Death After Death PLUS 238-240

Ch. 238 - Unopened

The barrow mounds were just as dank and dreary as he remembered them, and even though he reached them at almost noon, huffing and puffing as he topped a final rise, a hint of mist still clung to the small, artificial hills. He’d done some research on this place over the course of several lives, and depending on the part of the world, they were either called the Dark Hills or the Crypt of the Reaver King.

Not much was known about them beyond that they were a cursed place, and apparitions were sometimes spotted here at night.  They were rumored to contain treasures, but it was said that the treasure hunters never returned. Simon was pretty sure he knew the reason why, given the fact that at least the one he’d been inside was crawling with undead. 

Looking around now, though, none of the places could be breached anywhere that he could see. He couldn’t remember exactly which of the mounds was the one that he’d been in several times before, but he supposed it didn’t matter. “I should probably purge them all just to be sure,” he said with a sigh as he counted them. “Fourteen… fourteen words of earth just to break inside each of them. A year of my life gone, just like that.”

It wouldn’t take a year, of course. He doubted the entire expedition would take a week, but he’d still be using a lot of magic just to break each one of these open. Even so, it beat the hell out of going back to the closest village of any size, buying a mattock, and breaking in the old-fashioned way. 

Simon promised himself he’d do three a day and finish the thing off in a week. Only, it wasn’t quite as simple as that.  While some of them still had visible entrances that had been blocked by stone, most of them didn’t. Which meant on those he was drilling holes into the things that might or might not intersect with an internal passage. That was annoying, and every time, he wasted a spell by digging a hole that went nowhere. Further, even when he went inside the first two, he found no zombies, which puzzled him.

Simon had to use six words of earth to enter the first two barrow mounds, and even when he got in, he didn’t find much. There were a few grave goods and plenty of bodies. He searched those dusty corridors for traps, but when he found none, he took some of the golden Ornaments and he bashed in the skulls of the dead he found just to be sure. Still, it seemed pointless. He might be poor enough that grave robbing was useful, but it was hardly something he wanted to spend weeks doing. 

Fortunately, he found what he was looking for on the third try and decided that would probably be enough. The mound of the Reaver King wasn’t the largest of the hills he was digging through, but it was the most central, and when he forced his way inside, he recognized the passage immediately. 

He’d been in here several times, but only ever with the eyes of an adventurer and not a scholar. This time, he took some time to look at some of the nautically themed carvings that had been engraved in the large stones holding up the earthen ceiling. He could read words here and there, but they were too filthy to make out the whole thing. 

Each inscription seemed to be bragging about different accomplishments. This city was sacked, and then that city was raided. Apparently, the man was a force to be reckoned with, and for a time, his boats ruled the coast from the north of Ionia to the southern part of Muran. That interested Simon and he would have stayed there longer to learn more if he hadn’t heard the shuffling, shifting noise of the undead up ahead. 

That made him pull out his mace and whisper a word of light as he prowled forward. Until now, he hadn’t found any zombies, but that seemed about to change. In the corridor ahead, he found all the interred dead rising from their niches, but none of them seemed to be rising very quickly. Each was a dried-up arthritic thing, and despite their light armor he had no trouble putting them down as he advanced methodically, one blow at a time. 

Even this was a letdown, and the only surprise came when he reached the central chamber and found himself standing over the central sarcophagus, just putting the Reaver King’s Crown on his own head.

“You!” Simon said, raising his shield in a guarded stance, even though his doppelgänger wasn't holding a weapon. 

The other version of Simon looked just as he did the last time Simon had seen him at the foot of an erupting volcano. He was not much older than Simon was now, and he was in good shape. That told Simon plenty on some level, but there was nothing identifying that might offer him clues to the origin of this abomination.

“Me,” the other Simon agreed, with a growing smile. “I must say I didn’t expect to see you here, but I supposed I should have. We always do reach this point eventually.”

“What do you mean?” Simon asked warily, as the word to counter any spell the other him might seek to cast looped in his mind on repeat.

“I mean that we have done this dance before, and we will again,” the doppelgänger smiled. “More than that, I really can’t say.”

“Helades told me that time travel doesn’t exist,” Simon answered, torn between killing this pretender and dragging this conversation out as long as he could to get some answers. 

“She says a lot of things, whereas I must say as little as possible,” the other Simon explained. “We both have our roles to play. That’s all I’ll say.”

“If secrecy is so important, then why did you leave me those clues? The coins, the sketchbook…” Simon asked, almost as confused as he was annoyed. 

