Simon rode off and on for three nights before he decided that he was far enough away from whoever might be pursuing him to risk another act of necromancy and summon the spirit of the Magi he’d killed so recently. Those first few days were hardly wasted, though. Even before he did that, he spent several nights learning about the talisman that had been used to hunt him. Once he unraveled the golden snake that made the thing work, it was fairly straightforward.

Etched in tiny letters by a craftsman with a steady hand were the words Aufvarum Barom Dnarth Karesh, along with a few connecting symbols. The spell, as Simon understood it, was The light of distant location detection or something similar. The words were written in such a way that Dnarth looked to be used twice, but without taking the time to sketch it out and do some experiments, Simon really couldn’t be sure.

It was a delicate thing, and he found it interesting. Still, the most concerning part was that it was only a lesser version. There might well be a greater version that could follow him to the ends of the earth.

For now, he just assumed that was the case. That made his stops brief and his route circuitous. Even the night he picked to do his second attempt at necromancy, atop a rocky escarpment where he could see for miles in all directions, he didn’t stay more than a few hours.

This attempt was just as successful and just as disturbing as the last one. The Magi, whose name turned out to be Zondarian, didn’t beg to be released, though. He begged not to be sent back as he spilled his guts to Simon. Whereas the first necromancer Simon had interviewed demanded to be released and was loath to share anything, this one had already been found by the devils and begged not to return.

“Anything! I’ll tell you anything!” the tormented soul screamed while fire flickered around the edge of the binding circle.

Even without sending him back, though, the ghost’s time in the real world was brief. Still, in that time, Simon learned a great deal. He confirmed that the Magi’s dark pyramid was a charnel house and that sometimes dozens of men and women were drained of their vital essence to power any number of rituals. Some of these were merely to keep them young, even if many of the leaders were old enough to put vampires to shame.

There were other rituals, too, though. There were large-scale divinations and demon summoning. There were even enchantments fueled by violent deaths. The corpses and the souls were often bartered to demons for other diabolical boons, but the Magi could not offer Simon any details on that front.

“I’m merely an acolyte. I’ve been with them for only a decade and know only a handful of the King’s own words,” the ghost pleaded, fading away.

He told Simon the five words that he knew, but none of them were new to him. Ironically, if the man had merely read the talisman he’d been given, he could have learned two more, but Simon didn’t think his focus had been on learning. It had been on power. Specifically, power over others. The groveling ghost didn’t say as much, but it was evident by what he seemed to think was important. He kept trying to tell Simon the secrets of noblemen rather than the secrets of the universe, which showed Simon just how misplaced the man’s priorities were.

“I don’t care who’s buggering who!” Simon exploded at one point. “I care about the talismans. Tell me about those. Why do you wear them?”

“They… they command our loyalty to the god emperor,” the man said cautiously, “They have a grip on our very soul and let him share his vast power with all of his anointed subjects.”

Simon didn’t see any trace of the amulet on the ghost before him, and it certainly didn’t seem capable of making the dead keep their secrets. So, while he thought the soul part might be a bit overblown, the idea that it could channel energy to the energy from their monarch was very interesting to him if it was even halfway true. What Simon most wanted was to study one of those amulets that the Magi wore, but each time, they were destroyed by their own blast.

He had some hope the spirit might be able to offer him some insight there, but before it could offer Simon any more details in that regard, it started to dissolve. No, dissolve was the wrong word. That implied the process was gentle, and the ghost of Zondarian was in obvious pain as he came apart at the seams, even if he lacked the strength to say anything.

Simon couldn’t read lips properly, though with his mirror experiments, he’d certainly been trying to learn. In this case, at least it was easy, which made it all the more horrifying. No! Please don’t let them take me!

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Those words were when Simon realized that the man’s soul wasn’t coming apart; it was being ripped back to hell a piece at a time. When he was almost gone, the runes that Simon had scratched into the dirt burned briefly with blue fire. Then they were gone, just like the ghost, and he was left with nothing but the smoldering hand of a dead man.

