Traveling, as the thing he was, was a slow, halting process that was far more precarious than his time traveling as a mortal. That was counterintuitive since he could now transform into a flock of ravens and soar dozens of miles in an hour, but such occurrences were rare because of circumstances well beyond his control.
After all, how could someone soar without making sure he had a safe place to land. As a result, even though Simon the man was much slower, he moved much further every day.
Such travels were simpler, too. Then, he could simply buy a new donkey, name her Daisy, and set off down a trail, finding food and hospitality along the way. It didn’t matter where he stopped. Some nights, he would sleep under an open sky, and others, he would curl miserably under a canvas tent or warm himself by the fire in an inn’s common room.
As a vampire, though, he needed a place free from the light each night. Then, once he found it, he had to secure it and make sure that he would not be disturbed while he was crushed by the sun. Both of those steps were time-consuming. That was tough as he moved from one mountain to the next, but it was especially bad once he left the mountains behind.
There, in the flat lands, he might be forced to stay in the same lair for a week running before we found a new one and moved further west if locations were bad or hunting was scarce. If he had been willing to massacre a family farm every now and then, he could have made record time, but that was a shortcut he couldn’t conscience. These people’s lives were already hard enough. Goblins might be rare, but Murani patrols and armies were getting to be fairly common.
Despite the chaos, the broad cultivated lands were much less monster-infested. Although he would occasionally find a bridge troll or a small goblin pack, he was increasingly forced to feed off of animals as he made his way toward Brin. As bad as that was, though, at least that let him practice his gaze.
When you fought goblins, they ran toward you at least, which made them easy to catch. Bears and wolves did too, for the most part, but goats and deer, they just tried to escape, and as fast as he was now, trying to run down a deer was miserable.
So, he got good at holding the skittish creatures in his gaze as soon as he found them. That didn’t make them taste any better, but it did make them stand there and wait to die. By the time he got to Slany, he could make it work on people, too.
The small mining town was all but dead by the time he reached it, and there were no clues around the burned ruins of Corwin Manor to say for sure what had happened to Gregor’s heirs. That was unfortunate, and it gave Simon one more reason to hate the Murani. Still, he lingered for a better part of a week as he explored the familiar area and purged the silver mines of goblins in an effort to reconnect with the person he’d been a dozen lifetimes ago when he called this place home.
It was impossible for him now that he could see the bigger picture. He was no longer a wounded beast but a monster on a mission. He had no way of knowing exactly how far in the future level 99 was in the Pit. In the grand scheme of things, it was probably 150 or even 200 years from where he’d started, but that wasn’t so far from where he stood right now.
However unwillingly he’d gotten here, this moment offered a valuable peek into Helades’ end game as far as he was concerned. It would be a lot easier to solve levels if he understood what it was he was aiming for.
He was 120 or so years in the future relative to where he started, and the fact that there was a giant war going on for the continent that he spent most of his time on seemed rather relevant to that. “War can’t be what I’m meant to stop,” he told himself at first, as he watched another army marching or another legion building a fortification.
It seemed too mundane. All of this time, Simon had thought that what he was doing was building up to something huge and epic. Sometimes, he thought it might be the devils rising from the Pit or some out-of-control necromancer lord, but as he watched a legion of men with spears and shields marching south one evening on one of the trade roads, he became less convinced.
By all accounts, this war had been going on for the better part of a decade, and if he had included the two wars that were precursors to it, then the thing would have been closer to half a century. It was happening all around him right now in a hundred battles and guerilla actions. Sometimes, he interceded, and sometimes, he didn’t as he tried to decide what he was going to do about it. “Wars happen all the time; this one can’t be worse than any of the others I’ve seen in my other lives.”
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It certainly seemed to be, though. Everywhere he went over those next few months, as he slowly made his way across Brin toward Ionia, he found either men fighting or evidence of fighting. He didn’t think that Brin had seen so much combat, even at the height of their civil war, that he’d participated in so many lives before.
Though Simon didn’t always join in the fight, he usually did when he saw a particularly tempting target of opportunity. Mostly, that meant warlocks. There was usually at least one in any given detachment, and Simon would swim through campsites he found as a mist, looking for those men to rip to pieces as a warning to the rest.
