Death After Death

Simon spent most of the next few weeks and months in the library. He started going on longer and longer walks, and eventually, he went to the gym. That was mostly for the restorative hot springs, though he did eventually try to spar with men he’d once been able to beat handily.

The results of those bouts were ugly, and when his opponents asked him what had happened to him, Simon told them a story about being set upon by a small pack of orcs while he was out gathering herbs one day. In the broad strokes, the lie was perfectly adequate; he’d fought more than his share, and few men alive knew more about the sheer unrestrained power of the brutes than he did. Still, all of the details were outlandish without the use of magic to back them up.

Eventually, he stopped going to the baths when his scars got a bit too much attention. Curiosity he could handle, but open disgust… well, Simon already thought little enough of his body, so he didn’t exactly need that.

The Queen noticed that, though, and eventually offered to let him use the Royal Baths. They were not so large as the public baths, but they were about a hundred times nicer, with white glazed tiles and marble statues. Either way, the water did him good, but after a couple mix-ups where he almost walked in on the Queen while she was using them, he decided that maybe he’d healed enough that he didn’t need that magic warmth for his joints anymore.

Magic wasn’t something he was doing a lot of these days. That wasn’t because the Queen's Vizer was supposedly keeping an eye on him, either. It was because he wasn’t sure what to fix after all the work he’d already done on himself.

In his games, when you drank a potion or you cast a healing spell, you were restored to full hit points and were as good as new. In this world, though, he still suffered from any number of aches and pains, even after the last bandages were removed and the last wound was closed.

He’d cast a few lesser healing spells to fix the cartilage in his knees when that had started to bother him. That had seemed to work well enough, but other problems were less easy to quantify. Was his poor balance brain damage, or was a bone that had healed crooked, or a muscle that had gotten weak during all this bed rest. He had no idea.

Simon had a couple options that he thought would fix that. The first would be to drain the life out of some miscreants or vermin. He knew from experience that definitely made everything feel better. He also knew how addictive that was, though.

He considered trying to filter lesser transfer through a sword or a dagger to see if that would mitigate that problem, but that solution had the same problem as the other one he wanted to try: he simply lacked the privacy for complicated magic in the palace. Whether this mysterious visor or anyone else was actually watching him didn’t matter.

There was always a servant or an official walking through the room, no matter which room he was in. Now that Simon was out of his sick bed, he was quite popular, which meant that unless he was going to lock himself away, real, complicated works of magic were out of the question.

That was a pity, too, because he thought that if he tried the same sort of ritual he’d tried with Freya, he might just be able to draw the power necessary to fuel the spell from the world around him instead of from an unwilling donor. Hell, I could probably fuel that sort of ritual with the heat of the volcano, he thought as he looked up at the still-smoldering mountain. Too bad there’s no way I’m climbing that thing right now.

All told Simon was pretty sure he’d only used up a handful of years in that fight. This life was getting a little long, though, at least for him. With everything he’d done, plus some of the magic he’d used before he even arrived in Ionar, he was pretty sure he was pushing 40. Only a couple of those years had been lived, but… well, either way, he wasn’t old enough to be this ineffectual and weak just yet. He had at least 10 or 15 good years left in this life, and he was determined not to waste them.

Between books, Simon continued to work on his map, using the accounts he read to fill in the missing areas that he hadn’t yet explored. When it was all done, it was very impressive, showing off tens of thousands of square miles with relatively high levels of detail. That’s only a state or two, he reminded himself as he looked over the way the mountains and rivers were laid out.

The Kingdoms of Ionia and Brin were the most detailed by far. That was both because those were the places that Simon had been the most often and because that was what the Queen's library contained the most information about.

Charia was what interested him the most, though. The rugged mountains seemed to forbid explorers and historians from talking about them, and there were huge blank spots Simon was going to need to dig through. At least one of those belonged to the dragon, and he was pretty sure he’d be meeting it again soon, but the others? He had no idea.

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“When you are done with it, I shall hang it in my study,” the Queen told him. “Outside of a few sea captains' hands, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a map half so fine.”

“Well, it's easy to work on the details when you have nothing but time on your hands,” Simon answered. “I ain’t exactly moving around a lot these days.”

