Death After Death

Moments later, the monster’s head rolled free of its body and tumbled down the sandy slope, leaving a smeared trail of purple blood behind it. Exhausted, Simon stabbed his flaming sword into the creature’s corpse one final time and shouted, “Helades!”

He paused for breath a moment, then started walking back toward the front of the temple where most of the other statues were. He thought he’d made it through the fight completely unscathed, but after a few steps, he discovered the truth. The basilisk had almost gotten him on his last run, and his left leg from the calf down had been turned to stone.

Simon paused partway to his destination and shouted again, “Helades! I’m on level twenty, and you owe me my question!” Then, before he kept moving, he tried a couple of middle-powered spells to see what could be done about his foot. Healing did nothing, but curing returned it to flesh, though he noticed that he’d lost all feeling, which made it worse than before. As a stone limb, it had been like walking with a peg leg, but now it was like walking with a dead piece of flesh.

“Which it probably is,” he muttered to himself as he staggered on and tried not to think of the leg rotting while it was still attached to him.

It was fine. He’d rest and then use a greater heal or something in a few hours. As he limped up the slope, he wondered if it might be smarter to cut the possibly dead limb off and create a new one with greater heal. He wasn’t sure. He’d reattached a finger on one of his men with lesser heal once, and that had worked well enough, but he’d never tried to grow a new limb before.

Simon shrugged. There was a first time for everything.

When he reached the first statue, he toppled it over with a shove, shattering the thing. He took the head and threw it further up the slope towards the center of the group and then staggered on to the next one. “Helades! You told me I could ask a question, and last time I was here, you did all the talking!”

Simon looked around to see if she’d appeared, and when she was still nowhere to be found, he continued breaking statues. God, he was exhausted. In the movies, they always said things like, ‘I’m getting too old for this shit.’ He’d always thought that was dumb, but right now, he felt literally too old for this shit.

Still, the exhaustion of the fight wasn’t enough to stop him, and slowly but surely, he made a pile of heads. When he had almost two dozen of them there on the flagstones of the temple’s stairs, he finally took cover behind a pillar and whispered, “Ó̷̙o̸̺̓n̵͓̾b̶̠̒ě̴̪t̷̳͠ỉ̸̘ṫ̵̼,” imagining them being crushed downward like a vice.

In the immediate aftermath, he heard stone shrapnel spray out, and he felt himself go dizzy, but when he looked up, he could see that most of the heads were still largely intact. It hadn’t been enough.

“Ó̷̙o̸̺̓n̵͓̾b̶̠̒ě̴̪t̷̳͠ỉ̸̘ṫ̵̼.” he said again, grinding the bigger parts down into smaller chunks and noting that not all of them were destroyed yet.

He couldn’t save these people’s lives, but he could save their souls. He could get them out of the hell that they were stuck in. He might be the only one who ever would.

Simon knew he should rest. He knew he shouldn’t push himself much further, but he still yelled. “Ó̷̙o̸̺̓n̵͓̾b̶̠̒ě̴̪t̷̳͠ỉ̸̘ṫ̵̼!” again. Simon’s vision greyed briefly as he poured out his power to destroy the stone. He needed this. He needed to vent his rage because of all the other things he should have been able to do but hadn’t.

He felt the tears well up in his eyes as he thought about all the things he hadn’t been able to do, but wiped them away so he could get a good look at the pile of gravel in front of him. One more hit would almost certainly be enough to reduce them to sand and dust. Hopefully, then he’d be able to—

“Enough,” Helades called out from further up the slope, standing in the shadow of the temple.

Simon looked up, with his mouth still open, and sighed. Saying anything without carefully considering his words might be construed as a question. He hadn’t actually thought he’d get this far. He hadn’t actually thought he’d kill the basilisk, and if he did, he hadn’t expected that she would actually appear to talk to him, so Simon hadn’t actually picked a question to talk to her about. So, he took the opportunity as he slowly strode up the wide, shallow staircase to consider that.

“You know, this used to be a temple dedicated to me, in its way,” she said nostalgically before she turned and started walking into the half-collapsed thing, leaving Simon to catch up. “That was a long time ago, though.”

Simon ignored that. The last thing he cared about was Helades. There were so many other questions to explore, including the one that mattered most to him. Was she faithful? Could I have saved her? Did Varten… They were unthinkable questions that were enough to make him tear up all over again, and he wiped his face with his sleeve even as he tried to focus.

He knew that this was a valuable opportunity, and he shouldn’t waste it trying to make himself feel better, but he couldn’t help it. Asking about the aura some people could see, and their strange reaction would be a better choice. Likewise, there were so many questions he wanted to ask about the devil on level 13 or the nature of magic items and the frozen orb he’d found on level 17. Then there were the missing floors. The pit had a thousand mysteries he needed answers to.

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No matter how much he wanted any of those things, though, Freya kept returning to the top of the pile, and he knew he was going to ask about her, even if it wasn’t the optimal thing. He had to. He needed to know, and by the time he made it to the doorway of the temple, he’d made up his mind.

