Death After Death

Simon felt the fury rising in him, but it was premature, so he held it in check. Everything happened at once in that instant, and it was impossible to completely hold back his anger as the world turned red and shrank to a single point of focus. He felt the rage that his wife would cheat on him, only to watch in slow motion as Freya used the distraction his entrance had provided to wrest her right-hand free and stab Varten in the belly with the dagger Simon had given her so recently.

“Simon, this isn’t what it— Fucking bitch!” Varten’s excuses were interrupted by his scream of pain as he cuffed Simon’s wife, sending her careening off on the wooden table before she fell to the floor as limp as a rag doll.

“Gods, I’m fucking bleeding,” he muttered to himself as he pulled the dagger out and tossed it on the ground. “That bitch fucking stabbed me…”

Varten was a practiced duelist, but he only faced foes weaker than himself, so he was always the one doing the wounding and not at all used to the sight of his own blood. Simon’s lip curled in pleasure at that. For better or worse, he’d been on the wrong side of a blade dozens of times now. That realization didn’t stop him from advancing on the man with murder in his eyes.

“You’re supposed to be some kind of miracle worker, right?” the noble babbled. “Heal me as the men claimed you’ve healed them, or my father will hear of this!”

For a moment, Simon let that fantasy play out in his mind. He thought of how easy it would be to touch the other man’s bleeding shirt and whisper the magic words that would end his suffering. Those words weren’t the healing words he knew but the words of destruction. He imagined filling that gaping wound that his wife had left behind with molten pain that consumed the awful young man until his prattling was finally ended forever, and he was reduced to ashes.

Those idle thoughts all ended when he looked to Freya and saw the blood pooling by his wife’s head where she lay on the floor. That was the only thing that saved Varten as he walked past him to get to her.

“Get out,” he said coldly, not even bothering to look at the man that had done this as he cradled his wife. He could have Varten’s corpse any time he wanted it. So, at this moment, she was all that mattered.

The noble took the opportunity and bolted immediately. That show of cowardice would have made Simon smile if things weren’t so grim. It wasn’t like he could get away. There was, after all, no place in any world that the young Raithewait could go to escape from what was coming for him after he’d hurt the only woman that Simon had ever loved.

“Ä̴̮̦̯́̅ű̸̡̙̩͛f̶͈̦́̃v̸͚̬̀̕ả̷̩͙̼r̶̦̀͊ú̶̪̮̉͝m̷͔͔̃͋ ̷̩̯̈́Ḣ̸̲̗̲̽̚j̸̺͔̓͘͜a̸̢̘̎̋k̶̞̀k̴̤͇̏̑̈́” he whispered, instantly closing the wound on her forehead like it had never been there. Once that was done, he stroked her blood-matted hair as he cried softly. She stirred almost immediately but weakly. Her eyes fluttered open and then closed again, bringing to mind the painful lessons he’d learned after his battles in the last few months: closing the most obvious part of the wound didn’t necessarily solve the problem.

A couple months ago, a man in Simon’s unit had died after his stomach had been ripped open in a battle with goblins. Simon had even healed the man, though it didn’t seem to matter, and it had been a slow, painful death, and Simon was sure that all his magic had done was prolong the man’s suffering. At first, Simon thought it had been caused by internal bleeding. Still, even after a second round of healing, his belly continued to swell. Eventually, they’d had to put him out of his misery because some vital organ was punctured, and Simon didn’t know enough about it to fix it.

“It’s going to be okay, baby,” he said soothingly as he picked up Freya and set her on the bed. “I’m going to find out what’s wrong, and I’m going to fix you. I promise.”

Simon spent the next few minutes studying his beloved, looking for anything that might offer a clue as to what was wrong with her. At first, he thought it might be blood loss because she’d always been a little anemic, and it had only gotten worse after she started to show. Freya’s pulse was steady, though, and it didn’t seem like her neck was broken. It was only when he peeled open her eyelid and saw her pupils were of wildly different sizes that he realized it might be a concussion or something like that.

“Those aren’t fatal, though, are they?” Simon struggled to remember anything he could about his brief exposure to first aid treatment. All he could remember was to keep her hydrated and cover her with a blanket to prevent shock.

After she hadn’t shown any additional signs of recovery for an hour, Simon decided to risk trying to heal her brain directly. A concussion was supposed to be like a bruise on the brain after all, and bruises he could fix, but he felt certain he wasn’t qualified to be poking around in anyone’s brain, and as he whispered. “Ä̴̮̦̯́̅ű̸̡̙̩͛f̶͈̦́̃v̸͚̬̀̕ả̷̩͙̼r̶̦̀͊ú̶̪̮̉͝m̷͔͔̃͋ ̷̩̯̈́Ḣ̸̲̗̲̽̚j̸̺͔̓͘͜a̸̢̘̎̋k̶̞̀k̴̤͇̏̑̈́” he was extremely cognizant that he could make things worse.

