Simon wasn’t sure how this would work exactly, but there was no time left to deliberate. Any minute now, Freya’s heart was going to stop, her body was going to spasm as her organs shut down, and she’d be replaced by an abomination that could only ever be a mockery of the woman she’d been, and there was no way he could let that happen.

So, he pulled the trigger. In this case, for once, that didn’t involve saying anything at all. Instead, he moved forward and stood in the gap that he’d drawn to render the runes useless, completing the circuit with his own body.

For a moment, nothing happened, but only for just long enough to make him wonder if he’d screwed something up. That was quickly followed by a tingling that started in his feet and slowly moved up his body as the precisely carved symbols in the ground began to glow with an unearthly light.

“What… what is this?” Freya asked. “What are you doing to me?”

She seemed very uncomfortable about what was happening, but Simon had no way of knowing if that was superstition, or something deeper. At this point, all he could do was watch and wait. He was both the conductor of the circuit and also the off switch. If he stepped out of this spot it would cease working, and all this effort would be wasted.

He didn’t do that. Instead, he ignored her growing fear and his own trepidation, and watched as the light grew and pulsed, and the magic took hold of Freya.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “Just half a minute of this, maybe a little more.” He didn’t know how long this would take, though, he was just trying to put Freya at ease as her body started to glow.

The truth was he was in unexplored territory here, and even if he wasn’t, the atmosphere was so charged and dangerous that things felt like they might end badly for him too, and he had some idea of what was going on.

It wasn’t possible to explain any of that to Freya. Instead, he prayed silently as the light of his brute forced magic filled her with forces she would never understand.

If one took away the binding circle and the power circuits, the magic here was remarkably simple. It was built to take a ton of power and flood every aspect of his one time wife’s body with cure and life magic. He literally wanted to purge everything from her, down to the tiniest spec of darkness that might have wormed its way into her soul or her bone marrow. Wherever it was hiding, he would eliminate it.

The light show aside, it seemed to be working too. Her only obvious wound healed in seconds, barely leaving behind a crescent shaped scar. Simon didn’t rush things, though. After that, he gave it another half minute before he finally stepped back and ended the spell.

The runes dimmed immediately, but it took Freya a little longer to stop resembling a fey creature instead of the beautiful woman she was once she stopped sparkling with the powers of creation. While she took in what happened Simon used his mirror to make sure he hadn’t accidentally drained decades of his life and ended up with white hair, but it seemed fine.

He might have burned a year or two, but honestly he didn’t even think it was that much because he felt fine. Letting the rest of the world take some of the burden had definitely been the right answer, and he’d make sure he did that more in the future.

“Are you okay?” he asked finally, once she met his eyes.

“You tell me,” she said. “I-I, feel strange… Better but… different.”

“I’m sure all of that will fade in time,” Simon said. “The important thing is that… you survived.” As he spoke, he decided to leave out all the descriptors that might have filled that space. Probably. Against the odds. Impossibly.

The important part wasn’t that she knew how impossible this was. It was that she hadn’t died, and that she didn’t freak out.

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Freya didn’t freak out, though. Instead, she laughed and said, “which part? The zombie bite or the warlock’s spell?”

Simon smiled at that, but said nothing. Instead, he just let the moment wash over him. For a moment she wasn’t Frey, the mercenary warrior; she was Freya, with the easy smile and the clever quip. More importantly, she was his Freya, almost, for as long as that moment lasted.

“How did you know my name, anyway?” she asked, suddenly, once she stopped looking at her now healed hand.

Then it was gone. She was a stranger, again, and he was the suspicious warlock that knew how to heal the sick and consort with the dead.

“I stayed at the same tavern as you guys back in Schwarzenbruck a couple of weeks back,” Simon lied smoothly.

“I see,” she answered skeptically. “And why are you up here, alone, in the middle of a horde of zombies?”

“I’m investigating the same problem you are, in my own way,” Simon answered cryptically, hoping to leave it at that. However, when Freya opened up her mouth to ask another question he spoke over her. “I believe the phrase you are looking for is thank you.”

“Thank you?” she said, suddenly glaring at him. “For what? You saved me so I could live with the loss of the man I love. That’s a special kind of torture. That’s all. If you could have saved me, then you could have saved Kell too.”

Simon didn’t even try to explain that the man was already dead. Instead he just shook his head and said, “If I were you I would put your bandage back on and tell your friends that I used wood ash and salt to purify your wound. It’s a lot better than the alternative. They’re waiting for you down the road.”

She thought about it for a moment and then instead of saying anything at all, she stormed out of the building, leaving him standing alone in the barn. He sighed. “That’s what you get for trying Simon. You should have just stayed out of it.”

Simon didn’t even follow to watch her walk away. Instead, he grabbed a shovel and started destroying his circle. The very last thing he wanted was for someone to find this by accident. He had no idea what would happen then, but he was pretty sure it would unsolve a level or three, which was exactly what he would deserve for trying to help those who so clearly wanted to hate him.

“Leave the past in the past, man,” he chided himself as he worked. It was good advice, and he would try to follow it.

That only took a few minutes to leave the earth disturbed, and when it was done he finally walked outside. There, he noticed a little more death than he remembered before. A chicken that had been hunting and pecking here and there around the village up until now was laying dead near the barn. It was just one more corpse amongst the dismembered zombies and their victims that were scattered around, so normally his eyes would have glossed right over it.

That said, he’d just performed magic that had drawn on the life of nearby things, so it was almost certainly his fault. Some of the wilted plants there were nearby might be too. It was hard to say. Still, it was probably better than turning himself into an old man.

After he checked the area for any other anomalies, Simon walked to the road and saw that Freya was most of the way to her friends, then turned his back on her what he hoped was the last time, and went to finish what it was he’d been working on before she’d managed to appear in his life.

No matter how hot he stoked the forges, and no matter how hard he pounded with his hammer, though, Simon couldn’t get her off his mind. It was infuriating. It wasn’t even about love or lust, either. It was about the ingratitude of it all. He’d done something impossible and saved her life, and then, just like that she’d thrown it in his face, for her current loser boyfriend?

“Fucking Kell,” he grumbled. Every time Simon went through this level he was losing reasons not to track that kid down while he was still in diapers and throw him off a cliff somewhere. Not that it mattered now. The man was dead. Freya might still pine for him, but no amount of tears would bring him back to life.

His anger kept him focused at least, and he made great progress that day. Later that night he tracked down one of the few remaining chickens, and after spending half an hour getting and plucking it, he slow-roasted it on a spit for an hour, and then had one of the most delicious campfire meals of his life.

In the morning, Simon packed up his armor project the day after the survivors of the Butcher’s Bill continued south. That was both because he didn’t trust them not to come back with a lynch mob, and because all the heavy work was done. Everything else could be done on a workbench with smaller tools, and he could find one of those far from here.

He didn’t have any time pressure now, after all, he wasn’t going to use the door at the inn to go to Ionar. He was going to take the long way, and follow the trade roads south. In the best case he’d get there in plenty of time to explore the locale and understand what had caused everything to happen, and in the worst case, he’d miss it, and have to do it over again.

Well, he would do all of that after he made one more stop. There was no point in coming this far to give up on checking out the barrow mound first.