“Well, that looked unpleasant,” Simon said to himself as he reflected on the bizarre conversation. It hadn’t gone the way he’d expected at all. He’d thought that he’d pry a few answers out of a reluctant ghost, but instead, he’d gotten more answers than he could have asked for, and most of them were worthless.

More than anything they’d discussed, Simon wondered if he could summon the man’s spirit again in a day or two. How does necromancy interact in a world with heaven and hell, he wondered.

He had already summoned a spirit that still wandered the world in pain, and he’d very clearly just dragged someone out of hell. Could he do the same thing to someone in heaven? Normally, he would have considered those questions to be too metaphysical to worry about, but given the strange place his soul occupied, he thought he should add it to his list of things to do.

Simon saved a few charred finger bones in case he wanted to experiment with this more later, but he didn’t plan to summon the dead again any time soon. Just thinking about it creeped him out quite a bit. Simon had gotten used to some weird shit.

He could kill goblins and even men without batting an eye, as long as they were bad men, but watching souls rent to tatters, of men who didn’t want to be sent back to hell? That was rough by anyone’s measure.

Still, all of these developments put him in a bit of a quandary. He’d planned to cause some strife that might foment into a civil war and then go back to being zen for a few years, but given all these strange developments, he wasn’t really sure what his next move should be.

“Seeing a giant would be cool,” he said to himself as he rode north in no particular hurry. It would be cool, but it would also be a complete waste of time.

The problem, he decided, after several days, was that he’d taken far too much for granted. He’d assumed that magic was rare because the white cloaks had kept it that way, but only in his neck of the woods. Although he still couldn’t speak with any authority where it came from, he suspected that it was infernal in nature. It was quantifiable and understandable. So, Simon had already figured out how to do a great many interesting things with it. As much as he'd learned, it seemed to him that the Magi of Muran knew more, and he coveted that knowledge.

Do I want it more than what I’m learning from the Oracle, though? He asked himself. On the one hand, there was that strange feeling of connectedness that made everything feel right, and on the other, was learning ever more powerful ways to use magic. Even knowing that he’d lived enough lives to learn both in time, it was still an impossible decision for him.

So, at least for now, he resolved not to make it. Instead, he tried to get his head right. He brushed up on his archery and hunted for his food instead. He hadn’t had to do that in lives, and despite the gamey, stringy nature of the food, it somehow made it taste better. Although he lacked the frames or the tannins to cure the hides, he traded them as he went for other useful objects.

The clans of the area didn’t give him much trouble; only once was he forced to fight, and even that had more of a ceremonial nature to it. If anything, the lack of violence toward a lone rider surprised him and highlighted the distinct lack of monsters that existed in this part of the world. Despite the fact that this region would have made the perfect domain for centaurs, there were none to be found.

Rather than face off against monsters, there were only men, and usually, he’d be welcomed as a guest and offered fermented mare’s milk to tell them news of the south. Simon didn’t know much about Muran, of course, but he’d heard many other stories in the tea houses of the capital, so he told some of those as his own instead.

Several times, Simon was tempted to use magic simply to skip other riders altogether. A word of illusion would make him all but vanish amidst the tall, wispy grass until he was over the horizon. He didn’t do that, though.

In fact, for the first time in a long time, he entirely abstained from magic in an effort to make his soul less turbulent and murky. He had no idea what to do next. So, while he waited, he decided that he would at least try to put the Oracle's teachings to good use.

Somehow, all of that helped. It didn’t give Simon any special insight as to what was going to happen or anything, but as he rode, he calmed down and stopped living in fear that each rider on the southern horizon was another group of men bent on hunting him down. After that, the days started to blur together. The weather was starting to get colder, but it was only when he saw the mountains start to poke up above the northern horizon that he realized how far he’d gone.

“Top of the world, man,” he said to himself as he looked at the vast, glacier-dotted peaks that only got taller as he got closer, day by day.

This wasn’t the sort of place he should be when winter started, of course, but given that he was unlikely to ever come this far to the north again, it was something he wanted to appreciate, even if that appreciation only took the form of a few days of sketching.