Death After Death

Simon recognized the signs quicker than most would have, even with everything that was going on. Even before he found the bodies, he knew what had done this. The crude arrows with their red fletching and the hoof prints that were everywhere made it pretty obvious.

This was the aftermath of a centaur raid. It was a big one, too, from the looks of things.

He even had a pretty good idea of where he was. He wasn’t entirely sure which village this had been, but between the style of the smoldering huts and the color of the hills, he knew he wasn’t too far from one of his least favorite places in the world: Crowvar. He’d had enough of the Raithewait family to last a lifetime, and his fingers tightened into fists at the very thought of them.

For the moment, he ignored that and all the dark feelings that came with it. Instead, he focused on the carnage around him as he took in the scene between the billowing curtains of smoke.

There were a few dead bodies in the street, and most of those were of the men who’d died defending the town. Simon noted that there were none of the Baron’s men among the bodies either. That made sense. If the Baron had bothered to send men, then there might not have been a massacre.

Of course, the true massacre awaited him at the center of town. As he’d expected, most of the women and children had crowded into the temple. It was a holy building no longer, though. Instead, it had become a mass grave.

Simon paused a moment to pay his respects, then he started climbing up one of the partially collapsed facades. Other than this building and one of the stone granaries, the town had basically been leveled, so the top of the rubble, some ten feet above the ground, was where he was going to get his best view of his surroundings.

Simon quickly searched the horizon in all directions but saw no signs of riders. Which was positive, he supposed. That meant he wasn’t here to kill them. Which begged the question, “What am I supposed to be doing here?” he asked, coughing briefly as he looked around.

He made an effort to search through the dead, looking for a survivor or two, but he found no one. He didn’t expect he would. According to his men, the centaurs made great sport of lighting buildings on fire and then shooting the people who tried to run from the burning buildings. It was a pretty thorough way to cleanse a place.

Eventually, he made do with finding some pants and a shirt that wasn’t too bloody, and then he brought them back to his unconscious werewolf. Simon considered killing the man outright again before the stranger had the chance to wake up and freak out, but he decided against it.

Instead, he kicked him awake and said, “Hey, get dressed. We need to move. It’s not safe here.”

“I… wha-where am I?” the man asked, completely confused. “And why am I naked?”

“All of those are great questions that can wait until you have some clothes on,” Simon said as he walked outside.

“But… This… where is Galatia? Where are the trees?” the man protested while Simon ignored him. Instead, he picked through the corpses, replacing his sword with a dinged-up longsword that suited his style more and taking a half-full quiver, though he didn’t find a suitable bow to go with it.

If they’re out there in force, getting a long bow again is going to be kind of a must, he thought to himself while he ignored his involuntary companion’s pathetic whining.

When the man finally emerged, Simon had his bearings and tossed the man some boots. “I hope those fit you okay because we’re going to be walking for a day or two at least.”

“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me who you are…” the man said, trying and failing to regain his spine. “No, I want to know where we are and what the hell is going on.”

He was a dark-haired, skinny man, and Simon had no doubt that he could take him in a fight now that he was a fearful human. He even seemed like a decent fellow, but Simon didn’t have time for this shit. He might not know what he was supposed to do here or where he was supposed to go, but he knew whose grave was only a couple of days' travel from here, and suddenly, that was more important than whatever it was that Helades might want from him.

Simon regarded the man as he ignored the boots and then said, “I don’t think we’re due for another full moon for a while, so I doubt you stand much of a chance against the centaurs, but you’re welcome to stay if you like. Me, I’m going to Crowvar to see someone. I’ll figure out everything else later.”

Then, as the man sputtered in his wake, Simon turned and started walking to the northwest. He didn’t know exactly where the city was from here, but it was somewhere over there, and as he got closer, he’d be able to get his bearings straight. Worst case, he’d hit one of the main trade roads, and from there, things would fall together naturally.

He didn’t even have to wait a minute before the other man tugged on his boots and came running after him, though. “You can’t leave me!” the stranger whined piteously.

“Last night, you tried to kill me,” Simon said with a shrug. “I think I can do just about whatever I want to you. Leaving you for dead would be a kindness by comparison.”

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“I would never!” the stranger declared as they walked together. “I get these fits, sometimes it's true, but—”

“Are you seriously trying to deny that you’re a werewolf?” Simon asked, looking the man dead in the eye.

“Me? A werewhat? You’d dare call Murphy Dreser, the only begotten son of my mother Franna, a hellhound? Those are fighting words!” Murphy said with feigned outrage.

Simon ignored the bluster. “Any time you want, man, you just say the word.”

They walked in silence for a bit before Murphy asked, “You seem awfully calm for a man who claims to be walking through a battlefield with only the damned for company. Perhaps you’re the one that’s cursed.”

