Death After Death

Simon spent the next six months the same way. Every morning, he drank three helmets of water and caught something with a crude spear from the jetty while he still had the energy to do so. Then, he would fill his clay pot with five or six gallons of seawater and begin to climb up the slope.

There, he would use fire and salt to methodically make it further up the street toward the main square, destroying every tendril of greenery in any building along the way. Nothing behind me. That was his motto. He’d already been through the woodchipper once, and he had no intention of doing this half-assed and being forced to try again.

After all, the plant couldn’t do shit to him. Not if he was careful. He’d been hit by spines a few times so far, but none of them had penetrated his armor, which he wore no matter how hot he got. His leathers fit him loosely now, even cinched all the way up. Since he could count his ribs when his shirt was off, that wasn’t a surprise.

He was tanned in a way he’d never been before, too, and in all the time it took to get that tan, he’d counted a hundred and eight shooting stars, nine ships, and no people. The only thing he hadn’t counted in all that time was the number of fish he’d eaten. He might never eat fish after this. He was so sick of them that he’d taken to freediving for clams, oysters, and even shrimp sometimes, though he had very few ways to cook any of them properly.

“I’m never going anywhere without a pan again,” he told himself as he hiked up the cliff with a jug of water that day.

No, not that day, he corrected himself mentally. The day.

Today was the day he was going after the central blossom. He’d already killed every trace of plant life between the road and the main square. It wouldn’t be the end of it. He’d still have the rest of Ionar proper, plus the palace grounds to purge, but as far as Simon was concerned, what he was doing today was half the battle. If he succeeded here, everything else was just clean up.

He’d avoided it for weeks as he laid the groundwork, but that had given him all the time in the world to study the terrible plant. It had been growing for many years, which for a flower was an eternity, so at this point it was the size of an gnarled old oak tree. Instead of foliage, though, was a giant leathery flower that was very nearly blood red compared to the marbled orange and red of most of the other large blossoms.

He’d already destroyed many that were more than large enough to swallow him whole. Even the largest of those was only half the size of the main plant, though, and today, after what was probably decades of unending growth, he was going to end it.

Simon started the battle with the words of distant fire. It made the thing scream but did little to affect it. It simply closed its giant flower until the flames had passed. That was something that was largely true for the other large blossoms he’d defeated up until now, but it was still a vital step because that sudden burst of flame was enough to destroy or cripple most of the smaller needle-spitting blossoms.

Once that was done, he advanced with his freshly sharpened sword. The tendrils attacked him before he was even halfway across the square. The smaller ones moved so slowly that they were only effective against prey that had already been immobilized, but these larger ones were as thick as his thigh and could be wielded like clubs. They were the next hazard that needed to go.

Simon wove between them, hacking as he went, and over the space of a few minutes, he covered the square in the sticky green sap of his enemy. That was all he needed to do to reach the trunk. At least, that had been all he’d had to do in the past. This time, though, when he got close, the thing launched a cloud of evil-looking, red pollen at him. Simon staggered back, with his eyes and his mouth closed, and it was only when he was far enough away that he felt like the strong sea breeze had cleansed the air that he allowed himself to breathe again.

“Got yourself a new trick, huh?” he said, studying the residue in his hair as much as the strange creature that had released it.

He felt normal, but he had no idea what that shit did, so he used a word of lesser cure, just in case, then he went back to retrieve his jug of water. This thing was full of surprises. Fortunately, he was too.

Simon ran at it again, but this time from a slightly different direction, and he was able to dump half of the jug on the things roots before it could turn enough to try to dose him again. Before it succeeded in spraying him though, the thorny mouth at the center of the monstrous blossom started to scream.

This wasn’t the first time that one of the flowers had made noises at him. He’d heard them growl on several occasions when they thought they were about to get an easy meal. This was the first time that he’d heard such a keening wail, though, and he backed away, fearing another strange sonic attack almost as much as the pollen. Simon backed away once more until his vision cleared, but the third time he advanced, he vowed he wouldn’t stop hacking at it until the thing was finally dead.

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That’s exactly what he did, and it was messy work. He chopped at it until the tip of his sword broke off, but there was nothing it could do to defend itself anymore. No other part of it was in range to strike at him. Thanks to all his hard work, it was isolated and defenseless.

