Death After Death-Chapter 339 - Blast from the Past

The mirror burned with the complicated magic his twin wrote there. For a moment, it was just those lines of power, but as the spell took hold and the inscribed runes faded, and the mirror burst to vibrant life, Simon’s vision was wiped away by the intensity of it. For a moment the mirror wasn’t a mirror anymore; it was gateway of dazzling light, and he blinked hard as his eyes watered.

No matter how much it affected his vision, though, his hearing was left untouched, and while he wasn’t sure entirely what the words meant, he heard his doppelganger say, "Start at the beginning, but as fast as is comprehensible. Skip the parts where you can’t find him. Maybe five or ten times speed. We can always go faster next time.”

For a moment, Simon thought that the man was talking to him, but he quickly realized that he was commanding the mirror, as it sprang to life. As the light faded, the images that came out were familiar ones. They were of the cabin, and of him, fresh after a death. No, not after a death, at least not in the Pit, Simon realized as he watched himself flounder around the cabin for the first time. He’d forgotten the details of this moment, but it was easy to remember them as they unreeled before his eyes.

Only, it wasn’t before his eyes. The mirror wasn’t displaying it as it always had before. It was projecting them onto his very soul. He wasn’t quite relieving them. He was watching them from the perspective of wherever the mirror had observed him in those moments. In the cabin, that meant that it was watching him from where it hung right now, but as the past version of himself stepped outside, that perspective became more jarring.

For a moment he watched himself from the shiny metal of the doorhandle, and then, after that, from the stream as he walked over it. Not only was it playing fast, but whole stretches of it were missing. It was like every time he walked out of the mirror's view, time stopped, and then started again when it found him again. There was no sound, but his mind almost filled that in. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

The experience was jarring, but not as jarring as it should have been, because the longer he watched, the more he remembered about what was happening. He recalled his frustration at how stupid the mirror was during their first argument, and how quickly he thought he’d beat this place.

No, I’m not remembering, he realized as he watched himself come back to life after his first death to the rats. He could almost hear the words that the first version of him said, and there was no way he would have remembered such an inconsequential detail.

Let those little bitches try to bite through this, he thought, cringing at his words as if deciding to use armor was some kind of genius tactic. It should have been the first thing any serious warrior would have done from the start, but Simon hadn’t been a warrior then. He hadn’t even been a serious person.

It felt like a memory, but it wasn’t. It was like he was sharing the moment with his past self in some small way. He might not see him get ripped apart by rats, or die to goblins for the first time, but he could feel it echo through him. Those moments were bone-deep and their shame and pain were still vivid centuries later.

He actually didn’t see much of the goblin level at all. There were a few snips of him walking along the meltwater stream with the torch, and a single terrifying moment where he fell down the waterfall before he drowned in the dark, but until he got down to the skeletal knight level, there really wasn’t much to see.

Simon should have wondered why he was being shown all of these things, but he didn’t even ask the question. He barely asked how he was being shown them at all, because the novelty of what was happening all but overwhelmed him. They weren’t pleasant memories, but even watching himself die to the skeleton knight from a dented helmet across the room wouldn’t have been enough to cause the rising panic he was feeling.

He knew that he’d been terrified in that moment. He could recall killing himself, but such a thing wouldn’t have rattled him today. Today, he would have fought and he would have won. As he watched Simon pick up the mace and battle for the second time, he could feel himself not just critiquing his old performance, but trying to move along with it.

That’s when he realized he was actually moving again. That stunned him enough to stop, taking him right out of the experience. It kept playing, of course, but he was more concerned about the fact that for the first time since he’d blown himself to bits at the end of his last life, he felt something at all.

That was when his Dopelganger started to speak again. “Sibyl’s mark would have utterly destroyed your soul if you were any slower. I’m sure you’ve figured that out by now,” he explained. “As it is, though, it still did enough damage to disconnect you from your body. Without magic you’d probably be a vegetable forever, sort of like a stroke patient, I guess you could say.”

Simon might have said exactly that, but he couldn’t say shit like this. All he could do was watch his former self throw an extended pity party at the idea he’d never get past the knight because the entire Pit was broken, and Helades was out to get him. While he lay there quietly, trying and failing to get his fingers to do more than tremble to the images he was watching, his apparently not-so evil twin continued.

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“I guess you could call this, physical therapy for the soul,” he explained. “The mirror records the world, but specifically it records you. That’s how it knows what your experience should be at any given moment. It's a bit like… You could think of it like your guardian angel, only it doesn’t stop you from doing anything stupid; it just writes it all down. And today, we’re going to use that to help your soul remember what your body feels like.”

