be noted that the process of absorbing that much knowledge will take some time. It will be extremely painful, and the elixir is best used in small doses over several days.’ Simon brushed off the warning and moved to sit down in his chair, but even that small motion made the world feel like it was shifting. He could feel something building now in the back of his skull. It was pressure, combined with the faint haze of colors as he looked at the glowing monitor. It was almost like every light had a sort of aura to it now.

Aura. That word triggered a memory about his mother and her migraines, but that memory and the idea that he might be in the process of experiencing something like that only outran the oncoming pain by a couple seconds. He leaned heavily on the chair as memories and after images of languages he’d never heard, and words he’d never spoken, began to barrage him. Simon tried to sit down so that he could put his head in his hands and try to shut some of the light out, but somehow he managed to entirely miss the chair and land on the floor with a thud. He wanted to rise, but suddenly that felt like too much effort. The words were coming fast and furious now. He was in a text maelstrom now, and no two words were from the same alphabet.

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He tried to breathe slowly, forcing himself to calm down. He could do this. He could endure this fresh hell that Helades had inflicted on him. Closing his eyes didn’t help, he realized belatedly, and breathing deeply didn’t do much either. Even if he shut out the offending light, the words still came. He could hear them now as much as see them. Murmured words in a hundred different voices began speaking quietly into his mind, but that many whispers still added up to the sound of a roaring jet engine. That was when Simon started to scream. Every aspect of this torment got worse minute by minute. It was like having the worst hangover of his life times a hundred while he was at a particularly loud rock concert.

After less than an hour of enduring the tide of words he thought about killing himself. He only decided against it, because he was sure that the potion wouldn’t carry over to his next body. He would leave that behind along with his wounds. Only the knowledge forcing itself into his brain would carry over. So he had to endure this. There simply wasn’t another choice.

Simon managed to get to his feet long enough to make sure the door was barred, and then he crawled into bed and waited for death to take him. Mercifully, he slipped into unconsciousness within the hour, but his dreams weren’t any better than his waking life. There he was drowning in ink while the whales deafened him with their song, one sonic blast at a time, and by the time he woke up again, he was convinced he was bleeding from his ears.

Over the next two days, he slipped in and out of his troubled sleep. He tried drinking the entire bottle of wine to dull the pain. Nothing helped, there were just interludes where the barrage of knowledge soaking into his mind wasn’t quite so bad. He had plenty of time to hate himself for not following instructions, and plenty of time to hate Helades for doing this to him, but neither of those helped either. Eventually, though, Simon woke up to the surprising sound of silence. The goblins had apparently not managed to break in and murder him in his sleep, and a throbbing headache was all that remained of his torments. It was a monster of a headache that was at the upper end of normal, and no longer the sort of thing you could only experience through malicious magic.

The very first thing he did was brave the sunlight to get some more water. He’d been out for half a day, and there was no way he could face the goblins, let alone the skeletons like this. He slowly stumbled to the stream, squinting hard. He would have given away both his magic words for a good pair of sunglasses right now, sadly that wasn’t an option. The pit had no cash shop for cosmetic items. Once he had drained his waterskin once more, he set out for the only place he knew of that he could test to see if this had worked without resorting to combat: the temple ruins just south of the path.

As always the trip there was utterly without incident, and when Simon arrived at the eroded marble he got the surprise of his life when he could actually read the writing that had survived on the walls and columns of the most sheltered areas. It was like going to Egypt and suddenly remembering that you’d actually majored in hieroglyphics in college. The knowledge was just there, like it had always been there.

Despite his throbbing head, Simon was too intrigued to stop, and spent the next couple of hours reading every scrap of writing he could find. They might just look like swoopy, flowing pictographs, but to him, they had a whole set of meanings as well as enough cultural context to understand what they were saying. He read about the teachings of an ancient healing god, Kanuthep. It seemed like sort of a fertility/healing god to Simon, which struck him as kind of half ass. They could have made up two different gods, so the symbolism wasn’t quite so crowded. Most of the writing on the temple he found was an epic poem about the day of flowers, which was their version of the end of the world, after all the warriors had killed each other and there was nothing left to do but let the flowers bloom.

That struck Simon as vaguely creepy, and also somewhat like the plot of a manga. It didn’t quite make sense to him in that specific Japanese way that they did so often. It was honestly pretty boring stuff. Normally Simon would have given up after like ten minutes of dealing with this artsy bullshit, but he’d suffered greatly for this superpower, and he was going to use it every chance he could.

Finally, that accidental persistence paid off when he struck pay dirt. Near the end of a pillar talking about herbal remedies and their uses, which he didn’t give a shit about, there was a section about a prayer that you could recite before the gods. Most of it seemed like it was boilerplate nonsense like a catechism or whatever, but the last part was just two words, and Simon doubted that it was a coincidence. After all, the only spell he knew was two words long, so, taking a moment to sound them out and make sure he got them right, he said, “Aufvarum Hjakk.” This time he didn’t yell the incantation because his head wouldn’t allow it. He didn’t think it would make that big of a difference, though.

When nothing happened, though, he sighed as he stood up, unsurprised that nothing had happened. Of course, it was too good to be true there was no way Helades would leave a healing spell around right outside The Pit, he thought as he started to walk away, would she? That thought stopped Simon in his tracks. That’s exactly what she would do. The purpose of the pit was to get hurt and die, over and over, for her entertainment. The only thing that would make that better is if help was right there the whole time, but it was in a dead language no one could read.

Simon turned around and walked back to the pillar. This time he didn’t just say the words. This time he forced his mind to quiet and imagined his terrible headache fading away. Even if he never cared much for the whole “power of positive thinking” that his counselor always tried to get him to do, it was impossible to deny the link between the fire spell and the vividness with which he imagined his enemy bursting into flames by now. When he opened his eyes, he said it again, “Ä̴̮̦̯́̅ű̸̡̙̩͛f̶͈̦́̃v̸͚̬̀̕ả̷̩͙̼r̶̦̀͊ú̶̪̮̉͝m̷͔͔̃͋ ̷̩̯̈́Ḣ̸̲̗̲̽̚j̸̺͔̓͘͜a̸̢̘̎̋k̶̞̀k̴̤͇̏̑̈́.” This time he was only a little surprised that his headache blew away like dandelion fluff in a breeze. The words still felt wrong to him, and they still carved their way into his soul, but they were nowhere near as violent or as hard on him as the other spell had been.

Simon smiled. This was real progress.