Death After Death

It was only when Simon began to sew the runes of cold protection into the rabbit fur-lined gloves that he had made that he even understood that he’d need to sew the runes of fire protection as well. Until that moment, his plan had been to make a set of cold-resistant armor and a fiery weapon, but then, as he imagined how he would use them both, he recalled the frost sword that the skeleton knight had wielded against him so many times and pictured all his carefully crafted magical furs going up in smoke as his sword caught his clothing on fire.

The truth was he would need not just protection from both frost and fire, and he wasn’t exactly sure how to do that. Well, he was pretty sure how to do one or the other, he corrected himself, but both… it was entirely possible that they would cancel each other out or interfere in some weird way that might be even worse.

Simon gave it a great deal of thought, but eventually, he was forced to set the gloves aside and focus on the simpler task of the armor instead. It was something that he could copy directly from the book like he had the sword schematic, and it was a lot less work.

The only problem was that in the end, when he was done, he had no real way to test it. Sure, it had only taken two days of diligent effort with the thread to apply the mark in just the right way, but the only way to know if it succeeded would be to put it on and brave the cold. Even at night, it didn’t get particularly chilly out, and there was no way he was going to go jump in the river wearing full armor and see if he stayed warm.

So, whether he liked it or not, he was just going to have to hope the whole thing worked and test it when he walked inside the door to the next level. Which meant that he would have to set aside the crude thing and finish empowering the sword next.

It was an ugly thing, with crooked lines and handiwork that would never be confused with that of a skilled craftsman. Despite that, though, he was pretty sure it would work once he completed the attunement ritual with blood and molten silver. But, as he prepared to do that, he realized that once he completed the spell, it would burn forever. He had no way to stop it.

“Make up your mind already, Simon,” he chastised himself.

He would have liked to have blamed the head injury he sustained, but his balance had been perfect for weeks, so this wasn’t that. It was just a lot to think about. He needed to finish his flaming sword, but that was awfully complicated, so he decided to work on the armor first, but since that was done, he needed to focus on the scabbard and…

He sighed. He wasn’t sure if he’d always been like this or if this was brain damage from his injury, but the amount of things that needed to be done before he opened the next door seemed almost insurmountable some days.

“I should just make a list,” he said to himself, but even as he spoke, he knew he wasn’t going to waste any time with that. He only had like three things left to do besides get good with his bow, so a list would be pointless.

Finally, after beating himself up enough, he turned to the scabbard itself. That at least came with instructions, much like the sword had. In the grimoire, the sword had required over twenty carvings, but the scabbard that would nullify its power required only six, which would have made it simple if the recipe for the ink hadn’t been so complex.

He had no idea what the difference was. Why did it take three times as many runes to power a flaming sword as it did to put it away? He had no idea, but then he’d never done anything like this before. It was magic. How much sense could he expect it to make?

He didn’t know why the fire glyph connected to the source glyph, the boundary glyph, or the three unreadable ones, whereas almost everything else only connected to one or two symbols as a primitive sort of circuit, but it did.

By contrast, the clothing was the simplest of all. It mashed all of the symbols together into one bizarre spidery shape that he’d sewn into the lining.

He sighed, finally putting everything down. Jumping from one project to the next, he wasn’t going to get any work done. He needed to focus, and focus meant swordplay. So, Simon went out into the yard without even bothering to put on a shirt and spent the next few hours alternating between beating up a random selection of trees and using up all his arrows, trying to arc them over his cottage.

It was a familiar routine, and if he did it until he was completely spent, he found he’d be able to do a much better job at concentrating on the important things. He wasn’t sure if this was a byproduct of his recent recovery or just his deep-seated fear that if he stood too still for too long, then he would turn back into a statue.

Sure, it was irrational, but that didn’t make it less real. He still had nightmares about it. Whenever his mind grew tired of reminding him that he used to have a wife and that she was dead now, of course. Those were the only two topics that seemed to be on his mind when he slept.

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He didn’t wake up screaming when he was turned to stone, at least. Then, he only woke up and found himself practically paralyzed for several minutes as he struggled to remind himself that it wasn’t real.

The reality was that no matter how long he practiced, the gear he needed wasn’t going to finish itself. Yet he still procrastinated because he was afraid. Of what, he wasn’t sure. Afraid that he would fail? That didn’t matter. He could just try again. Afraid that it would explode and kill him in the process? Death was the only thing in the world he wasn’t afraid of.

