Death After Death

Though he’d never heard of these insects outside this level, they didn’t seem to be a new hazard for the region. “They rarely come this far from Mount Hizarth,” Millen said softly, filling Simon in on the particulars of the hazard they faced. “My dad said there was a swarm like this when he was young, but—”

“We couldn’t have known!” the headman growled, interrupting their conversation with preemptive words of self-defense. “I couldn’t have known that he wasn’t just a crackpot.”

That was growing to be a habit for the man, who was certainly feeling the guilt keenly as each new group succumbed to the tiny monsters in a dull chorus of screams. He had to know that if he’d only given the word, everyone would have joined them down here. Now, he was going to live while so many had died. Simon could tell from the sharp looks the old man got that everyone else had those thoughts, too, and for once, he didn’t do anything to try to soften the group up.

Instead, he talked to them about their stories and learned what he could about the dark swarm. There were many stories to tell, apparently. In some versions of the myth, they were the children of a demon bound beneath a large boulder that reached out into the world for some way to free their sire, and in others, they were the curse of a farmer who had died of starvation amidst his locust ravaged fields cursing the gods.

The topics were interesting, and placed the monsters outside somewhat closer to the boogieman than a hurricane. Everyone knew about the vicious little bugs, but no one expected them to actually have to deal with them; they existed mostly to scare disobedient children. After he learned all he could about the dark swarm outside, though, and no signs that goblins or giant spiders were about to crawl up out of the underworld and attack them, Simon’s thoughts slowly became fixated on the evil version of himself and everything that had happened after that.

With so many people and animals crowded around him, most of the time, he couldn’t produce a mirror and ask it any questions, but that didn’t stop his thoughts from churning. For the next day or so, whether he was trying to reassure frightened villagers or chat with the young boy, Aaric, his mind was a million miles away as he tried to untangle that lifetime and figure out what he should do about any of it.

The obvious thing would be to go to the barrow mounds before him and steal the crown. That would cause some kind of time travel paradox by keeping him from existing, though, wouldn’t it? He thought.

Well, that was true only if it was possible for Simon to get there before his double. There was no reason to suppose that he could if his alter ego had figured out some magic word that would allow him to travel between levels or, worse, timelines at will.

There was also one other very good reason he couldn’t do that, he realized, at least, not yet. “Elthena,” he whispered to himself in a quiet moment. Until he’d resolved everything he wanted to do in that life, he couldn’t change a single detail before Ionar.

That wasn’t such a big deal. That just meant he couldn’t end the Skeleton Knight yet, but still, it galled him. The right move was to drop everything and devote every resource and every life to understanding the nature of his doppelgänger until he\'d solved the mystery and put that awful version of himself out of his misery.

Was it me? That was the question he wanted to know more than anything. Was it me and not some demon? Then what happened to make me become so awful?

Simon couldn’t answer that, but as long as he was unwilling to let go of his life in Ionar, he couldn’t even really effectively dig into the issue. It was like fighting with one hand behind his back. While he realized that more answers might well present themselves in future levels, he also decided that he might well be playing into the hands of the other version of Simon if he did that.

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I guess I’ll have to get to level 40 and talk with Helades about this, he decided with a shake of his head. It wasn’t ideal, given how far he had left to go, but what choice did he have? From where he was standing, 9 levels seemed like the easiest path to his answers, even if one of those levels was a dragon.

Maybe I can just find the gate and skip that one for a while, he thought, hopefully.

Skipping things wasn’t really an option when he was trapped in an old mine shaft, sandwiched between Millen’s young family and half a herd of sheep.

At least this time, the girls will live, he told himself. It was a small consolation for everything else that was happening and unlikely to be the key to the level, but he would take it.

Roughly a day after they last heard the sound of humming, they opened a crack in the barricade to look around, not sure what to expect. Simon looked around warily for a few seconds, noting the apparently dead bugs that were scattered across the ground in great numbers.

He used a whispered word of minor force to move a few of them around and see if they would stir to life, and when they didn’t, he pronounced it safe to leave the shelter. When the townspeople returned to the surface, it was to a different world. The buildings were still intact and unchanged, except for the littered corpses of the thumb-sized bug corpses. Anything that was edible, though, was gone.

That extended to the obvious, of course, like people and plants. That was never in doubt. What was more curious, though, was that it included cloth and leather, too. Skeletons were scattered throughout the small village, and all the trees and crops that he should have been able to see from here were entirely denuded. The area hadn’t exactly been lush or anything, but there had been more than a few fruit and nut orchards scattered around the place. Now, there were only the bare limbs and scared bark. It was like the world had gone from summer to winter and entirely skipped the harvest season.

The heartbreak on the faces of many was plain, and Simon chose not to patronize them by telling them that they could rebuild. They knew that as well as he did, but more than that, they knew what a hard road it would be between here and there. Such a thing might take years, given the damage.

Instead, Simon asked, “Will you move the village further away? How do you know this won’t happen again?”

“Aren’t you the one that’s supposed to tell us that?” Millen said, trying to turn it into a joke. “You were the one that predicted this, weren’t you?”

“True enough,” Simon nodded, mentally kicking himself. “Unfortunately, the Gods have provided me with no new insights.”

“Well, you be sure to tell us if they do,” the farmer nodded. “Until then, we’ll be here doing what we can.”

That night, many of the villagers found their way to Simon to thank him for saving them. He accepted that gratitude but took no part in any of the small celebrations that followed. Instead, he studied the remains of the bugs, trying to figure out what might happen next.

He’d worried that they’d burrowed into the ground and laid eggs that might not hatch for years like some kind of demonic cicada, but they seemed even less natural than that. The hard carapaces had become brittle, and the innards didn’t contain eggs but ashes. There was definitely a touch of sulfur about these things.

“Please don’t tell me this comes back to hell too, somehow,” he sighed to himself.

It was hard to draw that conclusion from a single smell, but he had his concerns already with other things like that awful seed and even his double. Someone or something was periodically injecting really evil things into this world, and he was pretty sure that sooner or later, he was going to have to cut the head off that snake.

The next day, he gathered as many of the women and children as he could and set them to gathering the husks just in case. They tried burning them in a large fire. They didn’t burn very well at first, but once the fire got hot enough, they sizzled and exploded like sap-drenched pine as they sputtered and sparked before crumbling to ash.

There was no way they could get all of them, of course, but it was better safe than sorry. While they were doing all this, he decided that the true resolution for this level was probably on the mountain that Millen had mentioned earlier, but Simon didn’t plan to investigate that on this trip. Not when he had some nearly fireproof armor that needed fixing and a date with a dragon.

Besides, he thought with a shake of his head as he recalled just how much gray was in his hair at this point. This run is coming to a close soon, one way or the other. Simon wasn’t giving up, of course. He was just being realistic. He was still half crippled from falling off the volcano, and he didn’t rate his odds of solving another level very high just now. Still, he wasn’t in the mood to give up and hit the reset button.

Simon spent three days helping the villagers gather the husks and another week helping Millen’s family get settled into their place. In the end, he slipped away in the night shortly after that.

He was fairly certain that the next level was the crossroads, and after a quick peek confirmed it, it sealed the deal. He’d been fairly certain that he was going to leave Daisy behind as a parting gift, but with such a convenient location and a pocket full of gold, he was certain he could buy a new mount or pack animal to haul his junk around. Millen’s family needed another animal a lot more than he did at this point. So, without so much as a goodbye, he hauled his bundle over the threshold and closed the door behind him, disappearing into the next level.