“Nonsense,” the Queen declared, “You’re getting better every day.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Better at walking around the garden.”

They both laughed at that. She was right, of course. He was getting better. Just not fast enough. That was silly since anyone else would have been in a wheelchair for the rest of their life after what happened, but he didn’t accept that. After all, wheelchairs hadn’t been invented yet.

He continued to spend as much time with her as ever, though after he was there for almost a year, she insisted that he started calling her by her given name rather than her title, at least when no one was around. “It’s Elthena, please,” she insisted in one of their many conversations. “I do not let my friends call me by my title unless we are in public.”

“So I’ve graduated from guest to friend?” Simon asked. “It sure took long enough.”

“Well, you’ve been a very demanding guest,” she answered with a smile. “Troublesome to no end! You should hear what my physician says about you!”

“I’m sure,” Simon smirked. “The man can’t shut up about what a miracle worker he is after saving my life. He should be paying me for all the free advertising I’ve given him.”

It was a lame joke, and it landed flatly, both because of that and because she probably didn’t even know what advertising meant. It was a mistake he still made sometimes, even after all these years. Still, there was a moment there that hung between them as she tried to think of the right response where he was sure he could have kissed her without getting slapped.

There’d been a growing tension between them of some sort ever since he’d gotten out of bed. He avoided it for his own reasons, of course, but also because he knew getting involved with someone who was literal royalty was a terrible idea.

The moment passed almost as quickly as he noticed it, but after that, he made an effort to keep a little more distance between the two of them so as not to complicate things further. He made other friends among the courtiers, or at least people who spent time with him to ask him about his travels. In the right mood, those were almost the same thing.

Even living in a palace could become monotonous when one yearned to get back on the open road, though. Injuries notwithstanding, this was as fine a life as Simon had enjoyed during his time in the Pit. He had all he could eat, a comfortable bed, and more knowledge about the world of Erden than he could have hoped for in any of his previous life. Still, after a while, it did not satisfy him.

He longed to get back to being a hero. He didn’t so much crave finishing off more levels in the Pit as he did just finding wrongs to right. Just because those good deeds would be erased with his death didn’t mean that they weren’t worth doing.

At one point, Simon spent weeks making elaborate plans to go all the way back to Blackwater to see if the portal was still there. He decided the best routes, made lists of supplies, and decided what he would do on subsequent levels if he made it that far.

He didn’t go, though. As long as he couldn’t hike to the base of the volcano or wield a sword like he meant to use it, spending any serious time on the road was a terrible idea.

Instead, he let first two, then three years, pass by in relative comfort. Things might have continued on that way for months or years more if he hadn’t had a bit too much to drink one night while he was having dinner with the Queen… or rather, Elthena. He didn’t remember quite how it happened the next day. Why should he? That was the least memorable part of the whole evening.

The two of them had been sharing a private dinner in one of the small rooms, and the wine had flowed freely enough that the kissing, along with everything else, quickly followed. That he never made it back to his chambers. Instead, he woke up in hers with her curled against him.

Simon hadn’t meant to end up there, of course, but in the morning, he did not exactly regret it either. Certainly not enough to stop her from starting things all over again when she woke shortly after dawn, despite the painful protests from parts of his body.

“Should we be doing this?” he asked, finally, when they were both spent.

“Well, I can ask my physician if you like, but you certainly seem healthy to me,” she answered with a smirk.

“That’s not what I mean,” he said after a moment, appreciating the view. “You’re—”

“An unwed woman?” she asked. “It’s true. I am, and I think you’ve been playing hard to get quite long enough.”

“You’re also the Queen…” he said. “Won’t this cause problems?”

“Simon, I’m a queen that’s forbidden to marry lest she bring about the doom of her people,” she said with a smile. “The only perk of that arrangement is that I can take a lover whenever it suits me without regard to such things. After all, I can’t exactly marry you, can I?”

“We can’t get married,” he said, feigning shock. “Whatever will we do?”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll think of something,” she teased.

Simon smiled. There were a lot of things he could think of, but right now, none of them mattered half so much as the beautiful, dark haired woman whose bed he was sharing.

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