Even after he felled it, though, and the thing’s keening screech ceased, the battle still wasn’t done. He still had to dig up the seed itself. If he didn’t, in a day or a week, it would start sprouting all over again. That was just its nature, and by now, he had learned not to underestimate it.

No matter how hot the lava or how thick the crust of stone it left behind, this awful thing would reach the surface and blossom once more. Even if he drowned it in seawater, he was sure that once it had dried off, it would spring to life all over again. In that sense, it was the most terrible creature he’d ever faced. It was more tenacious than all the zombies he’d ever killed, put together, and if he’d left it lying anywhere besides this desolate place, he was sure it would have eaten half a continent by now.

That was the only silver lining to this, Simon decided as he poked around in its stump with his sword looking for a dark, fist sized object. No matter how deep he prodded, though, he saw nothing promising.

“Yeah, it’s like a dandelion,” he nodded. “You gotta pull those out by the roots, or they always come back.”

“Gervuul Oonbetit,” he yelled, starting to feel a little hoarse.

He’d used a lot of minor words today but didn’t use a lot of major words during his time on Ionar. There was no point. The enemy he faced wasn’t powerful. At this point, it wasn’t even dangerous if you were prepared. It was, however, so numerous as to be nearly endless.

The stump came out of the ground and was pulled a few feet in the sky by a titanic force that shattered the nearby cobblestones. It came out roots and all, and it was there, at the very bottom of the longest tap root, that he finally found it.

Simon noted that it was already starting to sprout new life, even as he’d killed its old form. He immediately chopped it off of the now-dead body of its former host with a single quick stroke of his blade before he sheathed it.

Then, he dumped what water he had left on it to stymie any further growth, then he pulled his coin purse full of gold coins from under his breastplate, and said, “Meiren,” heating them so much and so quickly that they became molten almost instantly, and burned right through the thin leather, drizzling down on the cursed thing.

Simon had to use a word of fire a second time, along with the word of earth, to make sure the thing was fully enclosed and sealed in a metal shell that it could not escape from. It was only when that was done that he retreated to his safe area to rest in the shade for a little bit and decide what to do next.

He figured it would still take months more to kill everything else, even with the heart cut out of this monster, but over the next hour, every vine stopped twitching, and every bit of foliage began to change colors. First, it faded to yellows and browns, and then, even before the sun started to dip below the horizon, almost all of them were black.

He was overjoyed but unwilling to be fooled. He wasted no daylight looking for evidence that somewhere, some part of this plant continued to thrive. Simon finally made his way down from the ruins well after nightfall, after he’d checked to make sure every single vine and tendril really was wilting.

He was exhausted after what he’d accomplished, but not so exhausted that he hadn’t used a few words of distant fire to create a fireworks display to celebrate the event. Even if no one else had seen it, he decided that wasting six months of his life to mark his triumph was more than worth it.

Once he reached the beach, he looked at the golden orb he held in his hand. Then he started walking out to the jetty to finish this. There were a lot of places he could put this gleaming evil seed. He could take it with him. He could leave it on the cliff, but in the end, given its weakness for salt water he decided the safest place for this thing to end up was the sea.

After all, no matter where he buried it, once this thing’s container got damaged, it would grow again. He was pretty sure that’s what had happened in the sewers. Someone had died trying to steal it or possess it or something, and eventually, it had grown up and consumed the city. If he had tools, he would have built a salt-filled time capsule and buried it in the deepest part of the ocean. He didn’t, though.

Instead, he used the word of earth three times. Twice to turn two large rocks into hemispherical shells to contain his golden artifact, and then, one more time, to meld them into a stone egg that he hoped would protect its precious cargo for thousands of years. Then, once that was done, he stood on the farthest point of the ancient stone jetty and launched it with a word of force hundreds of yards out into the water where no one would ever find it again.

Even after that victory, though, he sat on the beach for several days wondering how much this one thing had already changed history. How many ships didn’t stop here that would have? How many people that were supposed to never meet never did? Other than curing the zombie outbreak, this was probably the biggest single thing he’d done to alter the flow of the world events since he started, and it had been on accident.

There was no way to fix it now, of course. He would have to get on with his adventure eventually. Still, for a couple nights, he basked in that wonderful feeling of completion and wondered if there was any way to truly fix what it was he’d done.

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