Death After Death

There was confusion at first as the survivors tried to figure out what had happened. That gave Simon’s group an early lead of a dozen yards. However, after the survivors watched their brothers die around them, a cry of anger rang out, and soon the survivors were giving chase.

Four horses chased after two as Simon, Aaric, and Carelyn blazed out into the night. Simon didn’t know where they were going, and he wasn’t entirely sure that Aaric did, either, but he followed the young man just the same. While they rode, Simon cursed his unwillingness to aim the spell a little lower and kill all the horses that the white cloaks were riding while he was at it.

In the moment, it wasn’t that he’d worried it might have blunted the spell’s effect. It might have, of course, but he was far more concerned with Still, there was nothing he could do now. His magic had winded him, and though he could certainly spare another word or power of two so long as they weren’t major ones, he was unwilling to unless it was absolutely necessary.

In the Pit, Simon had died a lot of times. So many that he’d lost count. He didn’t think about mortality often. Even now, he wasn’t worried about dying. He was shepherding his remaining years more like a mana bar in a video game. The way things were going, he might have twenty or thirty years left, but he wasn’t sure all of those years were created equal, and he doubted that Helades quick sketch of how cosmic powers worked was the whole story. So, he was leaning toward the lower end of that scale.

It might even be less than that, he thought as the horse's hooves pounded away at the muddy road. At this point, every major word burned five percent of his power, every word burned almost half a percent, and every minor word was about a tenth of a percent. None of those were big numbers, but he could see that he was approaching the bottom of the barrel, and it made him think about the big picture more.

He had his bow on him. Unfortunately, he’d barely practiced archery from horseback, and unlike the centaurs he’d fought for so long, he doubted that skill would ever come naturally to him. Regardless, four pursuers became three pretty quickly as one peeled away because of their wounds.

After that, he didn’t have to let off too many shots before the other three pulled up short to avoid becoming another casualty. Just because he was very nearly firing at random didn’t mean that they knew that. In the dark, they could only hear the whistle of the arrow as it flew somewhere nearby in the darkness.

It seemed too easy, and Simon’s first instinct was that it was a trap. It didn’t seem to be, though. As they dropped further and further behind the group, he expected some large spell to ring out and kill them all. He had the word for barrier and protection on his lips, but he never needed to speak them.

Maybe they don’t know any magic, he thought to himself. He was incredulous, but he had to admit that it was true. They knew at least one word of power, but it was possible that they did not know the rest.

That was just one more question he added to the pile for Aaric. It would have to wait, though. They needed to put more distance between themselves and these people. By morning, there would likely be a whole mob riled up and coming for them.

Simon thought about what that might mean for his armor, but he just shrugged at the thought. He could always make a new set if he needed to. It had served its part, and though the idea of using such a time-consuming piece of gear to try to solve two levels appealed to him, he’d figure something out. Compared to the value of the answers these two could provide him, it was only so much rusting junk.

He considered these thoughts while the three of them rode until sunrise. When they finally stopped, it was at a small, half-toppled farmhouse well off the main road that Aaric must have known about because he rode straight there.

“This was our stop last night,” he explained as they tethered their horses around back. “We’d planned to go on further, to the south, so that we could lose ourselves in the vastness of Abrese, but…”

His words trailed off before Simon finished, “But then your friends found you sooner than you were expecting.”

“Exactly,” Aaric agreed. “We were—”

“Aaric,” Carelyn hissed. “Why are you telling this… this warlock our plans? We should be away from him. Now.”

“You don’t understand,” Aaric answered with a shake of his head. “This isn’t the first time that Simon has saved my life. It’s the second, and… no, I know what you were thinking, but I had no idea he knew magic or that he’d even be here. I swear I didn’t. You and I, we were going to—”

What followed was a lover’s quarrel in hushed tones. Simon couldn’t make everything out, but it was clear that while neither of them was happy to be in the same room with a warlock, Carelyn was not willing to give him even the smallest benefit of the doubt despite the fact that he’d just saved her life.

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The two of them stepped outside, where they continued their argument for quite a while. By the time they returned, Simon had started a small fire in the fireplace. He had nothing to cook over it, but it chased away the night’s chill at least.

“I’m sorry about that,” Aaric said as he returned to the room alone. “She doesn’t—”

“She doesn’t have the least idea who I am,” Simon nodded. “Nor do you. Not really.”

“I know you wouldn’t hurt us,” Aaric agreed. “I know that much.”

“Are you so certain,” Simon asked with a flat expression as he stared into the fire. “I killed a dozen people earlier tonight.”

