Death After Death

In desperation to find out more, he used the lesser word of earth a few times to try to make the rusted-out shields give up more secrets. He found a few coats of arms that way and some inscriptions to specific knights, but there were no clues as to what terrible magic animated these corpses.

He sealed up the tomb just the way he’d found it when he left, and he walked back to the half-abandoned city of Kawsburl. They were no more helpful than before, and by the time he’d finished his second round of investigation that afternoon, he decided it was best to leave.

Normally he would have stayed one more night at the inn. A few coppers for a bed and a hot meal beat the hell out of shivering beneath the open sky. There was something here that made him think it was time to leave, though. It was like the opposite of the times he’d stayed in the first inn and the old woman had seen some darkness about him.

Though he couldn’t actually see any sort of miasma, he could feel it. The locals had a secret to keep or an axe to grind, and since he didn’t want this run to end prematurely, he left before someone decided he shouldn’t be allowed to.

That night he made camp well off the game trail he was following, and a little past midnight, he heard riders and saw torches. They didn’t see him, either on the ride down or back, but only because he’d expected this.

Simon considered stopping them and questioning them forcefully as to what they were up to but decided against it. That wasn’t because he was concerned about the morality of killing people who were obviously trying to kill him. It was because the temptation to drain their strength and make it his own was much too great.

He’d largely recovered from his earlier weakness, but the urge to do something terrible remained even after his lassitude had faded. Maybe if it had been goblins or a terrifying wild beast like a wyvern or a griffon, he could have justified it, but people… It was a bridge too far for him in his current state of mind.

So, he let them pass. Instead of dealing with them, he decided that the mystery of this particular place would last at least one more life while he focused on ending the cursed graveyard. Now that he knew where the tomb was located in the real world, he supposed that he could come back any time to investigate further anytime he wanted, with a little effort. The earlier level had to be decades in the past. Maybe time wouldn’t have done as much damage by that point, and he could learn more.

For now he focused on more immediate issues. He decided to skip Lyndon Hills and walk straight back to Darndelle to save time, and throw off any further attempts at pursuit. It took him almost two days to decide that where or when to destroy whatever had been taken from the tomb was the wrong question.

If he destroyed it here, it would almost certainly solve this level, but, then on a later run, if he destroyed it back on the skeleton knight level, it would almost certainly reset this one, to some new state, like Freya’s tavern had. He’d have to defeat something else after that, because the fog itself would never have existed.

But did he want to do that? “Right now? Definitely not,” he said, answering his own questions out loud. “I’m sure I need that fucking sword for Ionar, so I can’t undo this level until I’ve undone that one.”

It was all getting hopelessly confusing, and he spent most nights by the fire, talking to the mirror as he added names and traced designs. As he did so, he started to link the levels to each other in different ways. Once upon a time, it had all been so simple and straightforward in his head, but now, every level seemed to loop backward and forward and link together in strange ways, either because of the people or the locations involved.

Even though he could check the mirror, it was still confusing. Without it, he was sure he would have been hopelessly lost. “I used to think that the Pit just got hard enough that no one could beat it,” he said to himself as he walked further south. “Now I think that most of them just got lost on the way there.”

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

He found Darndelle as he’d left it weeks before. It was unchanged, but on his first night back he investigated the graveyard and saw that the fog was stronger than it had been the last time, and as soon as he took a step over the line mist began to pour from the graves.

Simon didn’t try to fight it that first night back, though. Instead, he waited until morning and began to look through the records once more. He didn’t have the name of the warlock that had started all of this, but he had the place he’d come from, the year it had happened, and general outline of events. He hoped that would be enough.

Even with those facts in mind and a generous bribe to the archivist, it still took him half a week to find the right scroll. When he did, Simon laughed out loud. He couldn’t help himself.

He’d spent weeks traveling and asking question after he’d been told that a name was what he needed to solve this mystery, and when he found what he was sure was the correct entry, he found only a blacked-out portion of the scroll.

Fortunately, the location of the grave site wasn’t blacked out, and with a little more research, they finally figured out where it had been. What had been one large plot decades before was now three smaller ones, all of which were now occupied. Simon wasn’t going to let a little thing like a dead body stop him from reaching the conclusion, though.

Even though the sun was low in the sky, he still marched straight to the graveyard with the tiny map he’d made on a piece of scratch paper. Even a little light was enough to keep the ghosts, or whatever they were, at bay, though, and he still had the orange glow of the sunset when he reached the right spot.

“Are they going to try to kill me if I use a little magic here?” he asked himself as he looked around. There was no one here, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.

It wasn’t like he had a choice, though. He could hardly dig up this whole section in the next few minutes before the last limb of the sun descended below the horizon. So, he didn’t worry about it. Instead, he took a moment to center himself, and then he imagined the earth in this whole section flowing out and receding like the tide, leaving everything that wasn’t the earth behind. He wasn’t 100% sure that was going to work, of course, but if it didn’t, he could always come back with a shovel tomorrow.

“Gervuul Vosden,” he intoned solemnly, feeling the word resonate both within him and the ground he was standing on.

Simon had just enough time to reflect on how much less the greater words hurt when he really focused before the earth started to recede as if a sinkhole was opening up. The gravestones eased down as the earthen tide flowed out, and a six-foot-deep hole opened that was probably twenty yards on each side.

It was a lot of earth, and he vaguely wondered where it all went, but in the fading light, he didn’t worry about that too much. He was more concerned that anything he was looking for might have been swept away with it. He needn\'t have been, though.

Even as the earth retreated, there were enough puffs of the dark mist that had been hiding just beneath it to reveal the source. So, Simon uttered a minor word of light to shoo them away and hopped down into the pit as he searched for whatever the source of the black magic at the center of his little crater was. Along the way, he found all the tombstones that had been there already, a coffin, and two bodies buried in sacks that had almost completely rotted away. There was also a broken sword, a few bottles, and the remains of a shovel.

None of those were what he was looking for. When he finally found the thing, he was most surprised that it was literally a dark heart. Someone had carved a heart out of obsidian or something like it. As he studied it, he saw that it was anatomically correct, though he wasn’t sure how important that was. Whoever made it, had obviously taken great care in both the large details and the small ones. There were very delicate runes carved into it.

He bent and picked it up, and it was there he made his mistake. He saw the way it smoked at his touch and assumed that it was just more mist, but when he stood and brought the thing into the direct path of sunlight… it immediately started to crumble to ash.

“Shit!” he yelled, lowering it immediately again into the shadow of the grave, but it was too late.

Even as he watched, all the interesting information he’d wanted to study was going up in smoke. He might have won the level, but he lost a terrible opportunity.

Still, he did what he could, poring over each mark as they vanished, and when it was done, and there was no more to be gleaned, he sat down right in the hole and started to drawing the symbol combinations he was sure he’d seen. He hadn’t learned any new words in all that, but the way that it had used some of the ones he did know seemed very novel, and he wanted to explore that more.

Once all that was done, he decided not to fill in his hole, even if it was disrespectful to the dead. Instead, he waited another half hour to see if the mist would reappear, and when it didn’t, he walked back to his inn.

I could just leave, Simon thought absently, eyeing the exit. There was no need to rush it, though. Instead, he’d tell everyone the good news, make sure it was really done, and then get ready to kill those bloodthirsty servants before they could cause any harm.