The way to Darndelle was longer than Simon remembered. He was pretty sure it had taken him five days to get here once upon a time, but it took closer to a week before he sighted the city. He’d forgotten how much he hated this part of his cycle. The only way to really appreciate how soft and weak he’d been in his past life was to be forced to wallow in it after spending years feeling strong and vital.
This time, it wasn’t even the weight or his severe lack of cardio. It was how prone his feet were to blisters and how much he sweated under the heat of the midday sun. He could use words of lesser healing to address the minor wounds, but only time would take care of everything else.
“What I need is a word that lets me reshape my body,” he told himself one day while he rested in the shade. “Like a word of greater transformation or something. Hell, I’d take a word of lesser weight loss.”
Despite his griping about his physical condition, his skills were only slightly dulled by it, and thanks to his bow, he ate well on the trip back. One night, he slow-roasted a rabbit on a handmade rotisserie with sage, and another night, he had fire-roasted fish that he caught in a raging stream he crossed earlier that day. Even at his worst, this was hardly a bad life.
Simon didn’t encounter any bandits, and though he saw the tracks of a beastman tribe, he never actually saw them, which was just as well since he was trying not to kill everything in sight on this trip. He did walk with a caravan for the last few days once he reached the road. He told them that he was a traveling scholar, which wasn’t so far from the truth. They seemed skeptical, given his leather armor and his skill with a bow, but all he could do about that was lamely offer that the road was a very dangerous place for scholars.
Still, it was good feedback, and the first thing he did when he reached Darndelle once he’d secured a room at a cheap inn was to visit a tailor and have something more appropriate made. He planned on spending a lot of time at the libraries of the trade city, and the last thing he wanted to do was stand out like a sore thumb.
The second thing he did, after he’d wasted half of his precious few gold coins on a new outfit, was to go visit the graveyard where he’d spent so much time. He didn’t actually enter it, of course. Instead, he leaned on the fence and watched the mist coalesce nearby as it sensed his life force.
“I’d be careful if I were you, stranger,” a man said in passing as Simon studied the place. “You set foot in there after dark, and your life is forfeit. No one is going to be foolish enough to try to save you.”
Simon nodded and thanked the man, but he kept looking just the same. Fixing this particular problem in the future was one of his biggest accomplishments, and it felt weird to see that it was all undone . Part of him wanted to be here to watch when his past self finally burned all this away, but that was decades from now and well after the date he planned to be in Ionar.
Simon’s life in the city continued like that for the better part of a week while he ran various errands. He bought paper, ink, and wax to forge a note of introduction from a Baron in Liepzin. He considered using the Raithwaite name, but the idea of associating himself with that family sickened him. So, instead, he wrote it as if it were from Lord Corwin and hoped that he wouldn’t bring any trouble down on that man’s head while he waited for his clothes to arrive. It was only when all that was done that he finally paid a barber to make him look respectable and visited the city archives.
Though nominally, they were restricted to the King’s scribes and courtiers. He already knew what to say to get them to ask the least questions possible. Though initially, the archivist was quite unhelpful, when he read the letter and saw that Simon’s fictitious master had heard of the city’s plight and was planning to come down and slay the monstrosity that had beset the city’s graveyard, he softened immediately.
The people of Darndelle cared about many things. They cared about the roads and trade. They cared about the desert bandits and the centaur tribes. They even cared about their relations and rivalries with Abrese to the south. What the city's rulers cared about more than anything else, though, was the curse that haunted their city each night.
It was a stain on their rule, and Simon knew that any serious effort to purge it would be granted all the support that was needed.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“Why exactly does Baron uhm… Corwin? Is it? Why exactly has he taken an interest in our little problem, Mr. Nomis?” the man asked, still a little suspicious, even after reading the letter. “And what does he hope to gain by your presence?”
“Well, between you and me, my lord is a bit of a glory hound,” Simon confessed, pretending to sound embarrassed. This was made more difficult by hearing the alias he’d given the man said out loud. He’d reversed his name in case he accidentally did something so that he didn’t litter the history books with any more Simons, but now that he heard it repeated back to him, he decided he should have picked a better name. “This is hardly the first monster he’s fought. I think he’s hoping to create a legend of sorts.”