“You did. They weren’t even bad people, mostly. Not really,” Aaric said. “But back in Screeton… you saved everyone, and you didn’t have to. If you’d just saved yourself, no one would have known.” �

That outpouring of gratitude made Simon a little uncomfortable, and he switched topics immediately, even as he pondered how much that one event had changed this boy's life. If Simon had never existed, then Aaric and his whole family would be dead, of course. Still, the last time Simon had seen him as an adult, he was a zealot, almost certainly because he thought his family had been killed by a warlock. This time, without any of that angst, he’d come out somewhat more normal, and though it might not change all of history, it certainly changed Carelyn’s life.

Simon didn’t say any of that, though. Instead, he said, “Tell me about these unspoken. Is it a religion? A cult? In all my travels, I’ve never heard of them.”

Aaric didn’t seem surprised to hear that. The Unspoken, as it turned out, was something closer to a secret society than a cult. People knew that they existed in this part of the world, but almost no one who wasn’t initiated in their secrets knew what they were about beyond witch-hunting.

The truth was deeper than that, though. It turned out that they were the answer to one question that he’d had for a very long time: why didn’t he see more mages floating around the world because Aaric’s white-cloaked friends were killing them wherever they found them? It didn't sound like they were particularly common in the first place, of course, but at last, things started to click into place a little.

“You know that with practice, anyone could use a word of power,” Simon explained, but Aaric denied it.

“That’s simply not so,” he disagreed. “Women like Carelyn, and men like you… you’re special. If you weren’t, then magic would be everywhere.”

“Yeah, maybe for a generation,” Simon answered with a shrug. “After that, well, I think it would snuff itself out pretty quick.”

He explained what a toll magic took on the body, but he also told Aaric the story about the thugs he’d fought in the castle basement once upon a time and the way that they’d all cast fire spells at him, no matter how inexpertly as evidence for his assertion that anyone could do it.

“That’s not what we’re taught at all,” the younger man answered uncertainly. “For the initiated, it's more like… either we find those with talent before they turn to evil, or we strike them down before they can drag others down with them.”

Most of the answers to Simon’s questions turned out to be ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘I’m not sure.’ That changed a little when Carelyn came back inside and grudgingly started to answer some of Simon’s that Aaric couldn’t. It turned out she’d been with the Unspoken for much longer than her boyfriend had before she ran away.

While she was light on details about why exactly they decided to run, Simon decided they probably didn’t treat her the best, based on some old scars around her wrists and ankles that indicated manacles were involved. On the way whisperers worked, though, she was more forthcoming.

“That’s what I was supposed to be one day,” Carelyn confessed. “That’s all women with the gift are to the Unspoken. Whispers or witches. There’s no in-between if you have the sight.”

Her story made it clear why she’d escaped, even if he was sure she left out some of the worst parts. He learned the word that the Whisperers spoke, though the girl could not speak it. She was capable of tracing it into the dirt on the ground by the hearth, though, and Simon was immediately able to sound that out as Ovelum.

The word translated roughly to stop or null, and it had a strong meaning of finality. It wasn’t until he spoke it out loud as a minor word, though, that he realized it was actually Uuvellum, a word that he already knew. He’d thought it was strictly for boundary, and he’d mostly found it in summoning circles, like the gateway to hell. This cast it in a new light, and he would have to think more on that when he had the time.

Apparently, the women who spoke this word would start to chant it quietly under their breath every few seconds once the warlock approached, and they would keep doing so until he was slain or they passed out from the strain. Simon was appalled by this. He knew how draining magic was more than anyone, but to have random women spend their lives until their throats bled with no real understanding of what they were doing? It was hideously cruel.

“You should never do such a thing,” he cautioned Carelyn.

She agreed wholeheartedly, of course, and swore up and down that she didn’t want to damage her eternal soul. It was during that discussion about souls that it became clear that this cult only recruited people who could see auras could speak the words of power.

That was false, of course. Simon knew that because he could speak them, but he couldn’t see the miasma that he’d heard described before around anyone. Even if it wasn’t true, though, they believed it.

That revealed that Aaric could see them too, of course, but when Simon asked him about it, he said, “I didn’t start seeing the halos until the year after your visit.”

Still, talking with both of them, he learned that the shadows that surrounded him had dimmed quite a bit, but were no longer obvious. Simon made a note to check the mirror later to find out what his experience was currently at. He didn’t want to freak them out any more than they already were with new tricks.

Instead, he steered the conversation toward safer waters and asked them about their obvious romance and what they hoped to do once they were free of all this.