Death After Death

Chapter 36: Life After Death After Death

When Simon woke up in bed in the cabin as he’d done two dozen times before, it was with relief that bordered on disbelief. He just lay there unmoving for several minutes as he stared at the ceiling. Finally, he worked up the courage to turn his head, which somehow managed to feel climactic. After that, he flexed his hands and wiggled his toes before he finally tried sitting up. He’d feared that after the years or decades, he’d been lying beneath the sand, he would have forgotten how to move, but that wasn’t the case.

The first thing he did was look in the mirror and consider asking it a question to see if he was still capable of speech. That was a silly fear, of course, and he shrugged it off with a forced laugh as he reached for the wine.

“Fuck that,” he muttered as he decided the last thing he wanted to see right now was his character sheet. His experience was probably at like minus a million right now, and honestly, he was better off not knowing. Besides - he was sure his skills had dropped since he hadn’t used them in such a long time, and that would probably hurt more, given how much he’d suffered to improve them.

Instead, after he took a long drink, savoring the lost sensation of taste that had been restored before trying a bit of the food and reveling just as much in that. Intellectually he knew the bread and cheese he had was mediocre at best, but that didn’t stop it from tasting amazing in the moment. “Well, what now?” he asked himself once that was done.

From here, he could see all the gear he usually took on his quests into The Pit, but that was the last thing he wanted to see right now. There was no way he was going down there right now. Honestly, he wasn’t sure he was going to that deep ever again. As far as he was concerned, level twenty was a no-go zone. Level six might be, too, honestly.

He wasn’t sure he had it in him to be a zombie or statue again. Getting stabbed to death or dying of exposure was fine. Normal deaths could be painful or humbling, but the crazy ones where he died and kept living? He was completely over it.

Simon looked around for literally anything he could do besides gearing up for a fight. He opened up the dresser and saw nothing of interest. Still, in the top drawer under a stranger’s small clothes, he finally found something promising: a handful of fishhooks. At first, he didn’t realize what they were because they were made of bone, but eventually, his brain decided that was the only thing they could be used for. He looked around the room for a fishing pole or at least a little string he could tie to the spear.

Fishing would solve nothing, but that was precisely the point. Right now, the last thing Simon wanted to do was solve or fix anything. He just wanted to be for a while and remember what that felt like.

Fishooks in hand, he went outside with nothing but his dagger, waterskin, and a little food. He didn’t recall there being a shed or anything, but he hadn’t exactly looked for one, so anything was possible. A quick look around showed him that there was no shed, but a few tool pegs were built into the back wall of the cabin.

There he found a shovel and an axe meant for chopping down trees instead of the one inside that was obviously meant for chopping up monsters. Above those, though, just below the eaves where he almost missed it, was a simple wooden fly-fishing rod. It lacked a reel or any other fancy bits and pieces he was used to, but it had plenty of line and looked like it would do the job.

While Simon walked to the part of the stream he thought was the best place to do this, he contemplated the pole. It looked so like his grandfather’s that for a long time after he sat down in the shade by the water, all he could do was look at it and remember what the old man had tried to teach him before his PSP had monopolized his attention. His parents had used the man as a free babysitter for years. Still, Opa, as he preferred to be called by his beloved grandchildren, had always tried to get him to take an interest in being outside more.

At the time, he figured it was pure perversity: the kids wanted to be inside watching TV, so why not take them fishing, hiking, camping, or literally anything but sitting on the couch. “He was probably just trying to keep me from getting fat,” Simon said with a wry smile.

It was almost sunset when he finally decided to call it a day. He was enjoying the nostalgic moment as long as he could. With a grunt, he got up, dusted off his ass, and then after winding up his line around the pole, he picked up the fish and found a nice flat rock, making quick work of the thing. His dagger was shit for scaling, but no matter how many bones he was going to have to pick out of his dinner tonight, he was determined to enjoy it.

“Thanks, Opa,” he said quietly as he started toward the cabin in the darkening twilight.

The fire would be out by now. He’d forgotten about that, but he should be able to fix that with a half-assed fire spell if he was careful. It was fully dark by the time he could see the cabin by starlight. It was only when he was 50 yards away he watched a pair of goblins skulking out of the nearby forest.

It wasn’t hard to see him. The little bastards had a crude torch with them. That surprised Simon, but mostly because they didn’t usually try to burn the house down around him until the third night. He crouched down on the path and watched them get closer and closer, but they didn’t try to light the wood alight. Instead, they tested the closest shutters.

That at least made sense to him. They weren’t trying to burn the place down yet. These were the ones that had made footprints trying to break into his place in the past. “That means they’re going for the door,” he whispered to himself, rising to his feet as he advanced purposefully. The last thing he wanted were goblins in his house. They smelled like shit.

Simon intercepted them just before they reached the door. The goblin without the torch noticed him and screeched in alarm just before he brought the fishing pole down on the little bastard’s head, hard enough to crack it. The second goblin responded by waving the torch back and forth in his face like a weapon, but Simon wasn’t scared by this. He dropped everything he’d been holding, pulled his dagger, and waited for an opening.

When the goblin swung too far to the left, Simon responded with a vicious kick that sent it flying against the cabin wall so hard that it bounced off it. He was on it before it could rise again, stabbing it until it stopped squirming. Once that was done, he did the same to the first one, making sure it was dead too. After that, he cleaned his knife on the long grass before finally standing again with their torch in hand.

“That’s what you get,” he said, spitting as he looked at the two pathetic monsters.

It was only when he fetched his fish and his pole that he noticed that it had cracked, just like the goblin’s skull from his attack.

“Oh well,” he shrugged. “No more fishing in this lifetime. It was fun while it lasted.”

He tossed the pole aside and then went inside. A little fire and a lot of fish would go a long way to making his life a better place. Besides - trying to go fishing two days in a row would have been boring as hell, right?

“Tonight, I’m going to eat, finish off that wine, and chill the hell out,” he told himself, “and tomorrow, I’m going to find a way out of this hellhole.” He’d tried it before, of course - but he was a different person now.