Death After Death

There were a lot of parts about his last journey this deep that were a little hazy to Simon. For instance, it wasn’t until he was standing at the block of ice that he could really remember if the swamp level or the plague level came first. One thing he was certain of, though, was that he wasn’t staying in the same house he’d slept in last time, just feet away from a corpse.

“That shit was vile,” he muttered to himself as he started walking down the street, groping blindly in the dark for the next door.

Even after a minute, the night was so dark that he had trouble seeing much more than the vague shadows of corpses on the ground. So, eventually, he pulled his flaming sword just to have a torch to see with.

“This is an awfully complex flashlight,” he said with a laugh. As he spoke, he noted how crude the lines of his glyphs and runes were, compared to the handwork of the orb he’d examined only a few minutes before and the way the fire sizzled unevenly across the blade. “But hey - whatever works, right?”

The flaming sword gave him enough light to navigate and see, but every home he tried was either barred from the inside or contained corpses in varying states of decay. It also made him unbelievably hot, and after a few houses, he was forced to stop, sheath his sword, and then shed his armor before he could continue on.

“God - if I have to make a whole set of magic equipment for every level, this shit is going to take forever,” he grumbled as he started off again.

He tried to do the math in his head. He’d really only spent two or three weeks working on his enchanting project. The rest had all been recovery, so it didn’t really count, but even so, a perfect run would be like 5 years at that pace.

“Ain’t nobody got time for that,” he sighed.

Less than ten minutes later, Simon found something that stopped him cold. It wasn’t another disgusting dead body, though, or even a house that was empty. It was a mirror.

When he’d seen his distorted expression in the ice, Simon had thought that the cold and the weight loss had made him look older, but when he finally found a fine, silvered mirror in the house of some well-to-do craftsman, he could tell it was more than that at first glance. For starters, he had gray fucking hair and wrinkles around his eyes.

He had trouble recognizing himself most of the time these days, but usually, that was in a good way. This was most definitely not. He was probably 30 now, but he might be 31. But he looked like he was 45 easy.

“Is that from the magic I’ve been casting?” he asked himself as he touched his skin with his free hand. “Is this from that fucking orb?”

He had no idea which was the more likely culprit, but he was fairly sure that he hadn’t looked like this before now. Surely someone would have mentioned it in Rivenwood, or Freya would have told him that he was looking a little rough when they’d lived in Crowvar.

He cursed himself for not bothering to buy a mirror for that house. They were expensive, and he hadn’t thought such a luxury was necessary at the time. Now, he dearly wished he’d had the baseline. Surely, if it was some byproduct of the magic, he would have noticed himself changing a little week by week and month by month, wouldn’t he? Simon tried hard to remember the last time he’d gotten a good look at himself, but his recent head injury made memories in that time frame muddy and difficult to remember with real certainty.

“Whatever,” he said, feeling somehow cheated. “This doesn’t change anything anyway.”

Simon changed his plan, and instead of searching the rest of this dead city in vain for a corpse-free home, he simply went upstairs and found a spare bedroom that no one had died in and decided to call it a day here.

Technically, Simon didn’t really need to sleep yet. He’d only been awake for 6 or 8 hours and wasn’t particularly tired, but he wasn’t going to explore a city full of corpses in the dark. That was just asking for a zombie to pop up and bite him or worse. Besides, he had the word for cure now, so he doubted something as simple as a plague could do much to harm him at this point.

He was hopeful that the spell would work on whatever it was that zombies did when they bit you, too, of course, but as he blocked the door with a chair and stripped down to his small clothes, he admitted to himself that he was not looking forward to finding out if that was true or not. He’d honestly prefer not to find out. He might even blow his own head off rather than take the risk, but he was sure he’d come across someone he could try to save on this trip to hell one day, and anyone who’d been bitten by a zombie was bound to be a very grateful guinea pig, he decided with a smile.

The bed he’d chosen was one of the softest he’d laid on in a long time. It was nicer than anything he’d had since he’d known the joys of Egyptian cotton in the modern world. Even that wasn’t enough to let him rest, though.

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Instead, a variety of thoughts warred in his head. Why was he here in this city after everyone had died? Why wasn’t he here when people were just starting to get sick so he could do something to save them?

Surely Simon could teach a few dedicated healers the word for lesser cure, couldn’t he? Even if that magic aged them prematurely as it might have done with him, that would be a small enough price to pay, wouldn’t it? A dozen lives to save hundreds?

