Death After Death

Simon spent days looking through the Tome of Bahgmorrda, making notes and scribbling over them or crumpling them up and throwing them away, but that was all for show. He’d already solved the code, and the only difficulty was going slow enough to take it all in without giving himself away.

On its surface, the thing looked like the grimoire he’d stolen from Festuvian so long ago. That was to say, it was half full of garbage and meaningless rituals. Amidst those rituals, though, were words of power. He didn’t discover any new ones, but in many cases, the ones that were mentioned were used in ways he’d never seen them. That was enough to rapidly expand his knowledge.

The first word he dug into was Vrazig. Simon had used that one plenty to strike people down with lightning. It was his favorite assassination spell. He’d also learned from the strange orcish graffiti that it had connotations of entropy when it was pronounced as ruin. It was more than that, though.

Truthfully, all the words were, as he was quickly finding out. He’d once thought that each word only had a single power and a single meaning. Actually, I once thought that lesser was only associated with healing and greater with fire, he thought with a smirk as he remembered how foolish he’d been. There was far more to it, though.

In the case of Vrazig, there was lightning and ruin, but that was because they were both related to air. Well, wind, really, he corrected himself. It had elemental qualities, which made sense, but it also seemed to be related to chance.

That made Vosden its opposite since it was earth, but that was also true of Delzam, which turned out not to be just related to curing but a reordering of things.

Simon happily went through the book, a few pages at a time, collecting more associations and linkages. He pretended to scribble notes while he acted like his frustration continued to deepen. At dinner that night, he told the Head Librarian through a series of notes that he was trying a substitution cipher using common words, and he hoped for some results soon.

The man was polite enough, but the manner of his responses and his expression when he read Simon’s updates told him all he needed to know. As far as his superior was concerned, this was busy work, and he didn’t expect results.

That was good news as far as Simon was concerned, and he spent the next week drinking deep of this new font of knowledge. They think that taking my tongue is a setback, but in my next life, they will live to regret this, he told himself as his knowledge broadened.

That said, it was only when he figured out the nature of the illustration near the end of the book that he really had a breakthrough.

The thing was a series of disconnected shapes. Most of them had coded symbols on them, but a few were left blank, with only a question mark. He eventually decoded the elemental symbols, and a few minutes after that, most everything else, thanks to the process of elimination.

Vrazig was air, so it opposed earth, but it was also chaos, so it opposed order.

Vosden was earth, so it opposed air, but it was also strength, so it opposed weakness.

Meiren was fire, so it opposed water, but it was also heat, so it opposed cold.

Zyvon was water, so it opposed fire, but it was also transfer, so it opposed boundary.

Slowly but surely, a number of conclusions were built up from these basic oppositions. For most of the time that Simon had known a single word of power, he’d thought of them as discrete things, but really, they were almost a language onto themselves. Though it wasn’t quite a language that he was used to, with adverbs and punctuation, he could see how it now had nouns and verbs.

Each word modified the next, and though he wasn’t sure how much that increased the cost of the spell, he could see how that could increase the specificity of the effects. That kind of precision and flexibility would allow him to do any number of complex things with only a few more syllables spoken.

After only a week of studying this profane tome, Simon felt like his brain was melting from the implications. He felt like he’d been using the powers he’d found all wrong. Up until now, it was like he’d been spamming a fast kick in a fighting game without ever bothering to learn the combos.

That was what he wanted to do right now, more than anything. He wanted to try out at least a few of the ideas that this book was giving him, but he couldn’t, not unless he was willing to go out and commit suicide, and after making such huge gains only a couple years into this life, and only a few weeks into his time among the Unspoken, that would be the dumbest thing he could do.

So, he bided his time and devoured the grimoire, which mostly involved reading about how Bahgmorrda did terrible things in exchange for power. Some of these, like blood sacrifice, were pretty straightforward. He used animals and even strangers to power some spells so that he didn’t have to trade his own valuable life for his magic.

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Other stories were stranger, and if Simon hadn’t done all he’d done, he would have had trouble believing them. He traded openly with devils of the pit on several occasions for terrible secrets. Often, this included throwing his own family members into hell, which was all the more terrifying because of the way it was discussed so nonchalantly.

Simon couldn’t be one hundred percent sure without checking his notes in the mirror, but he was fairly certain that none of the devils that the warlock listed by name were the ones he’d spoken to on level thirteen. Grevelzarthrik, Bromathazin, and Varmathereon were all strange names, and Simon was fairly sure he would remember them if he’d ever heard them before.

