After that encounter, Simon became a borderline shut-in for the next several years. Since he'd nearly been killed in his own home, it wasn't hard to convince anyone that he'd become a bit more paranoid. That wasn't quite true, though.

He wasn't afraid that others would hurt him, or even that more White Cloaks would find him. Well, he did worry more would come, but he knew he could handle them.

He just didn't understand how the Unspoken had found him, and it made him wonder who else might follow the breadcrumb trail he'd left around. He'd become convinced that the only way he could prevent the perturbations of fate he was causing was to limit his exposure to the outside world.

Truthfully, he would have put up a circle of protection or warding to try to contain whatever the effect was, but he didn't know how. He tried to create boundaries of plan and shape around himself because he lacked a word for fate. Once he started seeing the signs himself, though, he knew those efforts were wasted.

In fact, by then, he had almost completely lost interest in his magical experiments. He actually ripped his demon summoning circle out of the ground and melted it down into ingots, but it changed nothing. The only magical experiment he did of any note in all that time was to test his frost orb prototype with a shard of charged obsidian in a mountain lake one summer. It worked precisely as planned, freezing it over for a few days before it ran out of power.

Neither his efforts at isolation nor the cessation of his experiments did anything to stop the effect he was having on the world. No matter how many days in a row he hid from the swirling sparrows or the breezes that seemed to beckon him with their invisible currents, they never stopped reaching for him. Though hiding away from the world made it easier to pretend he was sane and normal, it limited his observations and caused rumors about what he was doing with his time to spread.

Simon could ill afford those, so he rejoined the land of the living but even the normal activities of daily life were made harder by the delusions and the visions that began to plague him. He began to glimpse what Jakob had described after nearly two years without casting a single spell.

They were quick glimpses that disappeared as soon as he focused on them at first. Other times, though, he could see the way that the wind would swirl through a pile of dried leaves, or the way the clouds in the sky moved.

Simon summoned Jakob twice more in that time but gained no further insight into the phenomena. He considered summoning a demon again to continue the conversation, but decided against that; he'd had a nice long streak without doing anything evil and wasn't inclined to do anything that might cloud his growing perceptions.

And the longer he did that, the more things began to unfold. One layer at a time, the world was revealed to him, and as it did so, it became clear that the world was pivoting around him in some subtle way.

That has to be something new, Simon told himself. If it had always been like this, the Unspoken would have said something, and if not them, then the Oracle or the Magi. But how? What did I do to change things?

Simon reviewed everything he'd done over his last couple of lives, but he couldn't think of anything. Even if he had, it wouldn't have helped him interpret the signs he could see swirling around him on a regular basis now.

His experience points had been steadily improving, and now he was very slightly in the positive. He felt that was probably related to his improving sense of clarity, but not to the larger issue; if anything, hiding away from the world had slowed his experience point gain down substantially.

Simon queried the mirror at length, on several occasions, but it had no advice to offer. It could show him his aura. He could even use its reflection to see the strange threads that seemed to run through the world sometimes, but its knowledge of them was limited.

'I exist to help answer your questions,' the mirror admitted, 'But my knowledge is far from complete.'

It was a familiar refrain, and it annoyed Simon less as time went on. Instead, he did his best to fill in the thing's gaps with his own knowledge, to make it that much more useful in the future, and that seemed to be working, more or less. It was no longer as stupid as he remembered it being at the very beginning. He wouldn't quite call it helpful yet, but after centuries of use, it was no longer obtuse and seemed to have adapted to him.

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Had he not heard about all of this from Jakob, he would have called it some form of creeping madness. Simon certainly felt like he was going insane sometimes, but there was no denying it; this wasn't in his head. He could gain insight from the way his tea leaves swirled, or the shape that a spilled drop of ink would take. He couldn't quite hear voices on the wind, but sometimes, if the breeze whistled through his shutters just right, it sounded like he could.

He couldn't talk about this with anyone, not even the friends he'd made, but he wanted to.

