Death After Death

Progress down the mountain was slow, and by the following evening, they still hadn’t reached the gently rolling plains that would lead to the distant village. Simon would be glad when they did, though. He’d pinned his hopes on it. Not only was it exhausting having to double back whenever they encountered an area too steep to pass, but it took forever as they tried to get down the sandstone bluffs that separated them from anywhere hospitable.

Once, just after noon, they heard the shriek of the wyvern as it soared through the sky. Simon immediately dropped what he was doing and pulled Freya into the shadow of a boulder, where they hid for almost half an hour as they watched the thing soar across the sky. In the end, it was only when Simon saw it flying back to its nest with a goat in its claws that they continued on their way. Though Freya took the rest of the journey well enough, even though her feet were bleeding by the end of the day, thanks to her poor excuse for shoes, Simon couldn’t stop worrying even after they stopped and the sun started to set. All he could see was that wyvern flying back to its nest with her bloody body in its claws.

By the evening, she was noticeably limping though she still hadn’t complained. He wanted to heal her wounds immediately, but he didn’t want her to freak out, so he decided to wait until she went to sleep as they made camp for the evening. That night they didn’t make a fire because there was precious little wood on the slopes of course. It was also because Simon didn’t want a beacon that would attract attention. After all, there was no real shelter, and he couldn’t help but think that given the slightest provocation that wyvern would swoop down looking for prey and decide that the two of them were the perfect snack.

He didn’t have any idea how far those things ranged when they hunted. However, given their size and the number of calories they had to burn every day, it had to be far, and he was certain they’d still be at risk of a surprise attack for days. How many days was harder to say, but he was pretty sure that until they could make it to the light forest that was still over a day from here at least. After that, he had no idea what new dangers would await them in there.

“What are you thinking about?” Freya asked eventually, rousing him from his recursive train of thought about all the dangers that they faced.

“How did you know I was still awake?” he asked. They were spooning together for warmth, and she was facing away, so he was genuinely confused.

“If you were asleep, then you would have been snoring,” she said playfully. “When you’re this quiet, usually you’re just worrying about things.”

“The Wyvern,” he said honestly, unwilling to tell her too much.

“It’s going to be okay,” she reassured him. “We’ll get somewhere safe soon. You said so yourself.”

They chatted for a while about what he thought would happen next and what they would eat first when they got back to civilization, but eventually, there was a lull in the conversation, and Simon thought that she’d drifted off to sleep until she said, “It’s funny, you know? You spend all your time worrying about what’s going to happen next, but all I can think about are all the terrible things that have already happened.”

“I get that,” he agreed, looking briefly at the Pandora’s box of past traumas in his mind before he decided he did not want to open it again. “But eventually, all that just gets to be too much, and you have to move on.”

“I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to move on from Bre… From what happened in that inn,” she said, in a voice filled with sadness.

“You know, it helps if you talk about it,” he said, not really believing the words. It was something his therapist had always told him, though, and somehow at this moment, it felt right.

“I just… I can’t believe that she would do something like that…” Freya said, “Not really to him.”

“You mean Brenna?” he asked. “She seemed like a real piece of work to me.”

“But you didn’t…” she paused as she remembered. “Oh, was this before?”

“Yeah, we met before. Another time.” Simon agreed, not eager to tell his lover too much here. Other women were a sticky situation that he wasn’t used to, and facing a cave full of goblins was less than treacherous in his mind than trying to thread this needle. “She almost got me killed once.”

“Oh,” Freya said, letting the ominous word hang in the air for a long time.

“What did she do to you?” Simon asked, unwilling to let the conversation die in such a precarious place.

“She almost got me killed, too,” Freya said. At first, her words came out slowly, one at a time, like they were being dragged out of her. At some unseen critical point, though, that trickle became a waterfall, and she couldn’t stop. “No - worse. She almost made sure I was turned into one of those things. After the owner turned, she tried to use me as a human shield to save her skin, and we fought and eventually… I had to, you understand, don’t you? I had to…”

Stolen novel; please report.

“It’s okay,” Simon said, stroking her hair. “I know you did what you had to. Only what you had to.”

Freya was crying now, and that made it hard for him to focus on much of anything else besides how uncomfortable that made him feel and how he could somehow get her to stop, but at least the mystery finally made sense. Every time he journeyed to level 6 and the door opened, it was in the middle of some crucial moment, and so sometimes Freya won, sometimes Brenna won, and sometimes no one won at all. That explained the blood on Freya’s hands and the weapon in Brenna’s whenever he found one of them, at least.

They both drifted off after the sobbing stopped, but it was only when he woke up that he realized he’d forgotten to do something about Freya’s blistered, bleeding feet.

