Death After Death

Chapter 121: The Long Way

With only his mirror, half a sword, a particularly ragged bedroll, some salt-encrusted armor, a small piece of flint, eight silver coins in a canvas pouch, his trusty fishing spear and a pair of boots that weren’t going to last much longer, left to his name, Simon finally left that familiar beach and started walking east along the coast. These lands were not completely wild, and he was sure he would find villages along the way.

It only took four days to find his first fishing village, and two more to find his second. It even took less than a week to find his first bandits, though he seemed to have little enough worth stealing, and they left him alone as he walked past, looking more than a little like a crazy old hermit.

It was a pity, too. A couple of those toughs had nice swords, and Simon would have had no compunction stealing one of them from their corpses. He continued his journey in near silence, breaking it only to hail travelers going the other direction and ask them for news from up ahead.

Well, that and hunting. Thanks to the deprivations of the weather, Simon no longer had a bow, but he was also completely sick of fish. So, when he saw a plump hare feasting on grasses not so far from him. Simon used the lesser word of force to turn a pebble into a sling bullet and gave it the force his arm never could. It was the easiest choice in the world.

After all, he’d much rather give up a week of his life for something to eat that wasn’t from the sea at this point. That would have been true even if he wasn’t going to get it back when he died.

That night, he feasted on charred, greasy meat for the first time in months, and he lay there in the scraps of his bedroll feeling blessed. “How can I be this happy with this little?” he asked himself.

He didn’t try to answer his own question. He just appreciated it.

It wasn’t until he reached the first town of any size in Fia, almost a hundred miles away from where he'd started at Ionar. It was there he learned that he had over a hundred fifty miles to go to reach Abrese, but he wasn’t in a hurry. Why wasn’t he? Because the portal he needed was almost certainly gone by now, and even if he managed to track down the Sea Seraph to whatever port she was currently in, he doubted that the portal would still work after all this time.

No, I’m probably trapped herefor a long time, he decided, for better or worse.

Still, that certainty was no reason to mope about it. He was sure he could get up to some fine adventures here on the coast. Maybe he’d even take up sailing for fun. He was a strong swimmer now, and other than a bit malnourished, he was in excellent shape. He could do about anything he wanted.

And tonight, what he wanted more than anything was a hot bath. So, he traded away one of his precious silver coins for a handful of coppers, a soft bed, a warm meal, and a hot bath. He even vowed to get a shave tomorrow when the barber was finally open. Once he was clean and fed, he started to spend those coppers one at a time for another delicacy he’d dearly missed: warm beer.

After two large tankards, he settled into a warm haze of contentment and listened more than he talked to the other travelers that were there that night. He heard that the plague in Abrese was largely resolved, but he’d already expected that to be the case. These things didn’t last forever. More interestingly, though, was the news about Ionar.

“I heard someone finally slew that wretched, evil plant monstrosity,” an older trader who’d come from the west said. “Of course, I ain’t seen it with my own eyes yet, but I want to believe it’s so.”

Until that moment, he’d thought that opportunity was lost to him, but now it ate at him, even when he lay in bed at night. These people needed him, but really, how much did he owe them? In his next run, he would prevent this evil and save all their lives. As it was, he would run out of years in his own life before he ran out of people to save.

He stayed conflicted about that for several days, and he had a particularly terrible idea when he realized it was time to leave. Somewhere in the back of his mind, that thirst for the sweet life force still lingered, even after all these months. It was there even when he healed the sick in his makeshift hospital. The stray thought that he could steal the life of the criminals or the dying and use it to heal those that were worth saving followed him everywhere.

That was too much power in his hands, and he knew that as noble as his aims might be, he’d end up as a junkie or worse. So, with only a little gray in his hair, he resolved to leave before it was too late. So, he stripped down to nothing but his under clothes and his knife and took to diving in the harbor every day looking for the answer to that burning question.

At first, his search was slow. It took several days of diving in those murky waters before he found the right ship. Apparently, the city had endured at least as much chaos as it had disease because, ultimately, the pier he sought had been burned to the water line.

As a result, he dived the wrecks of a dozen ships that weren’t even close to where he needed to be before he found the Sea Seraph. When he finally located her, she was lying on her side, half drowned in silt.

Simon had no word for air, though he dearly wished he did. So, instead, he rested for half an hour before he dove as deep as he could to see if the portal in the captain’s quarters might still be in place, somehow, against all the odds. Then, refreshing his word of minor light, he took a deep breath and dove deep, kicking as hard as he could to get twenty yards beneath the waves before he felt the nagging need to breathe force him to return to the surface.

This time, well rested as he was, it was almost easy, and he quickly reached the captain’s cabin in the stern castle. The door was shut, and he couldn’t open it, so he swam around to the back and came in through the broken window.

He was starting to run low on air, but he wasn’t worried yet, and his light was still bright enough, so he looked around for any clues about what might have happened in all this. All he found, though, was the captain’s skeleton pinned to the wall by the same desk that Simon had seen the man slumped over the last time he was here. The skeleton had been picked nearly clean, but Simon saw a coin pouch on the ground that was not so far away, so he scooped it up.

He was free-diving with nothing but his small clothes and a knife, after all. If he got through this portal, he’d need funds to buy new gear in Crowvar or somewhere similar.

With Simon’s air starting to run low, he hurried to the door, and tried it from this side. It was still stuck, which was something he could have fixed in an instant with a word of force. He didn’t have one of those right now, though. So instead he braced himself against one of the roof beams and pushed with all his might.

I’m not fucking drowning again, Simon thought to himself as he stretched and forced the strong muscles of his legs to give everything they had against the stubborn, waterlogged wood. For a second, he feared it wouldn’t be enough, but then, he felt it budge just the smallest bit, and a second later, it gave way entirely.

Simon worried the portal wouldn’t open after all this time, but it did, and suddenly, he was riding a waterfall out of the ocean and into the darkness of the cavern beyond. It was a vaguely terrifying experience, and he landed on the stone floor gasping for breath and more than a little banged up. Still, he’d survived, somehow.