That night, when the clay-masked priests came for him, he was unsurprised. It was the reason he hadn’t stayed in Zoa’s cell with her. While he hadn’t been sure the oracle would talk to him about his painting, he’d been pretty sure, and as he walked through the misty streets by the light of a single lantern, the only surprise was that they led him to the cliffs in the same spot where he’d stood with Zoa half a day earlier.
“This is lovely, Simon,” she said as he approached, not taking her eyes off his mural. “I knew you would paint something grand, but this exceeds my expectations.”
He looked over his shoulder at the mural and had to admit that in the white light of the moon, with nothing but the dark city behind it, it looked even more striking than it had at sunset. The black lines had almost vanished in the shadows, but the white and yellow of the gold lines he’d drawn almost glowed by contrast. It hadn’t been an intentional effect, but it was a beautiful one.
“Thanks,” he answered, not sure exactly how to say any of that without sounding like a conceited jackass, so he went for conversational instead as he joined her in viewing the moonlit spectacle. “It was nice to paint something again.”
If he’d painted something in a major city, he was sure that the strange art style would have rippled out to influence countless young artists. Here, though, only a few hundred acolytes and priests would see it between now and the decades or centuries between now and when it finally flaked off the wall.
“It will make a difference,” she said as if she was reading his mind, which was her habit. “In many of the lives that have to see it each day, whether they ever realize it or not.”
“Well, that’s gratifying to hear,” Simon nodded, finally turning his gaze to the woman. She was beautiful, at least what little he could see of her, but she was veiled as always. “So do I owe this conversation to the spell I cast or—”
“Oh, I don’t think you need me to tell you what happened there,” she answered with a tight smile. “You’re a clever man; you’ve already figured that out.”
“If you muddy the waters, it becomes harder to see through them,” he repeated automatically.
“As long as you fall asleep thinking about Schwarzenbruck instead of Zoa or your aura, I don’t think that true clarity is within your grasp,” she volunteered with a forthrightness that surprised him.
“How can I not worry about it?” Simon asked. “In a year or two, the entire place will be overrun with the living dead. Thousands will die and spread across the land and—”
“I assume that you’ve solved this problem before,” she asked. “How has that improved the world?”
“I—” her question struck him like a slap to the face. For a moment, all he could think of were all the horrible things that had happened there. His doppelgänger, the collapsing barrow mound, Freya as a vampire, and, of course, the year he spent as one of the walking dead. It was as violent an emotional spasm as his brain had given him in years, and when he opened his eyes, he found her hand on his chest.
“Peace, Simon,” she said soothingly. “It was not an attack. Much of you is bound up in that place. I merely ask because perhaps it might be better to let you go and see how it plays out.”
For a second, Simon thought he was back talking to Helades once more. Only, the truth was that Helades would never have suggested that he do nothing and see how things play out where one of her levels was concerned. She would have told him to do what he was supposed to, move on to the next level, and stop trying to save everyone.
Still, for one terrible moment, those two voices resonated uncomfortably inside of him. “I can’t just let bad things happen to good people,” he said finally. “That’s not who I am.”
“Perhaps I could show you then…” she mused.
“Show me?” Simon asked.
“Well, this sort of vision would damage most people’s journey toward clarity,” she sighed. “It might even damage their mind, but you aren’t most people, are you Simon?”
He had no idea what she was getting at, so he said, “I’ve seen lots of terrible things.”
She nodded at that, and then, after a moment’s consideration, she said, “Come here, kneel by the water’s edge. There is something I wish to show you.”
Simon did as she instructed, only a little worried she’d push him into the water. Still, the strange tightness in her voice made him sure this was no prank. He wasn’t sure what was going to happen next, but he was fairly sure it would not be pleasant.
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“What you must understand,” she said, moving so that her feet were on either side of his legs as she stood directly behind him, “Is that there are many ways to use mirrors, visions, and even futures. As much as you think you know about magic, you are starting to understand that you really know nothing. That is true about many things, and you would be wise to remember that.”
As she spoke, he heard the sound of rustling fabric, which he could only assume was her removing her veil. That was tempting, but he wasn’t about to risk whatever was happening now just for a glimpse at who she really was. Instead, he nodded and said, “I understand.”
“You don’t,” she answered automatically. “But perhaps you will in time. These are all complex things, and I must caution you in the strictest sense possible that you should not try to repeat what I’m about to show you. This is dangerous even with me holding your hand, and it would certainly be fatal in my absence.”
