Death After Death

Simon hiked to the top of the volcano twice more in the weeks that followed, but neither trip turned up anything new. The most he got out of it was a picture of one of the half-visible elementals that he sketched out as best he could. He was no artist, but he’d been improving slowly. According to his mirror, his art skill had advanced above poor and was now merely below average, and he’d take that as a win considering the crude materials he had to work with.

Still, as much as the otherworldly creatures might fascinate him, he didn’t learn anything more about them. It is kind of odd that it is one of the few magical creatures I’ve seen so far, he thought to himself one day as he was cleaning his small house. No sooner had the thought formed than he realized how ridiculous that was.

“You mean besides the dragon, the basilisk, and the ogre?” he laughed at himself after he thought about it for a second.

He had, in fact, fought a lot of different magical creatures. Hell, goblins, skeletons, and zombies were all definitely magical, too, and he’d fought more of them than anything else. The difference in his mind was that they had been real.

He hadn’t exactly gotten a chance to study a dragon up close or anything, but the wyvern he’d blasted out of the sky was something he could have dissected if he’d wanted to. He could have preserved it and mounted it like a dinosaur in a museum, but the fire elementals, or whatever it was they were, that was something else entirely. It was entirely outside his experience, and other than a few run-ins with ghosts, they were unique.

That made the whole thing pretty damn magical to him. In the days that followed, even after he stopped going up the volcano, the image lingered with him, though he wasn’t completely sure why. After all, he had a sword that radiated cold and a suit of plate mail that was immune to fire that he’d built himself. That was magical, too, but again, it was something he could put his hands on and understand.

Every day, he waited for the volcano to erupt, and every day it did nothing. So Simon waited, and he prepared. He started going to the gym, which was a little too naked and Greco-Roman for his tastes. He never oiled himself up in olive oil and wrestled with grown men, but he did enjoy the natural hot springs that fed the bathes of the complex, and in time, he found a couple of guys to practice his sword fighting with so he didn’t get too rusty.

Some of his sparring partners found it strange that a doctor knew how to wield a blade so well, but Simon let the mystery linger. When the rumor started to spread that he’d been a field healer for the army in the Kingdom of Brin, he didn’t do anything to stop it. He didn’t care what people believed, as long as it wasn’t that he was a warlock.

Indeed, rumors aside, life became pretty mundane after that. Things became routine. He hid his weapons and armor in a magic-carved hollow beneath the trunk he used to store rarely used medicines, and he waited for the day to be a hero.

The only problem with that was that it never came. Day after day, he kept one eye on the horizon as he treated small wounds and persistent fevers, but the volcano never erupted, and the ground beneath his feet never shook.

Well, never was a strong word. The volcano had regular minor tremors every few days, and perhaps once a month, it would rumble slightly more ominously, but it didn’t amount to anything. Each time it happened, Simon held his breath, and each time, silence returned, and the world continued to turn.

At first, it was frustrating, but after a while, he was okay with it. It wasn’t like he was living a bad life right now. He couldn’t even blame anyone else for this waiting game. He was the one who thought it would be cool to stop it before Helades’ portal even opened up, and he knew that might take a year or more.

So, he made the best of it and slowly shifted from counting the weeks to counting the months. It had taken almost three months to walk here and two more before he’d gotten the suit completed and tested. It had been six months since then, though, and he’d settled back into the life of a doctor rather than the life of a traveler or an adventurer or a hero. That meant he’d been on this level for almost a year now. Once upon a time, that would have been a rarity, but these days, that was becoming almost par for the course.

Other than the weapons and armor that he’d secreted away and the donkey he was still paying a few coppers a week to keep well-fed in the stables, there really wasn’t anything left to point to him as adventurer anymore. He kept a knife on his belt when he went out, but he hadn’t worn his leather armor in months.

In fact, recently, Simon had broken down and bought one of the togas that the locals wore rather than the worn-out tunic and breeches he’d worn for so long. It felt weird to him, but it made those around him treat him with slightly less suspicion and a touch more warmth than they had up to now.

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No matter what he wore, though, he never got quite used to the food choices here. Beef was imported, which meant it was of poor quality and pointlessly expensive. Potatoes were likewise rare enough to be noticeable when they appeared in the market.

This limited his diet to seafood, goat, and lamb, which seemed to only ever be flavored with wine sauces. Simon refused to suffer with the dull palate of the locals. He eventually made his own wood-fired oven in his garden just to make better bread than he was used to here. He would have killed for some tomatoes to try making a pizza with, but no one had heard of such a fruit, and pepperoni had yet to be invented, so he was forced to go without.