“Perhaps I am,” Simon agreed without elaboration.

He let the man stew in the uncomfortable silence for a long time with only monosyllabic answers to satiate Murphy until he was sure that they were going the right way and that no one was nearby. Eventually, he explained where they were and that the centaurs seemed to be worse than usual, but he left out his business in Crowvar and Freya entirely.

Several times, Simon tried to get the man to admit that he was a monster, but the most he would admit to was blackouts. “Look, I drink too much, okay?” Murphy yelled at one point. “Sometimes I get blackout drunk and wake up in the morning feeling like shit. I ain’t proud of it.”

In the end, Simon was forced to assume that the man didn’t know he was a monster. He wondered if he should just put Murphy out of his misery, but ultimately, he wasn’t in the mood to kill anyone just now, so he left it alone.

It could wait until at least the next full moon, whenever that was.

Shortly after they reached the main road, they had to hide in the brambles as a herd of centaurs made their way to the northeast. Simon was concerned by both the number of centaur war bands and their proximity to the main roads, but he said nothing.

As the day wore on, this became literally true. At first Simon continued to speak a few words here and there, but as the day wore on, he found himself so hoarse he’d basically lost his voice.

He’d used a lot of magic a few hours before, and he didn’t have a waterskin or the privacy he would have liked to do some healing. Eventually, all of Murphy’s questions about how they’d ended up so far south or what they were going to do about these centaurs were greeted only with shrugs and stony silences.

Simon knew exactly what he was going to do to the centaurs. If it came to it, he was going to murder every last one of them. Preferably with fire, though force would probably be more subtle. He had at least one more word of greater force in him, though he imagined it wouldn't need to be greater to simply create a slender invisible wire that a whole group of galloping stallions could decapitate themselves on.

Force wasn’t required for the first group or the second, though it did disturb Simon greatly that there were so many of them so close to civilization.

In the end, they made it to Crowvar without any issues, and the only difficulty was binding Murphy’s hands at night so the man didn’t try to slit Simon’s throat in his sleep. Murphy hadn’t liked that, but when Simon gave him the choice between that and finding his own way to the city, the man had relented.

Simon found the trip to be almost disorienting in the level of nostalgia he faced those last few miles once he could see the tower on the horizon. In the end, when he went to the graveyard instead of the main gate, Murphy was confused, and Simon encouraged the man to go on without him, but he wouldn’t budge.

Instead, Simon made the man wait for him by the main gate while he went and found Freya’s grave. The first thing he noticed in the graveyard was how much larger it had gotten. It had more than doubled in size since he’d last been here, but worse, most of the graves seemed to be new, and it was impossible to miss the large amounts of freshly turned earth.

He knew it would take some time to find a needle in this particular haystack, as he wandered down the weed-strewn paths. Still, it took longer than he would have thought. Finally, after an hour of searching and going grave by grave in the section he was fairly certain he’d buried his wife in, Simon reached one inescapable conclusion: she was no longer here.

That broke his heart wide open all over again. While it was possible that they’d unearthed her thanks to what he’d done in the aftermath of her burial, Simon found that unlikely. Instead, it was far more likely that what he’d done here had never happened at all now.

“When did that get erased, though?” he asked himself as he sat on a bench and put his head in his hands. “Was it when I fought with Gregor or was it before that, when I came through the portal and killed the Wyvern?”

Though he wanted to believe it was the former, and that he’d fucked up the timelines when he’d battle beside his friends, the longer he thought about it, the more he was resigned to the latter. After all, each level reset every death unless he beat it, right? And he most definitely had not killed the wyvern on the way out, which seemed to be the goal, so he’d lost Freya right there.

For a moment, he almost screamed out loud in frustration. If only he’d done that one little thing, he could visit her right now, even like this. He didn’t though, and now he was all alone all over again. Simon stayed on that bench for some time, and it was only when he got his head clear about what he needed to do next that he looked for Murphy.

When he finally returned to his involuntary companion, the man asked, “Where are we going now?”

“Where else? We’re going to stop by the Baron’s place and see if Erik or Varten is the Baron these days,” Simon said with a faraway look in his eyes. “If it’s the former, I might help him with this little centaur problem, but if it’s the latter… I might just strangle him to death instead. It’s hard to say.”

“Strangle? The Baron?!” Murphy asked, taking a step back. “They’ll kill you! They’ll kill me just for walking into town with you! Why in all the blazes would you want to do that?”

“Because no matter how many times I kill the man, it will never be enough,” Simon said softly as he walked purposefully toward the east gate.

As he went, he decided to stop by the inn and get a fine meal first. If he was going to die, then he wanted to do it on a full stomach. The fare of Millen’s farm had been excellent, but it had been days since then, and he was starving.