Death After Death

Chapter 191: Crossover Episode

While the volcanic eruption made it pretty easy to know where he was in the timeline, Simon was surprised how quickly things got back to normal. People still talked about it in the days and weeks after it had happened, and there was a resurgence of interest after that when there were whispers that a brave hero had died fighting a terrible stone giant.

After that, though, things calmed down surprisingly quickly. Life, it would seem, went on, as long as the world was in no immediate danger of ending. That surprised Simon a little bit, but he supposed that he’d seen similar things happen in the aftermath of Schwarzenbruck’s zombie apocalypse.

After that, keeping track of the slow sequence of events that made up his past life wasn’t hard, not even a day's ride from the city. The rumors about what had really happened the night the volcano had erupted came and went whenever a new trade ship would dock for a night or two. However, more and more, those stories were eclipsed by a new one: the Queen of Ionia had taken a consort. If rumors were to be believed, he was an ugly foreigner, but most doubted that could possibly be the case for someone as radiant and dignified as the queen.

Sometime after that, Simon started making monthly trips to the city just to try to catch a glimpse of himself. He even used stealth and a little magic to climb the palace walls a few times and just watched his own recovery. It was an interesting sensation, and he wondered what would happen if he took out the past version of himself.

That would be a paradox, for sure, his brain told him. He believed it mostly, too, but with magic in play, he honestly had no idea. I’m not him, right? I mean, he was me, but he died, and I’m me now, so if he ceased to exist, nothing about me would change, but the future of this level certainly would...

He obviously had no intention of killing himself, but as a thought experiment, it crept into his mind again and again when he observed himself in the garden or the library as past Simon made his slow recovery. It was only when he saw himself with Elthena that those positive memories pushed aside his darker thoughts.

Still, all of that came to an end when the war started. Simon knew that little would come of it beyond the spread of disease, but during that time, the normally lax atmosphere around the palace transformed, and sneaking in without killing one or two people became effectively impossible.

“Past me would probably notice if future me started dropping bodies,” he told himself one day as he walked back to Olven’s Narrows with his mule, which was heavily loaded with the various supplies he’d purchased on this trip. “But would that cause a paradox? How much can I change the circumstances of past me before future me ceases to exist, if it even really works like that? What do you think, Daisy Two.”

The mule, of course, had no answers. Really, he should probably do an experiment to figure this out, but he had no idea how to do something like that without causing catastrophic consequences if he was wrong. “Do I bring someone else through a portal with me, solve a level, and then kill them in the past to see how that ripples out through the future?”

As the plague started to sweep across the region, he thought about this more and more, as well as the idea that some other version of himself might be watching him, even as he watched himself now. Really, though, all of those thoughts were just to keep himself from worrying about his impending reunion with Elthena.

It was something that he’d yearned for, for decades now, and day by day, it was getting closer. Of course, that also meant that his time in his sleepy little village was coming to an end, which was sad in its own way.

Simon had worked hard to make sure that no one died as the plague swept through it. It had a wise woman, of course, who was good with herbs, but under her treatments, a few older people had almost passed away. They would have, if not for a few surreptitious words of lesser curing he’d used to help them get through the worst of it.

That happened less often as he taught her some better ways to do things. “A blacksmith teaching me how to do my job,” she complained in an amiable enough way on more than one occasion. “Now I’ve seen everything.”

“Blacksmithing is just for fun,” he assured her. “Before I came here, I was a scholar. Everywhere I go, I just learn from people smarter than me.”

“Then I’ll be sure to teach you a few things before you continue on,” she responded.

He didn’t have an answer. Instead, all he could do to distract himself was sketch pictures of ships coming into the harbor while he waited for one specific ship to indicate that Elthena was about to send him off and out of her life forever. The place he’d picked to keep a look out for that, at least, was beautiful. Ionar was a shining work of art as much as it was a place, and from where he was staying in the upper city, he could see the lower city, the beautiful harbor, and the steady parade of trade that was the place’s lifeblood as it came and went.

In that time, he experimented with small magical alterations to his features. He gave himself the touch of gray that his doppelgänger had, and he toyed with a few of the more visible scars he could remember with the words of lesser flesh shaping. It worked better than he expected. Honestly, they looked pretty similar, at least as far as his memory went, but in the end, he decided to remove them.

“I’m not going to lie to her,” he told himself. “Not about this or about anything else. That’s not how we fix this.”

Nearly a month after he arrived in town, he saw a familiar ship docked near the breakwater. He hadn’t seen the Belaphora in a long time, but he recognized her instantly, even from this distance, so high above the harbor. There was just something about a ship you’d spent time on that made it stand out from all the other boats docked around it.

From that point on, Simon was up before dawn every morning, watching and waiting to see if this was the night that he was sent away. For four days and nights, his vigil went unrewarded, but on the fifth, he noted a man wrapped in a carpet being bundled off to the lower city on the back of his own donkey. It was an interesting scene, and when he looked up, he saw a teary-eyed queen standing on her balcony on the third floor, watching as he was led away.

“Daisy, how could you do me like this?” he whispered to himself, using the gallows humor to shield himself from the darker emotions that seeing Elthena like that inspired.

As soon as the sailors were out of the gate and heading down the main avenue, Simon took advantage of the dim light to vault the wall in an area that he already knew wasn’t well guarded. From there, he stole quickly and quietly along the deserted pre-dawn hallways as he made his way to the queen’s chambers.

Once, he almost ran into a servant on a blind corner, but the maid apologized and bowed. “I’m so sorry, mister Simon, sir,” she apologized, but he waved her off.

“Think nothing of it,” he said as he moved past her. For a moment, he felt supremely lucky, but a few seconds later, he realized that all of these people were used to seeing him around the palace every day, and the news would not yet have gotten out that he’d been exiled.

Simon spent a moment wondering what he might be able to do with that information, but he didn’t figure anything out by the time he slipped into the queen’s chambers. She was still standing on her balcony and didn’t come back in for a long time. He wondered if she planned to wait until he descended the winding cliffside road to the lower city, but she stayed out even longer than that.

She waited until the sun was up and the ship had actually left port before she came in. It was a gesture he found more than a little touching. In that time, servants came in twice, bringing her breakfast the first time and a message the second time.

As he stood there behind the bed curtains, waiting for her servants to leave, he could feel his heart beating harder in anticipation. He’d imagined this moment a thousand times, and even though it was going just as well as he could have hoped, he was still incredibly nervous.

“Guess who?” he asked in a gentle tone, trying not to startle her too badly.

He needn’t have worried. The woman barely reacted at all.

“Of course, it’s you, Simon. Who else would it be? I thought you would do something like this,” she sighed, not bothering to turn around and look at him. “Sit down, Simon. Let’s talk.”