He had to. Given the way they stayed young but kept casting spells, it was clear to him that they were burning the lives of others instead of their own, which was nearly as bad as his own existence. That meant they had to die as surely as he did one day.
The warlocks weren’t usually the leaders of a given formation. They seemed to have a different command structure, but they were invariably crafty. Sometimes, he narrowly avoided clever traps that were meant to keep them safe, and other times, he was burned by their suicide amulets or stabbed by their guards. None of that stopped him from doing damage to them whenever he could, not after he found evidence of blood magic rituals in several villages.
Though finding villages entirely devoid of people wasn’t uncommon at this point, Simon didn’t think that they were killing everyone for dark magics. He knew for a fact that many of the survivors were being sent north as slaves. That was one of the reasons the people of Brin still fought. This was not a war of conquest but a total war. If the Murani had simply come down, conquered the capital, replaced the King with a vassal, and left everyone else alone, the war probably would have been over decades before.
This wasn’t that, though. This was a total replacement, which drove Simon ever faster in an effort to find out if Ionia still stood. Eventually, on the way there, he grew curious enough to start questioning survivors. They wouldn’t survive for long, of course, but if he ripped three members of a patrol to pieces, he would let the fourth one live long enough to answer questions with the force of Simon’s dread gaze.
This was good practice for him since months of silent predation had left him with few people to talk to. When he started, he found that he snarled more than he spoke, but in time, more civilized ways returned to him. He learned many things. He learned that the Kingdom of Montain to the south had fallen, and even the city-state of Abresse had surrendered, while the Murani continued to move south in an effort to surround and absorb both of the hold-out Kingdoms he was traveling between.
That was when he knew this was more than a war. It was an invasion. Apparently, it wasn’t the first one, though. One of the mages explained that his own land of Murani had been conquered by people from across the sea two and three generations back and that this was the result of that. That forced Simon to adjust his timeline a bit more.
He’d thought that this war extended for half a century, but it increasingly looked like it was the better part of an entire century once he learned more. If that’s the case, then why do none of the early quests deal with this threat? He wondered. He’d had two levels take him to a place he couldn't even find on a map with ziggurats and carnivorous plants, but no quest had ever been urgent enough to take him to the Murani so he could investigate them further.
The most obvious answer was that it was either what Helades wanted or it was irrelevant to her plans. The latter case seemed unlikely, but the former was unsettling. He reached no consensus by the time he reached the war-torn borders of Ionia.
There, he feasted on beastmen in the Raiden Mountains and observed the situation. From that point, he wasn’t in any hurry because beastmen tasted much better than the goblins, trolls, and beasts he’d been devouring in the flat lands of Brin.
Why should a beast man taste better than a beast? He had no idea, but they did, despite the stink. There were also plenty of enemy soldiers to hunt or question each night as the mood struck him.
Still, it was only when he moved past the forts and fortresses that held the passes and saw that Ionar still stood there in the moonlight that he relaxed. He slept there in a lava tube for several days, high on the volcano's slopes, before he penetrated the palace as a mist to learn what he could.
It was there he found that his son Seymon was still alive. He was an old man now. In fact, he was older than Simon had been when he’d taught him, but he still sat on his simple throne and contributed meaningfully to the discussions with his generals. That sight did Simon’s heart more good than any feeding or victory he’d had in this life. It felt almost as good as his escape from Freya’s grip.
Simon lingered longer than he should. He’d seen that the situation was dire the moment he’d rematerialized as a few silent crows loitering in the shadows of the small garden they planned and discussed within. He didn’t decide to help until one of Seyom’s grandchildren came in to wish him goodnight. She was an adorable little girl who bore a strong family resemblance to Elthena, as he remembered her, young and beautiful in their mid-thirties while he lay crippled in bed. When her mother came in to fetch her and apologize for the distraction, the men just laughed. They didn’t seem to mind at all.
Simon was very distracted, though. Seyom’s daughter, who would have been Simon’s granddaughter, was in her thirties, and she looked so much like her grandmother that it made her heart ache. That was when he decided he had to help them, at least a little. The only question that remained was how he could best do that. Check latest chapters at NoveI(F)ire.net