Is it possible? That thought weighed on Simon for the rest of the day and kept him up half the night, even though he was deep enough into the plains that monster attacks were practically a nonissue. Whether it was possible to make himself younger and how he might accomplish such a miracle eventually took a back seat to whether or not it was a good idea.

Of course, it’s possible, he assured himself after thinking about it for almost 24 hours straight. If I can make myself a little younger, I can make myself a lot younger. The Magi already keep themselves young, and the leaders of the Unspoken probably do too.

However, if he was going to do it, then the means were obvious, too. Gervuul Zyvon.

He hadn’t used a greater word of transfer in a long time. His last time had been in Darndelle, and before that with the black swarmers. It was too powerful and too dangerous. He’d long since learned to cope with the low-grade euphoria that came from draining through a piece of steel. It was like drinking animal blood as a vampire: effective but far from ideal.

If he was going to do this, then it was almost certainly the right tool for the job, and Simon feared that. “I shouldn’t,” he told himself as he rode. “I’ve gotten used to the effects.” He hadn’t, though, never on that scale. It wouldn’t be just one word of greater transfer, after all. It would be a dozen, at least. It might be twice that. Simon had no idea if he’d have to use words of flesh shaping or if his body would naturally ungrow as he got young enough, but that wasn’t what put him off of the idea.

If he messed up his body too badly trying this and ended up as some deformed monstrosity, he could always kill himself and reset that. He’d miss leaving this life undone, but that would be recoverable. If he screwed up his soul and ended up hopelessly addicted to draining the life force of others for life after life, well, he’d be no better than a vampire, even if he could walk around in daylight.

Maybe I could slip my soul into the body of a child instead.

Simon thought, trying to find another, less risky solution.

That was even worse, though. Even if it was somehow possible, the idea of killing some innocent kid just to borrow their body for a covert op seemed too ghoulish for words.

As he made his way south, he considered all of the options and slowly worked out how he would do this if he decided it was the best plan. Instead of draining people or even beasts, he’d draw from nature itself, near the river in places that would be easily replenished by floods in the spring. He even worked out the circle he’d used to accomplish this strange project. It wasn’t so complex, and though technically they were the words of greater youthful flesh siphoning, given the proximity he planned to the water, he ended up thinking of the whole thing as his personal fountain of youth.

Eventually, when he’d covered half the distance back to Zurari, all he was missing was the will to move forward. To some extent, that was the problem with all of his lives. He wasn’t sure how to move forward, and even when he was, things rarely went according to plan.

In that regard, at least, this life had gone better than most. He’d found somewhere to wait until the zombie outbreak, and when it was time, he’d found the true cause and resolved it. If not for his doppelgänger, he would be back in Hepollyon meditating on the nature of the universe or something until it was time to address the next unfinished level.

“You can still do that,” Simon reminded himself. “You can breeze through Zurari on the way back, splash up a little graffiti to get the masses riled up, then use a little terrorism to set 'em loose and be gone before the city falls into civil war. You don’t have to go further than that.”

He did, though. Simon had found another vast source of knowledge, and he desperately wanted a peek inside. Even if it was only a few more words of power or new meanings for the words he already had, that was worth taking a chance.

Well, if you believe that, then you can start summoning demons any time, man, he told himself, mocking his glibness. I’m sure they’d trade you your soul for just about anything you might want.

Even on nights when Simon was greeted by horse clans, or he sat around the fires of traders, telling him about the giant footprints that he saw in the snow to a mixture of astonishment and laughter, these thoughts never left him, but none of these options became a certainty until the night of a full moon on a windy night after the first snows.

The grasslands were not the sort of place where snow stayed for any length of time until the winter was as deep as its grass. It would come and swirl about, then melt away again after a few days. Still, that night, he’d gotten a little drunk as the other traders had talked about how a war between the clans was likely to make the northern steppes a place that was unwise to travel through once spring arrived.

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Simon made his excuses when he realized he was slurring his words, but even that caution wasn’t enough to stop him from taking a tumble on the icy grass and patchy snow between the fire and his simple tent.

As he lay there laughing at his own clumsiness and his drunkenness, he wasn’t even tempted to use a word of lesser cure to purge the alcohol from his system. Instead, he lay there, appreciating the moment as an accidental snow angel.