More than that, though, they reminded him of the words of power in their pronunciation, and they made him think there might be some deeper connection there. Could the Unspoken be right? He wondered. They think that all magic is infernal, and infernal creatures seem to know a lot about it.

Simon wasn’t convinced yet, but it seemed like a fine thesis for now. Still, some of the stories were so lurid that Simon had trouble believing them. Apparently, Bahgmorrda used words of power to teleport to distant lands on more than one occasion, resurrect loved ones, and even level stone structures with his magic. Despite some of the hocus pocus and pageantry involved in some of the stories, based on the words he’d used and the methods he described, Simon was inclined to take the stories at least somewhat seriously. ᚱ𝓪

One thing was clear. A lot of preparation was required for such effects, and even with all that preparation, terrible things could still happen.

At one point, Bahgmorrda attempted to reincarnate his favorite wife into a perfect alabaster body that had been carved in her image. It was perfect in every last detail, but when he cast the spell, and the stone turned to flesh, the clothing had turned to flesh too, resulting in a woman-shaped abomination with wide skirts made of skin and legs that were only a few inches long before they ended in tiny feet shaped like high heels. The woman, if that was indeed what she was behind the veil that the stone masons had carved across her features, could barely move until he finally put her out of her misery.

For all the man’s accomplishments, though, he didn’t seem to know as much about creating magical items as Simon already did. It was a blindspot for him and a real indication that the Unspoken were winning. By suppressing knowledge the way they were, each aspiring wizard had to learn each secret anew, with only a few scraps of knowledge from their predecessors.

He imagined that most of them died in that process. He certainly would have.

Now maybe, I wouldn’t have to, he mused as he considered the various spells he could try. Aufvarum Hyakk was a spell he’d used a great many times, but up until now, he’d only used it to heal himself. It was possible, he realized now, though, that he could use the same words to shape his own appearance. Oftentimes, an illusion would be easier and more effective, but if he really had to impersonate someone else for the long term, it could definitely do the job.

Likewise, though he was not entirely sure how Bahgmorrda had used teleportation magic because the references he made were too coded and obscure, Simon was pretty sure he could use Dnarth Oonbetit to similar effect. He might use Dnarth Zyvon instead, though, because he wasn’t sure if distant motion or distant transfer would give him the effect he wanted. One or both of them might simply grant him a particularly ugly death. More study would be required.

Simon made a point to read Bahgmorrda’s failed experiments for these reasons. Every lesson he didn’t have to learn the hard way himself was a good one, as far as he was concerned. n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

Toward the end of the volume, and probably toward the end of his long life, the mage became obsessed with the idea of transferring his soul into a younger body. He was apparently unable to realize this goal before the end, though, and the pages abruptly went blank after a proposed experiment involving the words of greater understanding transfer, indicating that something had gone terribly wrong.

Or maybe he just ran out of power, Simon thought to himself with a shrug. He considered the whole thing very informative in a cautionary tale sort of way and made a note never to become an obsessive megalomaniac.

Three weeks after he started reading the tome, once he had finished squeezing it of everything of obvious value, he announced to his boss that he had made the first tentative strides in understanding it, providing him with a partially translated copy of the first page, complete with errors to make it look like it was still a work in progress.

It was good that he’d waited for so long to reveal even that much because their response was to take the thing away from him immediately and pass it off to the reader of the Grimoire section of the library. That frustrated Simon, but truthfully, he’d expected it, which was why he’d done exactly as he did. Let them struggle to learn even a tenth of what I did, he thought as he reflected on everything he knew now.

Aufvarum (disperse, minor)

Barom (illusion, light)

Celdura (plan, shape)

Delzam (cure, order)

Dnarth (connection, distant, hidden)

Gelthic (ice, weakness)

Gervuul (greater, power)

Hyakk (flesh, healing)

Karesh (location, protection, understanding)

Meiren (creation, fire, life)

Oonbetit (focused, force, motion)

Uuvellum (null, boundary)

Vosden (earth, metal, strength)

Vrazig (lightning, ruin, wind)

Zyvon (transfer, water)

Every word of power that Simon knew now had more than one association, and he suspected that there was still more to learn. Hopefully, he’d find all of that and more as he delved even deeper into the library.