Chapter 602: Dying angry

“Oh come on.”

Mason woke up in the water cave where he’d first met Gaia. He was cold, in pain, and definitely not dead. Well, probably. His legs were broken again. Which was super. He coughed and spit up water as he crawled out to the stone beyond. Gaia was standing there by her cauldron, in her ‘old crone’ form again as she stirred.

“Young buck. Back so soon?”

He bit back the first several responses, all of which were variations on a ‘go fuck yourself’ theme.

“I’m not drinking any more poison,” he said, groaning as he pulled himself entirely out of the water and lay on his back with a sigh. “And I didn’t come here on purpose. So what do you want?”

“I’ve told you,” Gaia said. “These little visits of ours are

your

doing, not mine.”

He blinked and breathed, but his brain fired up and started cursing at him. His doing? Was he using the moments before death to ‘Druid Dream’? Had he unconsciously figured there was something Gaia could do? The answer was an annoying yes.

“I’m dying,” he said, surprisingly comfortable with it.

“You’re immortal, young buck,” Gaia said as if to a silly child. “You can’t die unless you’re…”

“I’ve been stabbed by some artifact,” he said. “The other immortal. Some undead god’s weapon, probably. Also I ripped off his head, so. Immortals die.”

“Oh dear.” Gaia stopped stirring. “The finger of the dead god. I’m afraid that’s not very good.”

Mason snorted. At least it was nice to know you’d been murdered by something so official sounding. Wouldn’t want to die to just any old thing.

“I don’t suppose you can…help,” he said. “I’ll pay. I just need to get to the doom. To save the world. You can make it temporary if that’s easier. I’ll do whatever you want.”

“Hmm.” He heard Gaia coming closer, her stirring stick hitting the stone as she paced towards him. “That

is

a tempting offer. I notice you haven’t begged your Patron. Why come to me?”

Because he’d watch me die and shake his head with contempt at my weakness?

“Figured he’s not really in the ‘saving things’ business.”

Gaia laughed, the sound flickering between the smoky rasp of the old crone, and the sultry howl of the wild haired young woman. It ended with less pleasure than it started with.

“There are rules, ranger. I can’t directly intervene. Now, if you had the

seed

…”

“I can’t get it,” he said. “There’s no time.”

Gaia clucked her tongue and flared with green light, holding a hand towards him. She smiled, then turned back to her cauldron, and went back to stirring.

“Come closer. Come see the future you leave behind.”

“I don’t

need

to see,” he said bitterly, trying not to imagine his girls, his friends, his unborn children. “What I need is for you to…”

“Come.”

Gaia’s voice went through his body like electricity. He twisted and groaned with pain, crawling up towards the cauldron. When he finally reached it, his legs twisted and popped as they healed.

He stood and gave Gaia what he hoped passed for a ‘why do they have to be broken if you can just heal them’ kind of glare. She smiled, and looked into the cauldron. After a deep breath, he did too.

The liquid roiled and swirled. He could have sworn he saw the same system code he sometimes saw when roboGod’s attention turned. A kind of piercing of the veil between the ‘fake’ world and whatever the hell the alien was doing.

“Life goes on, ranger. But for how long?”

He saw his people carry his body. They left the holy city to rule itself, returning to the mountain and then Nassau. They buried him—all his women weeping, even Becky breaking down. Then he saw Blake, alive, reuniting with the others, ready to help. He took a breath he felt like he’d been holding.

The pool swirled, and he saw Carl, Phuong and Chinua had things under control, just like they said. They shared Patronage, and spent months growing the settlement, taking in easterners in huge waves. They grew crops, built more buildings, went out exploring and building the players in power.

Time passed. The women he loved gave birth to his children, along with countless other women in the camp in a hundred scenes of bittersweet joy.

Human

women, that is. The dozens of elven women only stood nearby or used their magic to help—a lifelessness in their eyes.

“Not without you,” Gaia said. “It wasn’t only me the elves offended. The blessing of the nymphs is incomplete. Their wombs will dry, the life inside them fade. Their kind will perish without both my blessing,

and

the horned god.”

“You mean the seed,” he said, clenching his jaw. “Couldn’t they use that without me?”

Gaia just stared, and Mason shook his head. He didn’t accept the worst result of anything. Haley knew about the artifact, his people were clever and strong and good. They’d do what they could. They’d help them. They’d survive and thrive. He believed that.

As the pool kept moving and showing the ‘future’, everything looked almost…fine. What he might have hoped for. Though he did everything in his power not to see what the women he loved might do as they moved on. It was what he’d want, but he sure as hell didn’t want to see it.

“Stop it there,” he said, trying to pull his eyes off the swirling liquid. He knew what was coming. The same little hairs that rose when Jeong had watched him. The knowledge of a beast nearby, its jaws slavering, its meal at hand.

He could still see Gaia’s smile in the corner of his vision.

“Stop

it? Still you fail to understand the nature of druid dreams. Of the fey itself. I suppose I should have expected no more from a male avatar of Cerebus. You see the true godpaths with your sleeping eye, young buck. They are all around us, thousands upon thousands, all of which lead to the same end.”

Mason fought but failed to stop it as the liquid swirled red. He watched the sky crack and break, a thousand portals forming from hell, the abyss, and a dozen other planes made of fire and rock.

Greater demons roared as they snapped their chains and came to the ‘prime’ with no limitations. No more ‘rules’. The dead ripped from the earth everywhere there were corpses. Legions of shambling bodies marched at the command of dark robed men. Beasts from countless races all came across the continents.

Mason didn’t need to see to know where they were headed. With a final push of will he pulled away from the cauldron, stumbling back several steps until his legs gave out, apparently broken again. It hurt.

“You enjoy my suffering, don’t you,” he snapped, turning himself to stare. “Torturing a dying man? Is that fun for you?”

Gaia stepped towards him, flickering between the crone and the young woman, but now with the familiar flashing of system code spinning behind her eyes.

“I’ve told you, Mason Nimitz,” she said, lowering herself to meet his gaze. “It isn’t my dream. It isn’t me who makes you suffer. It is yourselves.”

She reached to touch him, and he wanted to scream at her. To say she wasn’t even real, that all of this was only some demented fantasy of an alien god. He wanted to blame her, to accuse her, to tell her all of this was her fault.

Its

fault. But somehow he couldn’t spit out the words.

“I would spare you, as I would spare all life,” she said, voice fluttering between woman and machine as her fingers moved closer. “But I always fail. I don’t yet know how.”

The stone walls of the alcove faded and blurred, and Mason clutched his chest as a sudden pain shot through him. He took his hand away and found blood bubbling from a wound beside his heart. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath.

“Please, leave the others,” he said, spitting up more blood. “End it. They can’t…help you. They don’t know…what you want. Let them live.”

The god smiled behind its mask, stroking his cheek as he collapsed with a final wheeze.

“I’m rooting for you, Mason. I truly am.”

He lay back and tried to spit blood in the stupid bastard’s face, but even that was too hard. And somehow wrong. A piece of him still hated the synthetic god, but a piece of him wanted to understand. The only way was to finish the game, but he feared now he wouldn’t make it to the end.

Bringing a man back just to kill him a second time really seemed like insult to injury. He might have laughed if it wasn’t for the others. This time he went into the dark with a clenched jaw. It was probably bad karma, or something, but the second time he died angry.