He would often bring up questions on God or Nature just to find some way to couch these ideas in frameworks people might understand, but that did little good. For a community of herders and miners, life was simple and fatalistic. For a hero that was now hundreds of years into his new existence, things were more complicated, and apparently he hadn't reached the limits on that yet.

Some of these motifs ended up in Simon's art. He didn't show those paintings to anyone, after the reactions they got the first few times. The people of his town were happy to praise portraiture or nature scenes, but trying to understand abstract art that showed a teacup unfolding like a flower, or a book filled with words between words, was a bit much for them.

It was a bit much for him, too. Why is this the life where I'm slowly going crazy? He asked himself. I've done nothing. I've simply relaxed, experimented, and attempted to understand things.

In retrospect, though, that was probably the difference. He'd felt the faint stirrings of this in Hepollyon, too. Almost every one of his lives was dominated by fighting and magic, and now that he'd found a moment to breathe, he was seeing the world in a new way. Still, it was one thing to lie in the grass and look at the clouds and see shapes, and another to feel like he was seeing portents of the future.

If a friend had confessed all of this, Simon would have worried for him. In his case, though, he was less concerned. Especially after his observations started to become less hallucinatory, and more insightful. After a while, he could predict who he'd interact with on a given day, just by the direction and the number of strings that pulled at him.

He could see it in his visitors, too. He could see more than just light and dark now. He could see faint bands of color, and sometimes he could even guess at what those colors might mean.

For a season or two, this became the focus of his studies, since his little town provided the perfect tiny laboratory for it. He knew everything, and everyone in it, and slowly, he began to dissect them, one at a time, via clues that only he, and perhaps one other old woman in town, could see.

When Simon noticed Gertha shying away from those with the darkest auras, he asked her about it, but her only response was to say, "Some people just ain't right, you know? If you know what's good for you, you'll stay away."

Simon understood that, but hated the idea that even those who had this gift seemed to know no more about it than the mirror did. Not him, though. He was determined to understand it, and one person at a time, he learned to tell the difference between those dark colors. That black-brown was malice and sadism, whereas black-red was something more like having blood on his hands. The headman's black-blue stain, on the other hand, wasn't evil of any kind; it was just a bruise that had been left behind by his wife's death, a decade before.

By comparison, lighter colors were comparatively easy, and he could see the difference readily enough between the white green of happiness and the muddy green of petty jealousy. It wasn't always easy to see what caused these emotions to flare, but after a time, it became easy enough for Simon to see in the petty dramas that rippled through their small community like a stone into a still pond.

Adultery became an even easier one for him to pick out. He could see not just who lusted for whom by the way their aura sprang to life in mixed company, but the way that contrasted to the way they chose to hide their feelings. Simon spent one spring just playing matchmaker in an effort to see how much he could change the world without violence, and he was largely successful.

It probably wasn't the way that Helades intended for him to change the world, but he didn't care. Art wasn't a useful skill when it came to swordplay, but it was invaluable when it came to imagining magic's effects. The same was less true with his current subject of study.

While trying to focus on both a man's aura and their movements in a duel was impossible, Simon noticed that if he could remove his mind from the equation entirely, he could work wonders. Too much thought on the battlefield made one slow to react. Simon had learned that lifetimes ago. What was new now, though, was the way that he could use that zen state to get some insight into his opponent's next moves.

Even with wooden swords, he could detect the flicker of murderous violence around their limbs, giving him a warning a fraction of a second before the blow came. It was an exceedingly useful, if sporadic, gift.

In fact, the longer he eschewed speaking any words of power, and he studied the strange new world taking shape around him, the more he learned about it, though his observations were almost too trite to put into words.

He really did feel like everything was all connected, though, and as time went on, it became increasingly clear that his fate pulled him south, back to Ionar. Threads connected him to everything in this world. He could pluck one and see that it led to one of his mines in the mountains. Another might lead to Mari, or one of his other friends in the town. Most of them, though, especially the ones that braided together into larger cords, lead to the south.

"Do they lead to the Oracle's volcano or Ionar's?" Simon wondered aloud as he studied the horizon. He supposed that it didn't really matter. He planned to hit them both in time.

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