Once he entered the territory of monsters, the Murani horse clans were unsurprisingly absent. There was no market for goblin slaves, nor were there glorious combats to be had. Simon was sure that a battle with a giant would have counted as glorious combat, but no one seemed eager for that either. It wasn’t like someone could bring back a trophy from that fight very easily, and without an ox train and a wagon-sized skull, no one was likely to believe that such a battle had even taken place.

He wasn’t looking to forge any more legends, though, and while he would love to see one from a distance, he was happy to spend his time in the wilds fighting more inglorious battles. Just two weeks, he told himself, notching a tree near the boulder mound that had become his campsite near the edge of the forest that stretched out to the north of him. Just two weeks, and if no one comes for me, I can turn around and go back.

While Simon wasn’t sure if that was overcautious or not cautious enough, he certainly wasn’t going to underestimate these mages again. In those first few days, he spent a lot of time thinking about all the various magics he’d been exposed to recently and how some grand unified theory of magic might go together, but such things were still far too complex for him to understand and once the killing started those vast intellectual constructs pieced together with what-if’s drifted away like the castles in the sky that they were.

Once he started going on nighttime raids against the nearby goblins, none of those theoretical concerns mattered. By day, he would hunt rabbits, pheasants, and the occasional mountain goat or elk to keep his little base camp well-fed. By night, when no Magi appeared to drag him back to their ziggurat-dotted city, he would creep out in search of combat that only fed his soul.

At first, it had started as an activity to make sure that the hungry little bastards stayed well away from his mount and supplies. Gradually, night by night, it became more than that. It became his main source of entertainment, and for once, he didn’t even blame the little jolts of life energy he was getting from his blade. He’d long since grown used to those tiny jolts and didn’t feel any trace of the creeping addiction he’d worried about for so long.

It was that there was something thrilling about skulking through the shadows, wondering if you were the hunter or the hunted in any given moment. If he’d remembered them more clearly, he would have said this was the same feeling he’d gotten from playing video games once upon a time. That was too long ago, and Simon could no longer remember it. Truthfully, he wasn’t even sure he’d enjoy sitting there and clicking on words and images on the mirror-like screen if there wasn't any real danger in it.

Out in the night there was danger, and whether he was sniping the beasts with his bow or gutting them with his dagger, he enjoyed it immensely. “I’ve had too many safe lives lately,” he told himself. That didn’t reduce his desire to return to the Oracle and to Zoa, of course, but those desires didn’t make it any less true. Neither relaxing by a volcanic lake nor fighting a zombie outbreak in Schwarzenbruck for the fifteenth time was particularly dangerous to him anymore.

With magic, very little was dangerous at this point in his many lives. It was only his abstention from that which made fighting goblins in the forest a challenge. For a few nights running, Simon lost himself in that little guerilla war of his own making. It wouldn’t change history, it wouldn’t save any villages, and when he was done, no one but him would ever know that it had happened.

That was very freeing. Normally, he spent so much time thinking about how everything he did might impact everything else he was going to do. Here, he was so far off the map that no one cared either way. The most impactful thing he did was focus on understanding the advantages of the scimitar in certain situations, even if he preferred the longsword he’d long since left behind.

Simon ranged further and further afield as the days progressed, and when two weeks had passed with no further sign that he was being pursued, he decided to move on. However, instead of moving back to the south, as he’d planned, he went further north. It wasn’t quite on a whim, but it certainly wasn’t planned, either.

I still have time before the first snows, he told himself, And I have even more time to stop the coming war. The truth was that since he doubted he’d ever have to come this far north again, he wanted to see a giant. Well, that was mostly the truth. The rest of it was that he wasn’t sure what to do next.

Going north wouldn’t help with any of that. It was a side quest at best and an indulgence at worst. He wouldn’t even really think about what it was he should do next until he was riding south again. Still, he could resist delaying things a little longer, and he told himself that confirming the existence of giants would be enough.

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So, day by day, the things he needed to do percolated at the back of his mind as he navigated through forested ravines and found the right slopes to lead his horse further and further into the uplands. Even as he climbed, though, the mountains rose inexorably before him.

These weren’t the climbable, almost picturesque mountains he navigated when he dealt with the Wyvern. These were rugged, jutting peaks, and behind them, there were only higher, icier peaks. Part of him wondered if he’d find a new kingdom hidden away if he went far enough, but Simon knew it was too rugged even to be compared to the mountainous Kingdom of Charia.