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A moment later, she opened her eyes again. “Simon… I’m so sorry,” she whispered weakly. “I didn’t but… but he wouldn’t stop, he said that…”

“Shhhhh,” he soothed her, squeezing her hand tighter. “I know this isn’t your fault, baby. I know. It’s going to be okay.”

“The baby,” she said suddenly, trying to sit up, “Oh gods, the baby, is it…”

“It’s fine,” Simon said, trying to keep her calm. “Everything is going to be just fine.”

“It isn’t,” she said, starting to cry. “Simon, I have to tell you... I can’t… I’m not…”

That Freya seemed to be having trouble holding on to what she was trying to say concerned Simon to no end, but he tried to keep the worry off his face. He didn’t know if he’d done something to make things worse or if there was some other internal injury he hadn’t discovered, but it felt like with every word she spoke, she was expending a small part of her rapidly waning strength.

“Be still, darling,” he said, no longer able to hold back his tears as they cascaded silently down his face. “Don’t speak. Save your strength.”

“I didn’t want to, Simon…” she whispered, ignoring his caution, “but I always loved you…”

She smiled lopsidedly after that, but eventually, her eyelids closed again, and no matter what Simon did or said, he couldn’t make them reopen. “Freya. Can you hear me?” he pleaded, panic seeping into his voice. “Answer me, please!”

“Ä̴̮̦̯́̅ű̸̡̙̩͛f̶͈̦́̃v̸͚̬̀̕ả̷̩͙̼r̶̦̀͊ú̶̪̮̉͝m̷͔͔̃͋ ̷̩̯̈́Ḣ̸̲̗̲̽̚j̸̺͔̓͘͜a̸̢̘̎̋k̶̞̀k̴̤͇̏̑̈́” he said again, louder this time, trying to will her delicate mind to return to life one more time, but even that only made her eyelids flicker briefly before they were still once more.

“Please, Helades - just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. Just tell me how I can fix this, and I promise I’ll do whatever you ask of me,” he prayed quietly. “Just let me save my family. Please!”

The goddess gave him no answer, though, so all he could do was sit there, crying over Freya’s body. Her heart still beat, and her flesh was still warm, but he was increasingly certain she’d suffered some kind of stroke that was beyond his ability to fix, and now she was little more than a corpse.

An hour ago, he’d been full of adrenaline and pride that he’d managed to save everyone from the orcs, but right here, right now, none of that mattered. He felt certain that he’d failed to save his wife and his unborn child now, so everything else was meaningless. What use was a city that still stood if the only life that he wanted to save was ebbing out in front of him?

Simon didn’t leave her side for the rest of the day. He tried twice more to heal her without result, and it was just after sunset when he noticed that she’d stopped breathing. He held her one last time, and then he took the ugly, primitive-looking ring from her hand and tied it to a thong around his neck. Then he wrapped her in the blanket she’d spent the last few months knitting for them, picked her up, and took her outside to bury her.

Even hours after the victory over the orcs, the streets were still full of revelers and people celebrating the impossibility of what they’d done. When people saw Simon approaching, they cheered, but as he walked past them and they felt his aura of despair, they fell silent in his wake.

He walked to the graveyard just outside the north gate, and then he located a shovel and began to dig. Several people approached him, including the gravedigger, with offers of help, but he refused all of them. This single-minded focus was the only thing that could keep his mind off the rage and despair that warred within him.

Was this really all his life was now, he wondered? A constant stream of disappointments? Was he just supposed to find the girl again, only to lose her? What sort of life was that?

Simon was in better shape than he’d been in his whole life. He was even more fit than when he sparred with Gregor almost every day after being here in Crowvar for almost a year, but even so, digging down foot after foot into the clay soil was backbreaking work, and the exhaustion was all that kept him from breaking down into wracking sobs.

When the hole was at last deep enough, sometime after midnight, Simon arranged her into the pit and stood staring at it for a long time before he could bring himself to fill it in with dirt. He couldn’t help it. He was paralyzed by all the happy memories they’d shared together, and putting that first shovelful of earth on top of her would truly be saying goodbye for the last time.

It wouldn’t be the last time, of course. He knew that. He could just kill himself and go find her again. He could kill himself a hundred times if that’s what it took to locate her again. But it wouldn’t be this Freya or this life, and as tempted as he was to just lie down in that grave beside her, he gripped their ring that now hung around his neck, and he knew that he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t give in to despair.

So he filled in her grave and then impaled his sword in the earth as a crude grave marker. There was nothing fancy about the steel blade, but any one of the Baron’s men could look at it and see that it was his. Perhaps one of them would make something a little nicer for her in the days to come, he thought, exhausted.

Simon vowed that if he survived what was to come that he would use the rest of their gold to hire a mason to build a grand monument to her, though he doubted that he’d ever be around to see it. He lay there on the cold, wet earth in a vain attempt to be close to her one last time, and he slept, knowing that some small, vital piece of who he was had been buried in that grave with her.

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