“Ä̴̮̦̯́̅ű̸̡̙̩͛f̶͈̦́̃v̸͚̬̀̕ả̷̩͙̼r̶̦̀͊ú̶̪̮̉͝m̷͔͔̃͋ ̷̩̯̈́Ḣ̸̲̗̲̽̚j̸̺͔̓͘͜a̸̢̘̎̋k̶̞̀k̴̤͇̏̑̈́” he whispered in the dawn light while she still slept softly.

Under the blankets, he couldn’t see the results of his magic, but he was certain that he was successful as he felt the tingle of magic flow through him. Fortunately, Freya didn’t wake up from that, and even after he woke her up and they had the last of their stale biscuits for breakfast, she didn’t say a word about the state of her feet, even though he was sure she knew something was different.

Simon spent much of the next day thinking about the moment she’d described to him last night instead of the wyvern. Did the fact that either option was possible mean that the outcome wasn’t important, or did it mean that one of them was the right answer? Why would Helades have started the level right at the moment? Why not before the fight so he could save them all, or after the fight when Freya had lived.

He had no answers, but when they finally found a trail weaving through the rolling grasslands at the base of the mountains, they made better time and camped at the edge of the wood. They roasted some of the cured ham that night, which was delicious, but Simon spent half the night awake listening for the noise of predators as he realized that the delicious smell of roasting meat had been a terrible mistake in such a wild place. While Freya snored softly beside him, all he could think about was the razor-sharp beak of the owl bear and that he hoped they didn’t range in this wood like they did in the other one he’d traveled in so frequently.

This time when they finally reached a road he went south instead of north. It was as good a direction as any. That meant two more days on the road before they reached the safety of the next village, as it turned out. This time Simon was careful not to use gold when he paid this time. He struggled to introduce the two of them at the inn where they sought lodging because he doubted that there were words like girlfriend in the world, but Freya quickly handled that. “I’m his cousin,” she said quickly, making Simon wonder if she was intentionally choosing to downplay their situation or not.

“And where you folks traveling from?” the cranky old proprietor asked. “Not from the troubles up north, I hope.”

“No, definitely not,” Simon answered too quickly. “We come from a village to the east, beyond the mountains. Why? Has something happened?”

“We got any number of problems right now to choose from, but none as bad as Schwarzenbruck,” the older man said with a sigh. “If I were you, I’d think real hard about going back the way you came.”

“We might do that,” Simon answered. “We just need to rest a few nights after such a long trip.”

Simon had planned to stay there for three nights, but they only stayed two. In the end, it wasn’t the lumpy bed or the mediocre food that the place served. It wasn’t even that Freya was acting a little distant. It was that on their second night there, during dinner, one of the newly arrived merchants had a seizure and began to spasm and tremble at the table near the door before he suddenly rose again as a flesh-hungry monster.

Fortunately, Simon was prepared, and no sooner had the creature started trying to tear the throat out of their neighbor than Simon was there to crush the thing’s skull with his mace. He ended up doing the same thing to the man that had been bitten, even as everyone looked on in horror like he was the murderer.

“What?” he said defensively. “You get bit, you become one of them. Those are the rules.”

“How could you possibly know that?” someone gasped.

“Like you learn anything important: the hard way,” Simon shot back as he cleaned his mace on the deadman’s clothes before he grabbed Freya by the hand and pulled her away from the table. “Come on. We’re getting out of here. Who knows how many more of those things are close by.”

The fear in the woman’s face as she relived everything that had happened to her before made resistance impossible. “Where will we go?” she asked meekly.

“Away is the only direction that matters,” he said as they went upstairs to pack their meager belongings.

Simon had considered swiping the dead man’s coin purse, but he thought people might react badly. Once they were out of the inn, though, he had no problems swiping the wagon that the man had come in on. Simon had been sitting on the porch enjoying the breeze and the sunset when the merchant had come in earlier.

At the time, the man had seemed a little off, but not I’ve-been-bitten-and-you’re-all-gonna-die off. Simon needed Freya’s help to put the merchant’s horse back in the harness, but after that, they were on their way. She had some qualms about stealing someone else’s property to her credit, but it was this, or walk through the night, and Simon wanted to get away as far and as fast as they could.

“You know, it’s funny,” he said as they started to ride down the dark road to whatever horror awaited them next, “I always thought that in a med… In the midst of a place full of swords and axes, zombies wouldn’t be much of an issue, but it appears I was wrong.”

He’d almost said ‘medieval world,’ which would have been a mistake that was hard to correct.

“Simon,” she sighed. “Even if everyone in that room was armed, you were the only killer there. Most people just want to live. They don’t go around looking for things to fight like you.”

It was an interesting statement, and a few lives ago, he probably wouldn’t have gotten what she was saying, but now, he definitely did.