Death After Death

As hopefully as that conversation started, though, it came to an abrupt end when she said, “Unfortunately, that question doesn’t have a simple answer. At least not one that you can hear right now.”

“Pardon me?” Simon said, trying not to become annoyed. “I can use all sorts of magic. I—”

“You can,” she agreed. “I can see the scars it has left on you too. You’re definitely getting better, though, and I don’t mean to insult you, so please don’t take it that way. Magic is a tough thing for mortals to learn, and you know that better than most.”

“So then why can’t you answer my question?” he asked, only slightly mollified. He didn’t care if she insulted and belittled him as long as he got what he needed. Unfortunately, she was a lot kinder than Helades as she didn’t offer him sweeping pronouncements that left his ego bruised.

“Because some things must be experienced, not explained,” she said. “Fortunately, we can help you with that, too. It will just take longer.”

“How long?” Simon asked before quickly realizing it came out the wrong way. He didn’t really care how long things took anymore, but he didn’t want to make it seem like he was in a hurry, so he added, “I— It’s just that I thought that you didn’t let people stay unless they never left.”

“These rules are in place for reasons related to secrecy. Mortal men and women must stay for their whole lives to ensure they tell no one what they know. That hardly applies to you.” the Oracle nodded. “Men like you, well… You already have plenty of secrets, don’t you? What’s one more? You will stay for as long as you need to stay and go when you need to go. Even if we killed you, death could not hold your tongue. You would just come back and take your revenge.”

Simon wanted to say that he wasn’t the revenge-taking type, but since that wasn’t true these days, he pivoted and asked. “So I stay up here for a month or a year or a decade and do what exactly? What is it I need to experience?”

“Before any of that, we must first help you to still your waters and make them clear,” she answered evasively. “After that. After you have sufficient clarity, we will see what we can do to help you see without aids like your mirror.”

Had they been listening to the conversation, or did they somehow know all of this in advance, he wondered. Simon had seen no definitive proof that the Oracle could see the future. The strongest proof was the circumstantial evidence of Elthena’s own prophecy, which was to keep her son’s father close.

One more piece of evidence was put in the she-knows-what’s-going-to-happen-next column when they arrived at their destination, and he found his few meager possessions there waiting for him. The room wasn’t any fancier than the one he’d left behind. If anything, it was smaller, but it had a sleeping mat instead of the crude palette he’d slept on in what he’d come to think of as the guest room.

“So what do I do now?” Simon asked.

“Sleep,” the masked man answered. “Morning comes early, and we wake with the sun.”

Simon thanked the man before he left and plunged him into darkness, but mentally, he shrugged. He’d been through enough that being made to get up early was hardly the worst fate. Still, sleep was more difficult to find than it usually was, as his mind buzzed with questions.

He didn’t even notice he’d drifted off until a gong sounded somewhere nearby. It was too close, close enough that he could feel its vibrations as much as he could hear them.

Simon rose, along with dozens of others, noticing that as the tide of people came out into the sunlit arcade, they all looked fairly uniform. It was only the colors of their robes that varied from dark gray to light. As he was swept along with the tide of people to what he assumed was breakfast, he noticed two things. The first was that there were no white robes among the crowd. Even very light gray seemed rare. The second was that the robes he was wearing were the darkest of any he could see. Though not quite black, they certainly marked him as an initiate in all of this.

They weren’t going to eat, though, as it turned out. Instead, the path they followed led to the caldera’s edge, and one at a time, they disrobed and leaped off a small cliff into the steaming waters below. That confused Simon a great deal because he was fairly sure that water was hot enough to boil them alive. One of the men in lighter gray robes saw his confusion as they approached their turn and said, “It will be fine. If you’re nervous, just swim toward the colder water. Most do their first time. There’s no harm in it.”

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“Cold water?” Simon asked. “I thought the caldera was boiling.”

“It is,” the other acolyte agreed as he pointed to a pool up the slope. “Everywhere except for near the spring. It brings fresh water free from sulfur to the fields and kitchens, and the overflow comes out here.”

“Alright,” Simon answered with a shrug, “But why are we bathing here and not the baths?”

“You’ll see,” the man answered cryptically as he stripped and leaped into the water.

