The Heart of a Necromancer

by Eddie Patin

  "Yes!" she exclaimed. "Yes, I want to go with you!"

  Jason's heart nearly burst. All of the fear and crushing despair lifted off of him and vanished. Relief flooded into him and he felt his own eyes tear up, so he quickly wiped them with the back of one hand. He felt himself beaming and like he was flying when he saw Morgana smiling at him. Oh, thank God! he thought. He was happy, then dizzy, then elated, then remembered how freaking exhausted he was.

  "Oh, Morgana!" he blurted, then laughed, feeling embarrassed and on top of the world. He smiled at Riley—he'd saved him again—and the soldier smirked at him. The three of them laughed as Gliath looked on without expression, watching the large windows leading to the misty night. "What about your stuff?" Jason asked her about the noise of the portal. "Do you want to gather some things from home?"

  Morgana turned to look at the dining hall again then looked down at her brother's necklace in her hand. She smiled and met Jason's gaze once more.

  "I don't think so," she said. "I have the necklace, my sword, and my ring. I have my relics back home, but honestly..." She trailed off, staring up at nothing with her mouth open for a moment. "After seeing those things at your house, I don't think I need them anymore."

  Jason smiled, looked at the rift to make sure that all of the prisoners were through, then released it. The portal leading into the Soloster manor shuddered and collapsed on itself, spinning and shrinking, then finally disappearing with a pop. Jason barely heard it over the noise of the necromancer's machine.

  Looking back at Riley and Gliath with a grin, Jason faced Morgana. She looked less burdened already. Her green eyes were bright and there was still the hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. He wanted so badly to kiss her...

  Instead, Jason extended his hand for a handshake. She took it, and he instantly adored her warm palm and fingers in his grip.

  "Morgana Soloster," he said. "Welcome to the Reality Rifters."

  Chapter 32

  They weren't bothered by any more gargoyles.

  Riley was certain that the monsters were still out there, so as the Reality Rifters searched the necromancer's tower, they made sure to stay alert. Jason felt thoroughly exhausted, but was planning of staying frosty anyway. He knew all about the dangers and traps involved with exploring evil wizards' towers—in theory, at least.

  Staring out into the mountains and distant valley that was once Bozeman, Montana from the huge, open windows, Jason watched for gargoyles flying around in the night air or down in the mist. He didn't see any. He speculated for a moment in his tired brain that when the necromancer was killed, all of the remaining gargoyles and constructs he'd controlled were killed too, right? At least—that's the way it is in some movies. Jason scoured the skies with his night vision, but saw no beasts. Maybe they'd all fled for the moment. Maybe they did collapse when their source of necromantic power was destroyed. Riley seemed sure that the remaining stone monsters were still out there—as well as the remaining undead crawling all over Little Ellis and the ridge—but at the moment, the night seemed quiet.

  Well—quiet except for that damned green fire machine.

  At one point, all four of them stood around the noisy contraption, looking it over. Riley identified another fusion generator humming behind the tool cabinet, working quietly from hiding and standing about as tall as a night stand.

  "I can see lines running from the generator to this thing under the stone floor," he said, pointing down with a gloved finger, "but there's more than just electricity powering this. It's weird. There are strange fruking anomalies in other light spectrums all around it." The cyborg's body was lit up by the wildly flickering green fire belching forth from the ring-shaped void in the floor that concealed a vat of weird liquid-metal ooze-stuff, bubbling below them.

  "Black magic," Jason offered dramatically.

  Riley smirked then nodded. "Probably some kind of magic, I reckon."

  "Can you see magic, Riley?" Jason asked.

  "Sometimes."

  Jason sighed and crossed his arms, looking up at the high scaffolding and beams of the device. That large, shining ball rotated around and around, painted by the light of the green fire from below. It was the size of a beach ball.

  "So, how do we destroy it?" Jason asked.

  "Destroy it?" Riley countered. "Why?"

  Jason met the man's gaze after his eyes flitted to Morgana. "Uh ... so that it can't be used to transform people into gargoyles anymore, of course."

  Riley shrugged. "Destroy the generator maybe."

  Jason looked up and scratched his chin. "I kinda want to shoot that big ball up there..."

  Riley looked up. "Might be solid metal. Your slug won't do shet if it is and it might ricochet back at us."

  "Let's do it from inside the fancy door."

  "Well, you're just playing around now, Jason," Riley said with a tired smile. "Don't you wanna finish looting this fruking place and get some damned sleep?"

  Jason sighed. "Let's do it before we leave, then."

  "Whatever, man."

  Of course it wouldn't make any difference. That was the big deal about infinity, right? Nothing meant anything when you can just slip into the next world over. No consequences.