“A legend, huh? What else has he slain?” the man asked, more curiously.
Simon listed off a few random beasts inspired by his own adventures, though he gave them more creative names. “Well, after the goblin lord and the centaur chieftain, he turned his attention to larger beasts and struck down the wyvern of Mount Wiggindorf and the Griffon of Matalena,” Simon continued, using his most sincere voice, perfectly aware that not all of these were real places.
Still, the archivist didn’t seem to know that and, after the conversation, granted him probationary access to the records so that he could begin his research on the Baron’s behalf. As a strategy, this worked splendidly, and the only time that people bothered him was when important personages tracked him down to ask when the Baron was coming or if Simon had discovered the secret to slaying the beast.
His answer to those annoyances always varied but was generally along the lines of, “I may yet send for him soon. My current line of research is promising, but not yet conclusive,” even though very little of what he read about each day had anything to do, even tangentially, with the Blackheart or the mist.
Instead, he spent his time trying to learn about the history of the region and the other monsters of the world while he poured through document after document, looking for more information about the Unspoken. True to what Aaric had said, though, they seemed to be a secret society intent on saying that way. ŕ
Very occasionally, he would find oblique references about some problem or another being solved with the assistance of doves, and occasionally, a record about some warlock would end with the phrase, ‘and he was never spoken of again,’ but these were flimsy things that were barely worth mentioning after he spent day after day tracking down these out of the way stories.
For a fantasy world, it seemed a great deal of information in the library was utterly mundane. Fantastical accounts were rare, and almost all of them were flat and undetailed or cut off before he could get a complete picture. To him, it felt almost like someone was sanitizing history, especially where magic and the Unspoken were concerned.
Unfortunately, after months in the city, his funds started to get low, and he had to switch from doing full-time research to doing part-time map-making to make ends meet. In Simon’s time at the library, he’d noticed that the primary users of the library, beyond city functionaries, were merchants looking for more information about this destination or that one.
So, Simon set about making reasonably accurate maps of the region that he could sell to these gentlemen. Each would take a few hours to make as he traced them from the large glowing version he had the mirror in his room display, but each would sell for a handful of gold, which was more than enough to see him taken care of for a few months.
On the rare occasion he was called out on either of these activities, he would make something up on the spot. “Oh, there was once a similar phenomenon in this region…” or “Though that’s true, the Baron told me that I might find a clue as to the thing’s weakness because…”
It was all bullshit, of course, and eventually Simon got to be quite good at it. That was fortunate because the longer he stayed, the more parties of important people he got invited to share what he’d learned.
By the time he’d been in the city for over a year, he was invited to some event or another on an almost monthly basis, just so that the nobles of the city could ask him about the wider world and the chances that their city’s curse would finally be purged. Some brought up the Blackheart rumor, but he dismissed it. Instead, he focused on extraneous details, like the way that the fog moved and how similar it was to the swamp wraiths that haunted some bogs or how one of the headstones in the cemetery might indeed be cursed.
Once, at a Viscount’s dinner table, when he was asked how it absorbed the souls of everyone else who was buried there, Simon went on at length about how their souls were trapped and needed to be freed. He even insinuated that someone might be able to communicate with the beast in some dark fashion. He only suggested all of this because the man seemed to have something to hide, and it amused Simon to make him think that whatever secret he was keeping might yet be revealed.
He knew that he shouldn’t be making waves like that and that even harmless fun might impact the future in unknown ways. What he didn’t expect, though, was for it to rouse the attention of the Unspoken themselves.
When he returned home the following night, though, that’s exactly who he found waiting for him. There were three men in white cloaks looking through his things, and when he opened the door, they seemed utterly unperturbed.
“Have a seat, Mr. Nimos,” one of them said, not bothering to pull back his cowl and show his face. “We’ve been expecting you.”