What was he afraid of then, he wondered to himself as he went through the paces with his sword in a blinding flurry of blows and counterblows.

“That I’m missing something,” he said to himself, panting as his motion finally ceased, and he stood there holding the blade.

For weeks, he’d been trying to get this thought out of his addled brain, but today of all days, it finally broke loose, and Simon stood there, slowly turning it this way and that as he studied it. Things finally made sense as he held that ugly little fear in the forefront of his mind.

There was so much about this world that he didn’t understand, but magic was at the center of it. He didn’t know how it worked or why it worked. What he did know was that it was exhausting if he used too much, and it seemed to mark him as evil to anyone that had the ability to see magic. That pretty clearly indicated that it was at least as bad for him as smoking or something, but he had no idea how much worse it could be.

Could making these items trigger something like what he’d seen in the cathedral? Was that deranged series of symbols the result of some attempt to craft gone awry? Could the last step in enchanting his sword do the same thing?

Simon tried not to panic as he thought of that, but he couldn’t help but imagine one of the miscarved symbols arcing and sparking until it exploded, forcing a huge magical rupture on his formerly small blade, allowing unknown amounts of evil in the real world. After all, Hybissian was the one with the second sight or intuition or whatever it was, and she seemed very certain that something bad was about to happen. Maybe it was.

“Maybe I was naive for thinking that just because I hadn’t planned on killing anyone didn’t mean no one was going to die,” he mumbled to himself. “I mean - the instruction book I’m using is a pretty evil book. Maybe the whole thing is a trap…”

Simon turned that thought over and over in his mind and quickly realized that his real fear was that he had no idea what he was doing. He was just going through the motions without understanding them, and if this was chemistry, he probably would have blown himself up already.

That realization was enough to make him stop what he was doing. He wasn’t going to give up on making the magic weapon, of course. Not yet, anyway. He might if he still couldn’t figure it out, of course, but he really wanted it just in case.

What he was going to do was actually focus, though. Instead of just copying down the different symbols and hoping that was good enough, he was going to read the whole damn book all over again. He was going to understand why it was telling him to do different things, and if he couldn’t at least sort of understand it, then he’d take a break.

After all, he presumably had armor that would protect him from the worst cold. That meant that at this point, he could likely trudge through the blizzard and force his way through the frozen door with an axe or a little fire magic if he had to. He had a lot more control over his flames now than he ever did before.

So, hoping that the old woman that was currently the bane of his existence would understand, he closed the book and reopened it at the beginning, so he could pore through its entire contents uninterrupted. When he’d first started studying it, he’d just leafed through it looking for the words of power before focusing the last several months on the small section related to blood magic and permanent enchantment, but this time he was going to read the whole thing from beginning to end.

He was, after all, in no hurry. No one could force him to keep going, and near as he could tell, no one except for Hybissian and her most loyal cronies wanted him gone. Some people, like Majoria, had actually confided in him that they felt safer with someone like him around.

So, day after day, he familiarized himself with the scant basics that the book mentioned as he tried to understand what terrible thing it was that he’d been about to do.

Those days were endlessly boring, of course, and he took frequent breaks to practice his swordplay, but every day he made it through dozens of pages. He even took notes of some of the most important bits on the rare occasion that the grimoire would try to explain the strange language it called Valdarian.

Three weeks later, the town’s unofficial leader came back, of course, demanding that he honor his word, but Simon just told her, “If you’re ready to force me out, then I’m ready to fight you for the right to stay.”

The half a dozen men she had with her drew swords then, but the stray bolt of lightning that he whispered into existence that struck the ground between him and where the rest of them stood was enough to convince everyone that maybe this was a fight they didn’t want to have.

That night they tried to burn him out, but a single whispered word, “G̴͎̀ě̶̼l̶͕̀t̶͈̽h̸̯̉i̴͖͒c̴̗̓” froze all of their torches to cold ash and put the thatch out where it had started to catch without even the need of rising from his bed. Later Simon heard that a few of those men had lost fingers due to frostbite, despite how carefully he had aimed his magic, but none of them tried to take revenge, and no one ever came to ask him when he was leaving again after that, giving him all the time in the world to study in peace until he finally felt he understood what was happening well enough to take the next step.