“Everything I do or don’t is necessary,” his twin answered. “Just like you have to do certain things. Even if you never wanted to be Simon the Merciless.”

“Simon the…” he balked for a moment before he remembered. “The coin!”

“The coin,” the doppelgänger agreed. “You had all the evidence you needed of what was going to happen to you in that life, and it did you no good. How would answering any other questions help after that?”

“But that can’t be… I-I was never—” he stammered as he tried to square that circle. 

“You were,” the other Simon smiled. “As soon as you broke the back of the eastern horde, Ara decided to pretend you never left. She minted coins in your name, spread stories of your vile deeds, and led everyone to believe you still haunted those mountains. It worked, too. The Murani never tried a second time and instead moved on to easier targets.”

“How was I supposed to know any of that?” Simon asked, turning as briefly as possible to smash the head of a zombie that was ever so slowly shuffling toward him. 

“You shouldn’t have,” his evil twin explained. “You have your path; I have my tasks, and though our paths have to cross at moments like this, we should do our best not to interfere with each other too much.”

“Interfere?!” Simon demanded angrily. “You made a volcano erupt. How do you expect me not to stop that?”

“Oh, I’ll do far worse before all this is done,” the other Simon said. “So will you, but that’s not a conversation you’re ready to have.”

“I— What?” Simon asked, exasperated as he looked at his copy’s smiling expression. “Why? What’s the point of standing here if—”

Simon whirled at the sound of another noise, expecting another attack. It was just an echo from further down the hall. When he turned back to finish his question, the copy of himself was gone. 

“Son of a bitch!” Simon yelled as he turned and ran as fast as he could back the way he came. When he reached the outside, he used a word of force to leap to the top of the mound in a single outrageous leap. Then, he whirled quickly around, looking for where his doppelgänger might have gone. 

While he still had no idea how other-Simon’s teleportation magic worked, he knew enough about magic to be sure it was short range, and it took only a moment to spot the imposter running away from him through the thickening mist of the fen that covered most of the ground between here and the sea. 

Since the conversation was done, Simon felt no need to pull any punches. He wouldn’t be able to question a corpse since he had yet to learn much of anything related to necromancy, but a dead doppelgänger was probably better than more answers. 

Despite the fact that he’d already used a few words of power today, he cast a greater word of distant lightning and watched the flashing bolt that blazed down from the heavens as a slender line of ragged light. If the target had been close, that much power would have been as thick as a tree trunk. Even a little lightning would be enough to do the job, though. 

At least, it should have. Instead, as it approached the man, it winked out of existence, never managing to quite strike the ground before it vanished amidst a peal of thunder. 

Simon gawked for several seconds. He was tempted to try again, but instead he just said, “Son of a bitch.” He could still faintly see the silhouette of himself jogging deeper into the fog. Even as he realized that something was nullifying the magic, it was probably already too late. Belatedly, he realized he could probably bypass that anti-magic effect with an arrow propelled by force magic, before it reached the field, but that would have been a good thought to have a couple of moments earlier. Still, he drew his bow and an arrow and ran after his duplicate, seeking to catch up. Despite an exhausting twenty-minute jog, Simon only lost ground until he lost sight of him completely.  

Simon returned to the barrow, frustrated, both with how little he’d gained from this encounter and how little of it made any sense. “Why do I want this crown so bad?” he asked as he approached the sarcophagus and saw the paper crown on the head of the pinned zombie. Why do I always come back to this spot? Most importantly, isn’t this all supposed to happen years from now?”

Simon was here years before the zombies happened, which raised a number of important questions. The first was that he always assumed that this open barrow was the cause of the zombie outbreak. Was that not the case? Was it only indirect or completely unconnected?

The second was perhaps more important. He'd come here almost as soon as Simon could make it here from his starting point. There was no way that was a coincidence.

“Is it really possible that my evil twin just left the door open, and then years later, someone else stumbled in here, and…” Simon started asking himself, but he quickly set that thought aside. “He didn’t open the door, though, I did…”

The realization clarified things quite a bit. This was the source of the zombies, he realized, but tomb robbers that would come in years and cause that outbreak were entirely unrelated to the theft of the crown. They had to be; it was the only thing that made any sort of sense, and he felt stupid that it took him that long to put it together. Evil Simon was clearly wandering around the world with his own agenda, but Simon supposed he couldn't blame everything on him just yet, even if Helades explanation of time travel had been bullshit. 

