Chương 224: A Painful Eternity

Ch. 224 - A Painful Eternity Even with all Simon did in those first few days to make himself more comfortable, he was still in agony. That didn't change as the life force he'd drained from those three unsuspecting guards slowly leaked out of his open wounds, leaving him with hunger and pain as his only true companions. In his tomb, it was so quiet that he could hear every small move that he made but nothing else. The world might as well no longer exist, and Simon tried to make peace with that.

For a time, he even tried to use this time productively and think about some of the lingering questions he had in regard to magic. After a lifetime of painting, he had a very vivid imagination and didn't need paper to draw. He could trace the runes in his mind without much effort. This effort didn't last for as long as he would like, though, and neither did his attempt to count the days.

Even buried in stone, he could still feel the oppressive weight of the sun as it crushed him into torpor, and even with the pain of the hunger, he was still able to think clearly for a while, but in time, he weakened, and the last day he bothered to count was day 167. It hadn't even been half a year, but already, it was starting to feel like an eternity. If I stop counting, then it won't seem as long, he told himself. A watched pot never boils and all that, that was a lie, though.

The truth was that he was losing heart. That number had been the cornerstone that gave structure to his tiny little world. Once he took that away, it started to fall apart within a few days or a few lifetimes. It was hard to be sure of which. He didn't quite regret saving Emma and Ara, but after a while, his most common thought was that he shouldn't have sacrificed so much time to ensure their safety. I got them out of the castle! He raged at himself. That should have been enough, right there!

I should have killed myself the moment I'd given them a fighting chance! Regret was a toxic thing in an infinity of hunger and pain. He tried to find some way to be zen about it, but it wouldn't come. He'd been able to endure a lot of hardships that way. When he cut out every last sprout of the demon seed in a version of Ionar that never existed, he'd watched the waves every night until sleep took him and reminded himself that his efforts mattered little more than those waves but that he couldn't do anything else.

Now, he didn't even have the peace of the sea. He only had a gnawing hunger for flesh and blood that was rivaling the senseless need he'd had back when he was a zombie, along with the terrible pain of a sword jabbed into one of his cervical vertebrae. He played with that, sometimes, because it was the only means of entertainment he had left to him. It was the only sensation in the world besides his hunger and the smooth feeling of wood that was his prison.

If he moved a little to the left, eventually, his spine would heal enough to reveal the painful wound of the other sword still embedded in his chest. It also revealed that he had toes, and if he tried, he could even wiggle them. If he moved to the right again, he severed his spinal cord once more, and all of that vanished, leaving him with only a single painful wound to focus on. Eventually, all of that became too much trouble.

For a while, a year or two at least, he hoped that water damage would rot and warp the wood and let his feeble finger reach up and pull a piece of plank free to end himself. Surely that would be enough, he thought. Even rotted wood would penetrate my parchment skin. It never happened, though, and eventually, he grew tired of checking. Not long after that, in the grand scheme of things, he couldn't check at all. He no longer had the strength to lift so much as a finger. He couldn't even blink anymore.

All he could do was lay there and wait to die. When this started, Simon had earnestly believed that it wouldn't have been as bad as his time as the statue, but he'd been wrong. There, he'd experienced no pain or hunger. He'd just laid there, immune to the ravages of time as the sun rose and set. He would give a great deal for a single sunrise now, and not just because it would scourge him from the world and let him start over properly. He just wanted some stimulus that wasn't horrible.

A flower, a view of the stars, or really, anything at all would do. He would settle for the smell of a home-cooked meal or the feeling of a soft bed. His ability to think abstractly was starting to break down under the weight of years. This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. His negative emotions were growing ever more powerful in comparison to the thinking, rational part of his mind.

Eventually, all he could hold on to was Freya's promise that she would release him. She meant that as a form of torture, but he really longed to be free so badly that he would accept any other humiliation or abuse she planned to heap on him in exchange for removing these blades and walking under his own power once more. She didn't come, though. Years passed, and she didn't come, and slowly, his sanity paid the price for that. She's never going to come! His mind raged. It was just a trick to give you hope.