Simon’s first thought was, So Helades is always spying on me? But he quickly dismissed it. She was an omniscient goddess. She was always spying on everyone; it was her nature. Instead of focusing on that, he worried about what the other version of him was saying.

They were ideas he’d never considered, but they did have a strange sort of sense to them. Rather than getting stimulated by a masseuse or a physical therapist teaching him to walk again, he was getting blasted by a stream of memories going a mile a minute.

“Anyway, I’ll leave you to it,” his duplicate told him. “It's more effective if I let it work uninterrupted. I’ve got other things to do anyway.”

Simon wondered what those might be, and if he should be worried, but only until he got killed by being an idiot. After that, he lost himself in the visions before him. Sometime after that, after he got used to the echoes of his own deaths, his twin doubled the speed, and sometime after that, a few hours, or a few weeks later, he doubled it again.

At that speed, every hour took a minute, which rendered the world into a blur that made his muscles twitch, and his emotions trembled as he oscillated wildly between success and failure. He relived his experiences dying over and over again to the skeleton knight, and the feeling of that first major victory coursing through him was so strong that he barely had time to berate himself for not opening up its breastplate and finding the dark heart that would cause so many problems down the line.

Still, Simon endured it for hours and hours as whole lives flashed before his eyes. Several times, his twin stopped to say something, and several other times he walked away, leaving Simon to his own devices. He wasn’t quite sure what the man was up to, but it was hard to be paranoid when he was bathing in a whole lifetime of Schwarzenbruck. He met Freya again for the first time, and lost her.

That hurt less than he’d feared. He could feel his old self’s anguish, but there was no wound left in his heart to poke on that front. The most he could do was hope that she ended up happy in whatever version of that cursed town didn’t involve zombies. He also met Brena all over again, though this time he pitied her more than anything, even when she bit him.

I could have saved us both a lot of suffering that day, if only I’d known how to use magic, he told himself.

He didn’t, though. Rather than save her, he’d damned them both, and then spent a year or two as a ravening zombie. That was an ugly year, but not as ugly as he remembered it, and as he endured the zombie’s spasmodic motion, he slowly regained the ability to do so himself, at least with his fingers and toes.

His doppelganger eventually stopped the spell sometime after he rescued Gregor the first time. Stop was literal, too. He didn’t just end it; everything froze mid-dinner with Baron Corwin one night and then slowly faded from view, and when he found himself back in bed, he was left with the hunger he’d felt. That was when he realized why the smells and the sounds of the meal had seemed wrong. The day had come and gone, and while Simon had been remembering food in another world, his twin had been cooking food in this one.

The meal that his duplicate had made for them wasn’t nearly as fancy as the one that Baron Corwin’s chefs had prepared. There was no cognac, or pastries. It was just a simple venison stew that showed that his doppelganger had been out hunting, but Simon was still grateful for it.

What he was less grateful for was the fact that he had to be fed, like an infant. That grated on him, but even if he could raise his arms weakly, his hands shook like he was having a seizure, and any time he tried to talk, all that came out of his mouth was a stuttering snarl that he didn’t really mean. While he was frustrated, it wasn’t with his twin.

For once, Simon didn’t feel the need to blame anything on the man who didn’t even rub in the situation, or try to torment him about it. He just blew on spoonfuls of stew before feeding Simon. That gave Simon a long time to chew over both the root vegetable-heavy stew, as well as the things his twin had to say.

Mostly, though, he talked around things. He talked about what a struggle it was to recover from soul damage, and how Simon really needed countermeasures for this and everything else in future runs.

“More than fifty deaths now, and you’re still treating parts of the Pit in a very cavalier way,” his duplicate said. “What are you going to do if you fall into hell, or if the next time someone really does shred your soul all the way? You know there are fates worse than death, but Helades' magic won’t bring you back from all of them; the rest are on you.”

Simon wanted to yell at the man that he had no idea how to do any of that, of course, but such words were impossible. The most he could do was shake his head weakly, which was a big improvement over this morning.

He ate in silence, but that night, when his duplicate laid him back down in his bed, he didn’t sleep for some time. Not only was he afraid the paralysis he’d suffered through for weeks or months might return, but his mind was racing with all of the new information. Not only was the man he’d first thought of as his evil twin obviously not, but as he helped Simon dig his way out of his own grave, he was raising questions about things he’d considered impossible until now.

If she had destroyed my soul, how would I have managed to save myself? He wondered. He didn’t have an answer for that yet, but he hoped to soon.