He stared at the stars for a few seconds and the way they burned sharply in the deep black sky before he forced himself to rise. When he was on his feet, he turned and looked at his footsteps. For a moment, he thought they looked just like the giant’s footsteps in the mountains weeks before. It was only their scale that was different.

And that was all it took. In that instant, Simon’s entire world reoriented. Suddenly, everything was composed of those same lines that he saw back in Hepollyon. These weren’t red and blue currents in the water, though; they were white lines of fate that made up everything. They were the ice that he’d slipped on and the snow he’d fallen in. They were the fiery constellations above him and the canvas tents around him. They were everything, even the cities that lay far to the south.

This was a moment of clarity that was far more powerful than his last one had been. It wasn’t that he could see the fork in the road; it was that he was the fork in the road. Far to the south, in a winding road made of choices, lay the city of Zurari, and past it, despite the enormous distances involved, lay Hepollyon. There were other cities, too. Abrese and Darndelle were just as easy to find, like the intersections of a spiderweb.

For that instant, Simon knew that he could go anywhere and he could be anyone. That was the curse of his life in the Pit. He had true freedom in the midst of what might be permanent imprisonment, but even so, he was only just starting to understand it.

Right now, he understood that his choice was the right one. He understood that he could go anywhere, but eventually, the Murani would be everywhere. He couldn’t say why Helades might want that. Truthfully, he didn’t even think to ask. It was like the moment with Oracle where he viewed the world through her sight, and the further out things were, the hazier. Past a certain point, the entire South was nothing but fire and blood. Whether Ionaia or Brin stood longer than the other didn’t really matter. If he wanted to prevent it, all that really mattered was Zurari.

A thousand ways that he could navigate himself to the heart of power that he’d never considered before flicker through his mind. Some were war crimes, like recreating the demon seed or the frost orb. In one version of events, he saw very clearly that he could save the world for a time by detonating the grand pyramid in the center, though he did not precisely understand how. All of those were too far from the way he lived his lives for him to truly embrace.

Sneaking into the Magi by becoming a child, though, wasn’t impossible. That had a chance of paying off and giving the world exactly the sort of reprieve he wanted. Those details didn’t matter, though. What mattered was how he could achieve it without directly channeling the forces of creation through his soul until he was a burned-out dilettante. He needed another vessel, like the circles and the weapons that he used. In a flash, he finally saw what it was he needed to do, and though the answer, as it turned out, was quite unpleasant, he could bear that too.

“A vessel,” he breathed as he stood there in a fugue state, trying to process everything that had just occurred to him. “Magic requires a vessel.”

He’d known that, of course. Weapons with words of power were more potent than those that were spoken, and they weren’t as hard on his body, even when his own soul fueled them. He’d limited himself in that regard more than he should have.

Simon had no idea if he stood there amidst ten thousand crisscrossing lines that made up the possibilities of his future for seconds or hours. However, when the world unfroze, the night was just as it had been, and the other merchants still laughed and chatted by the fire not so far away. Bleary and overwhelmed, Simon made his way back to his tent to sleep it off, but before he could, he had to make a few notes so he wouldn’t forget what he needed to do next.

The next day, he threw away his original plans to scratch a fountain of youth in the dirt. It would work, but such a ritual would likely leave him hopelessly addicted to the thrill after using it only a handful of times. What he needed instead was something that worked only once and was far too awful to enjoy.

So, he rode south, and when he found a large copse of trees, he tethered his horse far away from it and made camp there. Then, he walked into the grove and chose the tree near the center because he was pretty sure it was a paw paw tree.

The exact tree didn’t matter, just as the exact grove didn’t matter. An oak would have made this harder, and less digestible. All that mattered was that he was okay with destroying it because what he was about to do next was probably going to kill everything on this spot for years. He didn’t expect that to be very visible now since only a few yellow leaves remained on these already skeletal trees, but it would still weigh on his concise more than any number of goblins.

Once the tree was chosen, and he shaved off the bark on one side, Simon took his time carving a series of runes into the tree, though he left them unconnected and nonfunctional. Then, when that was done, he retreated from the area as well because he was pretty sure that what he was about to do next was going to suck the life out of anyone that was close enough to power the spell he was about to unleash.

When Simon was a hundred feet away, which was about as far as he could get without losing sight of his carving, he took a deep breath and pictured the last marks he needed to make, then he whispered, “Dnarth Vrazig,” and unleashed a word of distant lightning to complete the inscription with a single precise bolt from the leaden sky above.