You'll be down here forever, now, and not even that bitch of a Goddess will save you. Simon had no idea if that was true or not, but then, as the months and years passed, he was having a harder and harder time remembering who he was. Things were getting muddled, and only his happiest memories were enough to penetrate the darkness after a time. He thought about Elthna and his son Sayom often. The vampire level was in their future, so she hoped things were going well there. Sayom was probably the King of Ionia now.

He probably had a family. At least, Simon hoped he did. He promised himself that when this was done, he would go and visit them if he escaped, even if he was a vampire. He wouldn't let them know he was there, of course. He'd just watch from a distance as Sayom tucked his grandchildren into bed for a night or two before he let the sun scour him from the earth the way that God intended. He made up all sorts of stories about where he would go and what he would do when this was done.

He knew that the real answer was that he was going to kill himself at the first chance he got and reset his miserable existence, but that was too depressing, so he thought about the other things he could do. He could visit friends and family, or he could use his fantastical vampire powers to kill people he didn't care for, like the Unspoken. Simon spent weeks thinking about the best possible way to take those pricks apart, simply for something to do. He considered every weakness and every avenue of attack.

Mostly, he was surprised and a little bit unnerved by how much better his mind seemed to work when he was fantasizing about something dark. He had trouble remembering what Eltha looked like, but when it came to vengeance, things were crystal clear. His only lucky break came several years into the whole process when the settling stone finally caused the mortar to crack. It was a tiny thing, but it was enough to return at least one of his senses: smell.

In a world defined by pain and hunger, that counted for more than one would have expected. Over time, he was eventually able to smell many different things. He even heard a rare sound or two if someone was being tortured, murdered, or whatever it was that was making them scream so. While he still wasn't depraved enough to take enjoyment in the suffering of others, he did appreciate any sound that reminded him that he still existed.

Mostly, though, all he smelled in those first few years were damp air, shit, and the occasional whiff of cooking from the kitchen. He had a hard time coming to grips with the fact that in the body of a vampire wracked by years of hunger, the smell of freshly baked bread smelled almost as badly to him as vomit, but it was something, and he would take it. Eventually, though, even those things failed to motivate him. As the march of years became the passage of decades, almost everything failed him.

He continued to shrivel and atrophy, and thinking became too hard for him to consider. His mind only operated sporadically now, and it ran off of feelings and urges instead of anything more abstract. Only his regret and his anger were strong enough to penetrate the thick fog of hunger that he seemed to permanently reside in now. Eventually, he was too far gone for even that. When that happened, he was reduced further to merely a desire to feed, which was only interrupted by the distant rising sun.

With nothing else left to distract him, though, that hunger was forged into something sharp enough to sniff out a surprising amount of detail from only a few molecules. As the endless, unceasing cycle of the sun hammered against him, eventually, smell, and hunger were all that he had, and Simon used it to ever-increasing effect. He could smell when someone died when someone fed, and most of all, when there was fighting. That last one had nothing to do with hearing.

He couldn't hear the sword blows or the screams of the dying, but he could smell the different flavors of blood that had been spilled well enough that he could tell them apart, and though he couldn't say how any of them had died, he could figure out who had bled the most as their odors made their way down into the dungeon. That was likely a process that took days, though, but then, Simon no longer understood time.

He was just a hungry animal, trapped in a cage while the sun battered him with fear like a blacksmith's hammer. So, it was with some surprise when he finally heard something again, and though he no longer understood that it was hammers and chisel banging against stones that were setting him free, he knew that sound meant freedom, and even if it was only freedom to suffer in some new terrible way, he welcomed it. He'd suffered enough this way, and anything would be better than continuing to exist like this.

As the wall that imprisoned him was chipped away, one thing mattered to him even more than the prospect of impending freedom, and that was the rising smell of blood. A lot of people had been wounded or killed recently, and he wanted to devour them all.