“Helades, How—” he started to ask, but she cut him off.

“It used to be beautiful once here, you know,” she said, gesturing broadly at the wall behind him. “Not just this temple, but the city too, and the region. Now, it is just an oasis that is critical to certain events that have to happen in the future. Trade is key for both knowledge and prosperity.”

As she spoke, he glanced over his shoulder toward where she was pointing and noticed a large mural of what the city must have looked like once. It was overwhelmingly Greek or maybe Roman. He wasn’t sure, but it was lovely enough to make him wonder what had befallen this place.

He was about to turn back toward Helades and finish his question when he noticed the lake that someone had painted with a silver glaze so that it was just reflective enough to be a distorted mirror. That was enough to give him pause, though, and he approached it for a closer look.

What he found wasn’t his father staring back at him, but his grandfather. His hair had gone almost completely white, and his skin had wrinkled. He looked down at his hands and began to pull off his leather gloves with shaking hands, finding nothing but liver spots and wrinkles underneath.

“H-how did I get so old…” he asked.

Simon knew he’d screwed up as soon as he asked, but there was nothing for it. Even as he was turning to Helades, she was already smiling sadly.

“Don’t worry,” she reassured him as she took him by the hand and led him over to the closest piece of rubble large enough to function as a bench before sitting them both down on it. “You’ll have time for your other questions too. You’ll be to level thirty and forty before you know it, Simon. You’re doing wonderfully.”

“But Freya and…” he trailed off as he tried to take her words in. Now that he’d seen how old he’d gotten somehow, he felt like his mind had started to slow down, or maybe it had been doing that ever since the fight with the monster outside. He honestly couldn’t say for sure.

“Shhhh,” Helades soothed him, “Your wife was a good girl, and she’s in a much better place. We aren’t here to talk about her today. We’re here to talk about you and how time flies.”

“How could this have happened?” he demanded piteously. “Only a day or two ago, I was fine, with just a touch of gray, and before that…”

“Well, you have used an awful lot of magic in the last couple of days,” she chided him gently. “Like it was going out of style, so to speak.”

“Well, I’ve been casting spells the whole time I was in The Pit,” he said, “and it’s never mattered before.”

“More specifically, you’ve always died violently before it’s gotten around to mattering,” she corrected him gently. “But this time, you lived for… well, almost a year. That’s a lot of soldiers to mend and a lot of monsters to slay, and then there’s the sword…”

“What about the sword?” he asked, feeling like she’d mentioned something important.

“Well, Simon, when you copied those runes, you tied it to the only source of power you had available: you.” Helades saw his look of shock, she added. “Where did you think all of that fire was coming from exactly? Nothing is free in this world, not even magic.”

“I… ” Simon started to speak, but he forgot what he was going to say, and for a moment, he felt like he was going to faint.

“It’s fine,” she said, pulling him down into her lap. “Spells themselves aren’t so bad. They take perhaps a month, but—”

“A month?!” he gasped. “Each? That’s worse than smoking!”

“Well, the minor command throttles the life force. They’re more like a day,” she said with a shrug. “It’s not an exact thing.”

“What about the greater spells then?” Simon asked, not sure that he wanted to know the answer.

“A year,” she answered without hesitation. “That’s a lot for anyone but you. With magic items, most of the evil mages throughout history will use the life force of less-than-willing victims or other clever tricks, but between your sword and your armor, you’re bleeding more than a week a minute from your soul right now. That’s why you’ve gotten so much older. Magic can be very dangerous.”

“Like the orb and the hellgate,” Simon said, feeling exhausted. He felt more at peace now that he understood what had happened.

“Yes,” she agreed, reaching up to stroke his hair softly. “No matter how much the good men of the world try to purge the magic of the past, there will always be someone out there that discovers some old secret. Nothing can stay buried forever.”

Simon wanted to ask her about that, but he was too weak to do so. He was all used up. All he could do was lay there and appreciate the cool stone beneath him as he looked up at the beautiful Goddess.

“You’ll figure out all of that eventually, Simon,” she whispered. “I have faith in you. You’ve become what you always wanted to be - A hero.”

He closed his eyes then, imagining that Freya was the one who was holding him and telling him these things. He’d often wanted to die in the pit, but never more so than he did right now. If he were to die right this moment, he was sure that he’d be reunited with his Freya in the afterlife, and then he’d finally have his answers. Instead, he was going to have to do all of this all over again.

Simon reached up and clutched the ring around his neck as he felt himself start to slip away. This wouldn’t stop him, he decided, as he imagined that flaming sword burning down like a candle somewhere outside. No matter how many times he died, he was coming back to finish this thing. He’d go as deep as he needed to until all of his questions were answered.

His hand gripped the small piece of jewelry around his neck, and then it slackened… and fell to the floor as he experienced an entirely new death in The Pit: old age.

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