She just doesn't want me using it, he told himself. Clearly, that was stupid, though, because he already had at some point in the future, and for some reason, he'd decided to use those powers for evil instead of good.

Simon sighed heavily. “Well, I guess that means I have to clear the rest of them out, too, just to make sure.”

Ch. 239 - Moldering Tombs

Rather than finish the whole thing in five days like he’d planned, it took Simon almost two weeks. In the end, he found out a bit about the exploits of Rognar the Pale, the Brojin Brothers, and a number of other historical figures who belonged to a now-extinct nation. However, no matter how many tombs he opened, none of them contained the unquiet dead. They were just empty tombs, and truthfully, he felt a little bad for breaking into them when all was said and done. 

Including his greater word of distant lightning, he’d wasted about three years of his life while he was here, but he’d get it back. When he’d purged the rest of the barrows, he searched the Reaver King’s one more time before he headed back. There, at least, he discovered a couple of small details.

There were no words he could find that caused the dead to rise up, which puzzled him because the same trap that would make the roof crumble was the result of words of power was still there and recognizable. “If magic isn’t bringing the dead to life, then what is?” Simon asked himself. He didn’t have an answer, though he could imagine many. After all, when he was a vampire, there was no clear evidence that runes had done this to him. 

Ultimately, it was a question he was unable to answer, and even as he leveled the place by triggering the trap from a distance, it was something he thought about a lot as he journeyed south to destroy the Blackheart. 

Even when he stopped in Schwarzenbruck to resupply, the thoughts didn’t entirely leave him except for a single moment in the marketplace where he was haggling with a merchant about the price of his bacon and salt pork. That was the moment that he saw Freya dart out from between two stalls before hurrying on her way with a few other children her age. 

He had no idea what game they were playing. He couldn’t even be sure that it was her, but somehow, he was anyway. She wore a gap-toothed smile and was as happy as Simon had ever seen her, and for a moment, that was enough. It wasn’t enough to erase the horrible things she'd done to him as a vampire, but it was enough to give him hope for the future he was building. 

As long as he could help that smiling girl and all the others like her become happy, smiling women with little girls of their own in a world free from rampaging armies and endless zombies, he was doing the right thing. Simon kept that thought in mind even as he journeyed south. 

Still, it was hard to know if he was doing a good job, and he doubted himself often since he didn’t even know how much of his previous work that one move had reset. Fortunately, it was that stray thought that eventually led to its own answer. 

“Mirror, show me the list of accessible levels,” Simon commanded two days later as he sat by a still pond, taking a break. 

It hadn’t occurred to him right away that he could use this ability to check how much he’d changed the timeline, but after obsessing about it for days, it occurred to him, eventually as a bolt of inspiration. He was not disappointed. 

‘Level 4 - An evil skeleton’s crypt.

Level 6 - Tavern infested with zombies.

Level 9 - Ruins on a mountaintop and a wyvern.

Level 10 - A dark forest at night with an owl bear.

Level 15 - A village in the midst of an orc raid.

Level 22 - A Costume Party.

Level 34 - ?????”

“Well, that certainly undid a lot of work,” he said as he looked through the list. “I wonder why it's these levels that I seem to have to repeat the most.”

It was a fair question, but it was one he didn’t have a good answer for. He’d probably repeated the wyvern level the most often, though dealing with the zombies in level six was the next most common, for sure. There were other levels, like the plants, that he never saw again once he’d completed it. It was like it didn’t exist anymore. 

That’s probably somewhere very far from here, though, he decided. It makes sense that nothing I do in this corner of the world would ripple out that far. 

Out of everything, though, the fact that level six was back again was the odd one out. That was the signal to him that he might not understand what was going on there as well as he thought he did. Simon considered spending more time up here to investigate that but decided against it for now. 

“It only says zombies because that's what I told the mirror to put there,” he reminded himself. “It could be back for anything. It could be a freaking bar fight. I can worry about it on my next run.”

It wasn’t like anything he did reset everything else. The rats and the goblins were still dead, and no matter how hard he looked, he couldn’t find the dungeon filled with gold that he’d sealed away so long ago. 

Fortunately, today, he wasn’t looking for that. He was seeking out the graveyard just outside Kawsburl, and when he stayed there for the night, passing himself off as a messenger heading to Abrese, no one gave him a second look. 

The people of this town were still as unwelcoming as they’d ever been. They had something to hide, but if you didn’t seem like you were sticking around, then they didn’t really care. He was pretty sure it was more than this tomb, but today, he didn’t really care, either. That was another mystery for another day. 