Simon thought about asking questions about that, but as she spoke, she drew close to him, and he could see her hands dancing in strange rhythms that he knew to be another way of casting spells. He’d seen both the Murani warlocks and the devils from hell use them. That raised some questions about the Oracle, but before he could formulate them, let alone ask them, her hands began to glow darkly, and then she covered his eyes with them.
“When I uncover your eyes, look into the water and think only about Schwarzenbruck,” she cautioned him. “Then you will see the world as I often do, and most importantly, you will see what happens if you do not interfere.”
Simon tingled in anticipation, even as he tried to still his mind with the meditation techniques he learned, but that was hard when his heart was beating faster with excitement. He had no idea what was going to happen next, and after so many lives, that was very rarely the case.
Simon felt her soft, cool hands leave his face, and a moment later, he opened his mind, thinking only of Schwarzenbruck. He was entirely unprepared for the images he was bombarded with.
The lake was alive. A moment before, it had been a dark, mist-covered lake that was as still as the night air. Now, it was boiling over with images everywhere, and all of them were of Schwarzenbruck. At first, they were a thousand snapshots of what life looked like in the sleepy crossroads town. A miller having dinner with his family, a shop cobbler repairing someone's boots, and friends getting drinks together in a tavern were all images that caught his eye at first.
Though it was dazzling, he didn’t really understand what her cautions were about, not until the violence started. After that, the lake very quickly became a cauldron of blood, and the sight was made all the more horrific in the way it was presented. There were no vast tableaus of people dying en mass. Each bubble that came to the surface of that vast, frothy lake was an individual death, and in almost all cases, the people it showed died at the teeth of someone they loved and trusted.
It was an ocean of gore, and despite how inured he was to violence after so many lives, it affected even him. Still, his first instinct was to try to find a patient zero and trace it back. As he sifted through the froth, he found a group of adventurers that he was sure was mentioned to him in one of his first lives. Even as Simon tried to trace them back, to figure out where it was they’d been to get infected, though, the Oracle chided him. “This is not to help you try to make sure this never happens. This is so you can see what happens if it does. Focus, Simon.”
It took an act of will to listen to her and let those answers drift away. Instead, he let the tide of violence sweep him forward. He watched as the city was alive through a thousand different lives, and through all that, the only mercy was that he didn’t see Freya get ripped to pieces. Instead, he watched the town meltdown, one life at a time.
At first, it spread only along the north bank, spreading quickly between scattered communities and more slowly along the winding trade route. Those were consequences Simon had only barely dealt with. It was the surge south he was more familiar with, and when he glimpsed Kell as he opened the gates that had been nailed shut by the survivor, the tide of dead spread south and east, devastating every town and city they reached.
Simon didn’t need the gory images to remind him of this part. He’d lived it. Still, he couldn’t look away. Days and weeks were passing and seconds, and unless he learned how this sort of magic worked, he was unlikely to ever experience this again, so he stayed focused, allowing the bottomless well of suffering that was the lake's surface to wash over him over and over again. Google seaʀᴄh novᴇlfire.net
Though the mountains contained the surge to the south, eventually, the tide of dead reached all the way to the very capital of Brin before it was put down. By this point, some of the images were getting fuzzy, and some of the events were playing out through different people's eyes quite differently.
Uncertainty, his mind whispered. The further events ripple out, the more subject they are to change, and the more likely they are to vary.
The Oracle said nothing. She just rested her hands on his shoulders as he gazed into the frothing images of the abyss. Even without the zombies, they continued. Now, they focused on the recovery and all of the shattered lives.
Before the zombies arrived, the kingdom had been at war with itself in a sequence of betrayals that Simon remembered very well. The tide of the dead ended that, at least. In the wake of the zombies, peace reigned, but that was as much because there were so few men left to fight as any positive impulses.
As the rebuilding started, Simon watched over the space of years as a thousand futures resolved into a blurred, unreadable froth. He was uncertain if that was because they’d gone too far into the future for even the oracle to see clearly or if things became chaotic absent a major event to react to. Either way, things continued to fade.
In those waning moments, absent anything interesting happening in Brin, he turned his view north, looking for any evidence of how the zombies had fared up there. He saw only that they had passed through the deserts and seemed to cause outbreaks in lands that were unfamiliar to him. Unfortunately, by that point, the details were all but gone, and eventually, all he saw was the dark, still lake.
He blinked then, for the first time in however long it had been since he opened his eyes. Decades had passed, though he could not say if they’d passed in hours or minutes. All he knew now was that his cheeks were stained with tears he didn’t remember crying.