That was the reason that he was eventually forced to turn around. Above the treeline, there wasn’t much in the way of danger, but without grass, he could take his horse no father, and when he finally reached vast snowfields, he decided that was as far as he could go.

Still, it was a gorgeous view, and Simon took the time to appreciate the vast sea of grass to his south, past the mountains he’d climbed to get here, and the forests that separated the two. They continued into the distance so far that he could only see a long sweep of yellow, unmarred by fortifications or settlements. Only the smaller rivers and streams that would eventually become the mighty Serpent River broke it up as they meandered across the plain.

Despite that simplicity, Simon wasn’t sure that he had the skill to capture that beauty, even if he had proper paints and canvas. Still, just for a moment, he couldn't help but feel like everything was connected again in some deep way. He had no way of knowing whether that was simply an aesthetic projection or some deeper intuition, but he hoped it was the latter. Simon had been abstaining from magic ever since he’d left Zurari, and he was sure that the Oracle would tell him that such things would pay dividends eventually if she were here.

Perhaps you could find a way to avoid killing too, the imaginary version of the woman quipped in his head. Maybe then you’d find out what true clarity is like.

It was nice to do without magic, but he didn’t see that he’d ever be able to do without a blade, at least in this sort of life.

When he turned around the following day, he took a different way down than he had up, just to do a bit more exploring. It was there he finally found his first and only piece of evidence that giants were real. There, in a half-melted snowy meadow two valleys over, he saw regularly spaced ovals a dozen feet apart. At first, he’d assumed they were springs or a partially frozen stream, but as he traveled along them for a short time, he was eventually struck by the idea that they couldn’t be anything but footprints.

For a moment, Simon was tempted to free his horse and continue on, tracking the thing down that much further, but he resisted. That would have been too self-indulgent, even for the mood he was in lately. It was enough to see the tracks, he decided, and he took a moment to study the outlines before deciding they were too melted to bother sketching.

On his way back toward the plains, his own goals and responsibilities began to stalk him once more like an invisible giant. Prevent a war, then go gain clarity and solve some more levels. He told himself. That’s not so hard, right?

It was hard, though. It was a heavy burden, and now that he was proceeding back toward it once more, it weighed on him every bit as much as his supplies weighed down the saddlebags of his horse. It might be overburdened with things, but it was his mind that was overburdened with ideas.

“What I need to do is worm my way into the Murani’s Magi the same way I did with Brin’s Whitecloaks,” he told himself as he dismounted and walked his horse to the edge of a stream to water it after a long ride. “The problem is they only allow children to join their ranks so they can properly brainwash them, and I haven’t been a kid in centuries.”

He sighed at that. It wasn’t the first time That Simon had come to that conclusion, but it still annoyed him. He’d considered stealing the identities of one of the existing Magi and worming his way in that way. He felt confident enough that he could sculpt his face into someone else's. Surely, he could follow them around enough to learn enough about them to fool their colleagues for a couple of days.

Would that be enough? Even if he faked his own identity, faking those amulets that they wore would be harder. He’d never gotten a close look at one until after it had blown up, and though they vaguely looked like a very curved shuriken or a flattened lotus flower, he didn’t think that would be enough to pass even a cursory inspection.

“No, I need to infiltrate them the proper way, but I can’t…” his words trailed off as he looked at his own reflection in the water, and he noted how young he looked.

Simon had been killing for weeks with his blade and hadn’t thought much of it. He’d barely been around a mirror, and he had the patchy beard to show for it. He also apparently had smooth skin and a hairline that he hadn’t had since his twenties.

During his time in Ionia, he’d de-aged himself decades, but never very quickly. The result had been that he’d stayed the same oldish man for a very long time. Throughout his last month or so in the wilderness, he’d devoured years from goblins, a few weeks at a time, and it showed.

Really, it creeped him out a little. He’d gotten used to this new face of his. It was strange that he looked sort of Central Asian or Middle Eastern, but he’d looked very Mediterranean in his last life, so that was tolerable. The idea that he could look like the son, or at least the younger brother of the man he’d been in Zurari.

Until this point, he’d considered it completely impossible that he could infiltrate the Magi properly because he would never be young enough, but this presented an interesting option. “Could I get young enough to fool them?” Simon wondered. “Is it even possible?”