Simon did the same thing and stripped but hesitated a moment as the crowd continued to flow around him. First, he looked at all the discarded robes and tried to figure out how anyone would ever find their garments again. After that, he watched the swimmers for a bit.

It seemed a strange ritual, and he hoped he wouldn’t have to do it every morning even though he was pretty sure he did. Still, bathing in a hot spring wasn’t the worst way to start the day. After all, no one so far had screamed in agony. The other swimmers were taking a variety of different paths across the water. Most seemed to take a middle path across the small bay that divided this cliff from its twin on the other side, but others swam diverged further toward the caldera or further toward the gushing waterfall that came from up above them.

Eventually, with nothing left to inspect and the numbers behind him dwindling, Simon leaped into the water and began to swim. It was a strange experience. When he landed in the water, the first thing he noticed was that the temperatures were not in any way even. Because of the irregular flow of splashing cold water into the superheated lake, he experienced layers of temperatures that varied from frigid to much hotter than he was comfortable with. Worse, the mixture of hot and cold made it feel like he was being scalded as his body struggled to make sense of the strange sensations it was trying to process.

Still, he didn’t complain or cry out. He just started to swim to the opposite shore to get this over with as quickly as possible. It was then that he discovered a second problem. A straight line exacerbated the issue. While he moved directly via the shortest path, the water temperatures weren’t nearly as cooperative.

Sometimes, he splashed through sections that were almost hot enough to burn him, and other times, he found completely frigid currents that had not managed to mingle with the hot water at all. It was a miserable experience, and when he dragged himself out of the water on the far side, he was surprised that he couldn’t see any obvious burns.

“What the fuck is going on?” he wondered. Simon had been absolutely sure that he was going to have to use a word of lesser healing on himself, but there seemed to be no need.

He didn’t find out the answer to that question until after breakfast, which didn’t happen until he’d gotten dressed. On the far side of the area they’d just swum across was a set of stone stairs carved into the basalt, and on the landing above them were piles of towels, along with brown robes, sandals, and the breakfast he’d been craving since this strange ordeal had started.

It was a simple meal of yogurt and some sort of mixed fruit preserve, but as soon as he’d put on clothes, he ate it greedily. As he did so, he noticed that he was one of the few people who had bothered to dress and definitely in the minority of people who were already eating. Almost everyone else was sitting there, meditating, either naked or wearing only a towel.

Great, Simon thought as he took another bite, I’ve joined a hippy cult.

He spent a few minutes trying to decide if that was better or worse than joining the Unspoken had been. It wasn’t until the same man as before found him and sat down beside him wearing a towel that he finally started to get some answers.

He explained everything, though not necessarily in the order that Simon had asked his questions, which was an annoying habit. Simon might look younger than him, but he was centuries older at this point.

“The swim is, as you’ve said, more complicated than one would guess,” the acolyte agreed. “The currents are ever-shifting but not nearly as hot as you think. I’m no sage or naturalist, so I really can’t explain it, but by some quirk of anatomy, if the skin feels hot and cold water at the same time, it thinks it's being exposed to scalding water, which, in this case, isn’t true. You’d have to swim quite a ways out from the crossing to get seriously burned.”

“So the point is to make us endure suffering?” Simon asked. He had no idea if what the man was telling him was true or not, but it sounded right.

“At first, perhaps, but as you grow accustomed to it, the task is more about learning oneness, in a way, as you seek clarity and understanding,” the acolyte explained. He went off on that point for quite a while, but Simon started to tune him out for a while as he waited for his turn to speak.

Yup, he decided. Definitely a hippy cult. It was better than cutting out his tongue, but not by as much as he would have hoped.

“So then, what, you sense the currents or foresee them or whatever and have a less painful experience than I do?” Simon asked.

“Some mornings,” the acolyte agreed. “You saw how everyone took a different path to the shore? They were all following their own intuition. I confess I’ve never gotten particularly good at this part of life here, but in time, I hope to.”

The conversation continued then, but before he could find any real answers about the nudist sunbathers or why everyone was waiting to eat, it was announced that work shifts were going to be filled. With that, talking came to an abrupt end. Suddenly, everyone was getting dressed or grabbing some food before they were told what their assignment for the day was.