Today, he had one mission. Even though that mission would probably unlock several more levels, it was still something he had to do if he ever wanted to move forward. 

Still, that night, he had three beers too many and allowed himself a chance to grieve the loss of the wife that he never had and the son he’d spent far too little time with. It was only in the morning, after a word of lesser cure to eliminate his hangover and a breakfast of eggs and toast, that he went to the graveyard. 

That was an errand that he should have done last night instead of drinking, but he didn’t really care. He wouldn’t be sticking around here, and he cared very little what rumors his strange actions might cause. All that mattered was shattering this heart and moving on.

The battle to the thing had been easy for him for a long time. Even without his vorpal sword, which was useless against non-living targets, he had no trouble fighting his way through both floors of skeletons. Not even the knight gave him any real trouble. Simon studied the Blackheart for a few minutes to find any details he might have missed in previous visits, but it was just as he'd left it. Despite knowing basically every rune on the thing, he still didn’t understand precisely how it worked. That annoyed him on some level, but really, he had no interest in necromancy. 

Is it really even necromantic, though? He wondered. 

It seemed to have been created to extend life, perhaps even unnaturally so, to the point where it extended it all the way past death. He wasn’t totally convinced that was its original purpose. 

The fact that it was made out of obsidian struck him as interesting and even important, but that just made the thing easier to destroy. When he was ready to do that, he set it down on the floor and crushed it with a word of force from a safe distance. 

The thing shattered as easily as he’d expected. What was unexpected, though, was the burst of darkness and the wave of cold that spread out from that invisible impact. Even as the thing became nothing but a pile of broken glass, it managed to explode like an invisible bomb, and even though there was no shrapnel, Simon was staggered by the chill that passed through him. 

He staggered back a few steps on numb feet and then slumped against the wall as he tried to figure out if he’d been dealt a mortal wound or not. The breath he exhaled then fogged the air, and the skin of his fingertips looked frostbitten in places. With chattering teeth, he whispered the word of lesser healing, and that cleared up, but that couldn’t be enough to undo whatever it was that had just happened to him. He searched himself for some terrible wound he just couldn’t feel yet, but shockingly, he seemed fine, mostly. Even so, his mind was racing. 

What was that, and how bad did it hurt me, though, were secondary questions. The real question was how that was even possible. “If that was death energy, or cold or whatever, it doesn’t matter,” he told himself. “The real question is how that thing stored any amount of anything?”

Simon had long sought out a battery, capacitor, or some other magical equivalent. The closest he’d come was the ice orb or the dark heart. One seemed to store up heat, and he was pretty sure the other gathered unlife, but he could’t say for sure. He could think of a dozen ways to use one in his spells. Then, somehow, he’d found it by destroying one of the artifacts he’d known about for the longest. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it. 

“You can always come straight here next life and steal it before it gets destroyed,” he reminded himself. 

Still, that wasn’t enough, and even after he’d recovered from the shock of all of this, some part of it made him feel profoundly stupid. He should have been worried about where he was going next and what he was going to do with this life, but even as he staggered out of the tomb and let the sun warm him until the chill that reached his bones finally faded, he couldn’t get what had happened off his mind. He was missing something, and it was going to kill him until he figured out what it was. 

Simon was so distracted by this that he spent two days camping along a particularly lively river, fishing and thinking before he even asked the mirror to show him the current playing field. Then, not even his sadness at seeing Ionar reset was enough to penetrate his annoyance, at least not until he saw the basilisk level had returned. 

‘Level 6 - Tavern infested with zombies.

Level 9 - Ruins on a mountaintop and a wyvern.

Level 10 - A volcano in Ionar.

Level 11 - A dark forest at night with an owl bear.

Level 15 - A village in the midst of an orc raid.

Level 20 - A Basilisk amongst the ruins.

Level 21 - A haunted cemetery. 

Level 22 - A costume party.

Level 26 - A werewolf in the mountains.

Level 27 - Centaur raiders near Crowvar.

Level 34 - ?????”

“Level four is finally down and ten old levels back,” he said with a shake of his head as he counted one more time to make sure he’d gotten that right. “That’s ugly stuff.”

Simon sighed heavily. He still had to decide what he was going to do with this life, but after seeing his family vanish, the orphanage in Darndelle vanish, and his war against the centaurs erased, all he really wanted was a good stiff drink. 

Ch. 240 - What Now?