Why didn’t the portal open to the merchant ship that had brought this plague here or the wagon that it had lain dormant in across long trade roads to get here? These were all good questions, of course. Good enough to torment him as he lay there in the dark, wondering what the point of all this was.

He didn’t have any answers, though. He didn’t even know for sure what had caused him to age like this or when it had happened. It was frustrating, and ultimately, it was that simmering frustration that had let him nap until dawn finally colored the sky.

He slept fitfully, and he remembered only pieces of a dream involving Freya and the son they’d never had. It had been so happy that Simon woke up with a smile on his face until he remembered the truth. She was dead, and nothing could change that. Not even tracking her down and trying to make it work all over again.

It was a heartbreaking moment as he tried to reconcile the false, joyful existence with the grim reality. He sat there on that stranger’s bed, trying to put those raw, ragged emotions back into the box deep inside himself.

He hadn’t killed her, and he’d done his best to save her, but he should never have left her alone. He knew that now. He knew that put her blood on his hands to some degree and that there was nothing he could do to fix that now.

He should have fixed it by fleeing the orcs rather than neglecting her for days and days as he tried to defend the Crowvar. No, he should have taken her from that place as soon as he’d realized what a creep the lord of the area and his son were. He would probably have been better off taking her to some deserted piece of country land and building her a log cabin.

Monsters would no doubt have attacked them eventually. He knew that. At least they would have died together, though. That wouldn’t have been a death that tormented him half as much as the one he was forced to remember now.

Only when he’d gotten himself under control did Simon finally rise with renewed purpose. He was going to figure out just what the hell made a city of the dead a worthwhile stop on his whirlwind trip through hell, no matter how many times he had to heal himself of this disease until he found it.

The city was no friendlier in dawn’s light than he remembered it from his last visit. Here and there, doors were daubed with red X’s that meant they contained bodies, but Simon knew the truth after his vain search last night. Those marks were from some earlier point in the plague. Before, whoever had been trying to keep order had given up. Now, there were piles of bodies in the streets, nearby already full carts loaded with corpses wrapped in funeral shrouds.

It was a mess, and it only took a little searching to realize that anyone who had survived this had done so by managing to flee a long time ago. That wasn’t the interesting part to him, though. The interesting part was that after walking down a few streets in the daylight, he was sure that he’d been here before.

The first time he’d been to this level, it had just struck him as a shithole little town, but to be fair, his impression of Hurag while it was still a bustling little city the first time he’d walked through hadn’t been much different. It was still a little shithole wedged between two rivers. It was still pretty much that same little shithole of course, though it had a few more stone buildings than he remembered, but now it was full of the dead.

That mystery solved, Simon thought about walking to the temple of Ethryes and leaving. However, to be honest, he wasn’t totally sure where that was, and the idea of a temple full of dead priests who lacked the magic to even save themselves was more than a little depressing. So, he headed slowly back toward the south, which was where he thought it would be, avoiding the worst swarms of flies where he could.

Eventually he stopped, as he discovered what he could only describe as a primitive hospital in the main market. There, under pavilion tents, were dozens of cots laid out in orderly rows, and Simon felt compelled to explore it.

From the looks of the corpses, some of them had been dead for days, but a few, near the end, looked like they might still be alive. Really, it was like a macabre museum display. The oldest bodies were already bloating and rotting, but as he moved back, he could see the boils swell, and the black and blue streaks started to spread across the skin. It was a progression out of a medical textbook and equal parts disgusting and fascinating.

Simon quickly checked for a pulse but found none. All the likely candidates were still and cold, and though he didn’t regret trying to help them, he suddenly felt an overpowering need to wash his hands.

As he walked over to the small fountain on the north wall, he found something else that was still familiar. There, sprawled out on the ground, was a man wearing a plague mask made of leather and canvas, just like he’d seen in video games. That was an oddity that was enough to make him wonder. Was it possible that this was some isekaied person from his world?

Sadly, he’d never get the chance to ask a dead man, he thought as he bent down to retrieve the thing for a closer look. “Don’t mind me, pal - it looks like you don’t really need this anymore,” Simon said as he undid the strap. “You can—”

As he removed the mask, though, he found another surprise. The man was still breathing, faintly at least. For a moment, Simon backpedaled, worried the man might be about to turn into a zombie.

He put his hand on his hilt, but as soon as the stranger blinked and tried to speak, Simon relaxed. This guy wasn’t about to devour his flesh. He was as weak as a kitten, and unless Simon did something, he definitely wasn’t going to make it.

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