Food, much like magic, was still in a remarkably primitive state in this world, and once Simon had that thought in mind, he couldn’t let it go. He had little in the way of cooking knowledge from his time before he died. His skills had largely been limited to boiling water for ramen and choosing the perfect number of seconds for each meal he stuck into the microwave.

In time, he did figure out how to make flat bread, and with enough lard, he even figured out how to pan-fry fish with a thin flour coating until it was extra crispy and somewhat palatable again. Those two things didn’t quite add up to a fish taco, but it wasn’t bad, and Simon considered it one of the many successes he had in the months that followed.

Even his pickiness had his plus side, though. Thanks to his proximity to the market, he eventually learned to like both olives and dates, which were things he would never have touched on Earth. Early on, he’d tolerated them just for something to snack on as he hiked up the volcano to inspect the caldera, but in time, he grew to like their flavor, and he almost wished that someone would invent pasta or something so he could try more complicated flavor combinations.

Sometime after Simon had been in Ionar for almost two years, he had enough friends to start hosting dinner parties. These started quite by accident when he was explaining to one of his sparring partners what the strange meal he’d brought with him for lunch was. It was just a wrap filled with a few of the ingredients that had been available in the market that week. There were some onions, some cabbage, and some slow-roasted pork. It was nothing special, but soon, he was inviting his friends over on a weekly basis for his new creations.

“You should shut down your apothecary and open a restaurant,” Aikolas exclaimed one night after several bottles of wine.

“I would,” Simon agreed. “But where would I get the herbs to flavor all of these sauces without an apothecary?”

Everyone laughed at that, and all agreed he’d be a wonderful host. In time, he became truly accepted by these people despite his foreign background. That was nice. He'd been here for almost two years after all, but it was also when the marriage proposals started coming in. First, they were just the men of Simon’s circle casually mentioning he was getting a little old not to have a family or bringing up the fact that their sister or cousin was single out of nowhere.

For a while, he missed these social cues completely. Those were easy enough to rebuff, but when drunk men and former customers started to brag to him about the size of their herds or the generosity of their dowry, it became impossible to miss. Now that I’m part of the community, they want me to become part of the community, he thought, realizing the inevitability of the thing.

He held fewer parties after that because he wasn't sure what to do, but even so, the offers kept coming. While he wasn’t opposed to finding a beautiful olive-skinned Ionarian woman to marry, of course, it was pretty far down his list of things to do. Instead, he focused on healing by day and half-heartedly studying art and magic at night when the mood struck.

Things became pretty routine after almost three years of waiting for an eruption that never came. So, one day, Aikolas stopped him one afternoon on the narrow street not far from his home to say, “Ah, I thought you were dressed a little strangely. Is your other outfit for a costume party you’re planning, or were you having a liaison with someone, you sly dog?” Simon was greatly confused.

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” Simon said, looking down at his toga. It was one of three he owned now and looking a little dingy, but it was still good enough to wear in public. He certainly didn’t have a nicer one that he’d been wearing in its place. “I’ve been in my practice all morning, tending to children and—”

“Are you trying to tell me that wasn’t you in the market just a few minutes ago?” his friend asked incredulously. “With the leather armor and the strange crown? I would swear that—”

“Crown?” Simon asked, his interest suddenly piqued. “And armor, you say? Which way did I… err, did he go?”

“He?” Aikolas laughed. “Very droll. Last I saw you, you were heading up the main road toward the high city. I thought perhaps you’d finally gone to make a proposal of your own in your fanciest foreign clothes to make an impression with some noble’s daughter.”

The high city, Simon thought, forcing himself to smile even though he wanted to scowl. Or the volcano?

“Thank you for telling me; I’ll get to the bottom of this right now!” Simon shouted, already running off with nothing but a dagger. Part of him said that he should fetch his armor and that this was it, but the rest of him… practically every fiber of his being screamed that he didn’t have time for any of that.

“Let us know when you want to introduce her then!” his friend laughed, thinking nothing of the encounter.

Simon’s mind was racing, though, as he ran down to the first main street, he came across and then cut over to start making his way to the north-east, up to the high city. Just mentioning he had a doppelgänger would have been enough to set Simon’s teeth on edge, but the mention of a crown? That set off all the alarm bells.

All this time, he’d been waiting for the volcano to erupt on its own, and now, just like that, he was certain that wasn’t how all this had gone down. Someone had done something magical to make this crisis happen, and strangely, almost impossibly, he began to worry that someone might be him.