Simon was more impacted by the loss of so much progress than he thought he would be and was very glad he hadn’t taken Helades advice to wipe the slate clean any further. “Little adjustments,” he told himself as he packed up his camp that morning and went looking for a tavern further down the road where he could find something to drink and wash the bad taste of this recent development out of his mouth. 

“It’s not so bad,” he told himself unconvincingly. “This time, you can strike down the basilisk from a distance, and the orcs and the cemetery will be easy. You can even go with those kids and maybe stop Kaylee’s murderous rampage before…”

“Was it Kaylee? Or was it the other one that tried to kill all those nobles?” he wondered aloud. He couldn’t quite recall, and unless he walked back to the river he’d just left, there was no way to check. 

The truth was that he was overreacting to only a couple of those levels, and he shouldn’t. He knew better. Simon knew that Ionar would reset when he changed the levels preceding it. He also knew from his brief time with a dragon that none of those lives or events were really lost; they were just out of his reach. 

Out of my reach forever, more like, he thought glumly. 

It took him a few hours to get his mind right about all of this, and by then, he saw a village on the horizon. To call the sole inn on the place run down would have been an understatement, but beggars couldn’t be choosers, and though they didn’t have a still to make whiskey, they did have wine, and a few glasses of the sour red was all it took to get him to the point where he wasn’t worried about any of it at all.

Fortunately, though, he stopped before he managed to drink the barmaid pretty. Instead, he diced with some of the locals to keep his spirits up and won nearly as many coppers as he lost, which was good because aside from them, he really only had a few pounds of golden ornaments that hadn’t been melted down into coins yet. 

Even if they were coins, that much gold would be bound to raise eyebrows, though, Simon reminded himself. He knew that from hard experience. Losing money like this was better than losing his mind by letting his own thoughts engage in a vicious blood sport like dog fighting or bear-baiting like he knew they would if he was alone. 

“You just got to keep your attitude up and know that the Gods will provide,” one farmer told another who was complaining about the way this year’s crop was shaping up. 

“Yeah, but—” the unfortunate with the ruddy face said. 

“Some years are lean,” Simon interrupted, “But even a lean year is better than war or goblins.”

“Exactly my point,” the first man said, even though it wasn’t. “We got to count our blessings even when they’re meager, and peace is one such blessing!”

Even after he helped the complaining drunkard home and helped himself to a place in the man’s barn, Simon thought about the conversation while he lay there on a pile of hay, trying to sleep. It wasn’t about him or his problems, and yet some, it was. 

It was just the booze and the moroseness that he warred with, but somehow, it felt like more than that, though he couldn’t precisely say what. I’m on level 1 now, well, level 0, he corrected himself. I’ve changed the future, but how much? How do I even know if I’m making things better or worse? What if they’re just a different kind of awful?

Simon knew that he could just go back to his cabin, hop down to level six, and find out right now. He might have if that didn’t mean he would run into Freya again. Part of him thought that it might be better to just go linger in the north for a few years and figure out where the zombies came from, but somehow, that didn’t feel right either. 

“What I really need is some perspective,” he decided as he finally started to drift off to sleep. Where could he get that from? He had no idea. He could figure that out tomorrow. 

Unfortunately for him, that idea didn’t wait for tomorrow. It hounded him in anxious dreams as he tried to cling to the sides of cliffs and showed up to battle goblins without any armor. It was only when he finally fell, though, that he recalled another dream like that. 

“The Oracle.” He woke with her name on his lips just before sunrise. 

It wasn’t the worst idea. He knew about the easier path now, and she was only a few weeks away. A few weeks wasn’t much compared to how he’d spend his next life or two. He didn’t get much from the crazy dreams she’d given him last time, but he did find the strange temple city to be very comforting, and at the moment, it was that comfort that called to him more than anything.  

Simon rose and left that morning before anyone else was up. As he walked down the path toward the rutted road that led to town, he used a word of distant dispersed plant growth on the man’s field. He barely felt the slight surge of power from within him as it spread out into the field. 

That little power over as much of an area as he’d used it was probably a pointless use of a week of his life, but Simon didn’t care. This spot had given him a moment of inspiration, and he couldn’t ask for more than that. He’d found a problem, he’d tried to help, and he was moving on. There was nothing to him that seemed to indicate that the area was starving or anything. 

There were no large cities on the west side of Brin, and Slany was a little too far away to visit and see if young Gregor had been born yet. So, Simon walked straight southwest toward the mountains that separated him from the coast and Ionia. As he went, he realized that with the wyvern level had come undone, so had young Gregor’s future. Without Simon’s intervention, he was doomed to become a bitter, one-armed man. 

That annoyed him because that level had already come undone during his previous Ionia adventure in his life before last, which meant that his young friend had been suffering this whole time, and he didn’t even realize it. “And it’s all part of Helades grand plan,” he told himself bitterly. 

As Simon traveled over the next few days, he made a list of all the things he had to stop and people he had to save. He wasn’t sure he’d try for it this life or anything, but it passed the time, and he started to think of it as his perfect run, even though he knew there would never be any such thing. 

“You could save everyone, but it would be like lining the beach with sand castles, but in a generation, the tide of war will still come from the north and sweep over everyone anyway,” he reminded himself. “That’s what Helades should be trying to stop. Next to some of the plague outbreaks I help with, It's hard to think of anything bigger than war.”

That she didn’t seem the least bit concerned with it was a puzzle, and clearly one he was not meant to solve. At least so far, the early parts of the Pit seemed to be about saving a few people here and a few people there. He wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if the goal of the volcano level was to help a single person get to the ship instead of trying to stop the eruption, but that was bullshit. 

“I beat it before, and I can beat it again,” he reminded himself one night around a campfire where he ate at a rabbit he’d shot a few hours earlier. 

Later that night, a few goblins decided they wanted a taste, but Simon merely used them to feed his vampiric dagger instead. He didn’t need the energy, but he no longer felt bad about using such powers on vermin like this, as long as it was done in moderation. He didn’t want to become an addict again.

As the farmlands gave way to foothills and eventually mountain crags, his dinner options dwindled, but so did the likelihood that he was going to run into bandits. Those untamed places held far worse things than desperate men with swords, though. 

Things weren’t all bad, though. At one point, he found some wild grapes that were ripe before the birds did, and he feasted on those with a gusto that made him surprised he’d ever thought he hated fruit. Not even the seeds were enough to make him find a single fault with the tart berries. 

Several times, he saw flying beasts in the distance. Once, it was a wyvern, though he was pretty sure it wasn’t the wyvern he’d fought before. Two other times, he saw griffons. 

Well, he might have seen the same griffon twice. It was hard to say. The second time, he even spied its nest high on a cliff at least five hundred feet above the pass he was crossing. He took one look at that sheer location and decided that there was no way he was going up there. 

“If the thing wants a fight, I’ll shoot it down, but otherwise…” he let the statement linger, unfinished and stood ready to use a word of force to send it tumbling to the ground if he needed to. Fortunately, the thing either wasn’t hungry, or it didn’t spot him, and he continued on his way. 

That distance was a small comfort when he found an ogre’s lair, though. Even if he avoided trouble, it still found him. He’d smelled the place before he saw it, and truthfully, he thought it had been a beastman camp because those goaty bastards were filthy. It turned out the only beastmen there, though, had been used as dinner by the ten-foot-tall monster. 

Simon briefly considered skipping the thing. I don’t have to kill every monster, do I? He asked himself. His mind warred for a moment between his own feeling of personal responsibility and Helades comments about how he didn’t need to solve every problem. He’d almost convinced himself that she might be right, but then, as he got closer, he saw that some of the bones in the nearest pile were human. No, they were human. They were children’s bones or that of a very small woman. He couldn’t say for sure. 

Had they been merchants or pilgrims? Was there a village somewhere around here with grieving parents? “Helades would say that the real question is, is the future better off for most people if these people died here,” he said numbly. “My response is fuck that.”

Simon set his gear down, and with his eyes watering at the stench, he peered into the cave. It was a shallow thing that didn’t appear to be the secret entrance to some Shangri-La or long-forgotten dungeon. It was just a rotting garbage pit where a giant, primitive man-thing slept away the day on a pile of bear skin rugs. 

“I don’t have to fight it,” he decided aloud, “But I do have to make sure it never hurts anyone else ever again.”

Then, taking a moment to imagine the entire place caving in on itself, he shouted, “Gervuul Vrazig Vosden!” and used a greater word of earth ruining on the thing. It had just enough time to stir at the noise, but not enough time to rise or even bellow in pain before the stone above its head cracked and the mountain itself came down on it. 

Simon stood there for several seconds tensely to see if the thing would yet burst out of its tomb like some comic book villain, but it didn’t. The rocks never stirred. So, he walked over and planted a few of his grape seeds and then used a lesser word of plant growth on them. He couldn’t save the lives it had already devoured, but he could grant just a touch of new life to this barren escarpment before he continued on.