  As they carefully made their way through the rest of the tower and its much less-exciting lower levels, Jason's thoughts went back to poor Jason 1241. They also lingered on Riley's answer to all of the tough questions.

  Don't think about it.

  Jason found himself almost falling asleep standing up, but he tried to keep his wits about him. His thoughts kept drifting back toward meaninglessness. With his rifting ability, Jason could do and find anything he wanted—once he could fully control it, anyway. If things were up to Riley, they would have been in and out of u936 with thirty gargoyle hearts without casting a second glance at the village and its people, or at Estren and his Golden Lady's Communion, or at Morgana. Because they did get involved, she was still alive and with him now, finally freed from the burden of a people that had turned against her.

  Looking over at the beautiful young woman, Jason smiled when she looked his way. She smiled back, and Jason's heart swelled.

  He could have left her be; left her on the cross where he'd found her. She would have been killed, of course, but what did it matter? If he really wanted her that badly—and he did—he could have just shifted through some adjacent universes until he found a world where it would have been easier to convince her to come along. Even now, if they were to open a random door of the tower and Morgana was blown to pieces by a trap of some kind, Jason could just hop through the seventh and find another version of her. Hell—he could even go back in time and steal her away from another universe in probability space in the same way that he found other versions of himself when he went hunting after the alpha minotaur back home.

  What was the point of taking stances on anything when faced with infinite universes where anything and everything could, did, and would happen?

  What should I do if life is indeed meaningless? he thought.

  Jason 1241's answer was to check out. He couldn't handle it; couldn't deal with the guilt of seeing his neighbors from his universe slaughtered by the minotaur. He couldn't deal with the pointlessness of it all. There were infinite versions of the Clayton family and Mr. and Mrs. Hines, so why did the old couple (and their damned dog) from universe 1241 matter at all? On top of that, if their deaths were meaningless, how did anything mean anything at all...?

  In an omniverse where death and tragedy mean nothing, Jason 1241 just couldn't deal with the pointlessness of it all. He didn't want to explore and get rich after he looked into the void of nihilism and saw infinity looking back at him.

  Jason 1241 chose not to play.

  Riley's answer of ignoring the absurdity of meaninglessness was just as bad, though. Just as Jason 1241 couldn't handle facing the paradox of everything and nothing, Riley simply refused to face it at all ... other than a bare lip-service reaction that allowed him
to ignore the absurd whenever it was convenient. The soldier tried to escape the reality of infinity, only flirting with the surface concept of 'nothing means anything' whenever it made decision-making easier for him.

  Jason's friend—Riley was truly feeling like a friend now—had apparently decided to deal with the meaninglessness of existence among infinite universes by eluding the concept. He just refused to face it. Jason chuckled, trying not to fall asleep. In refusing to face the absurd, Riley sometimes said one thing and did another. He was inconsistent. Whether or not something actually had any meaning to Riley always depended on the circumstances and the man's mood.

  As long as I'm still living, I've got to make a living, he'd said.

  During this entire gargoyle adventure that went way beyond the original specs of the bounty, Jason had been wrestling with whether to help Morgana or not, all in the face of Riley telling him that nothing mattered and that he should leave her be.

  Now that Jason watched the young woman walk through the stone hall they were in, lighting her way with her shining sword as the necromancer's black robes swished around her lovely, lean legs—God, she was so filthy from all of this, though!—Jason knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he did the right thing.

  But what did that mean, doing the right thing? Wasn't it pointless?

  Nothing means anything? Existence is pointless?

  In the face of infinity, nothing matters so why go on at all?

  Well, Jason knew that he wasn't going to kill himself, and he wasn't going to try to ignore the absurdity of it, either.

  If everything was meaningless, then the only thing left for Jason to find meaning in ... was whatever Jason chose to care about. He would create his own meaning. He cared about his life and the lives and happiness of his friends. He cared a lot for Morgana, even though—holy crap—he'd just met her a few days ago! And even though he could have just let her die, and could have gone after another version of the girl like Riley had suggested, if Jason had decided to not rescue her from the necromancer and just let her be killed horribly...

  Well, he would know. He would know that he could have done good and turned away instead, and he'd have to live with that.

  If there was no right and wrong, and nothing meant anything, then the best that Jason could do was to decide what was right to him and do his best to follow his own code. He would accept the meaninglessness and try to live a good life anyway. He would have fun, and see the omniverse, and hunt monsters, and get rich, and eventually die with a brain full of amazing stories and satisfaction.

  In an infinite omniverse that he could move through with relative ease, Jason was so free that it was ridiculous! But it would be the personal meaning in his own heart that would truly set him free; free from the fear and guilt of looking into the void, and free from the self-imposed chains of refusing to confront the truth.

  Jason felt good and smiled.

  He paused to lean against a wall. He was so freaking tired.

  As they continued exploring the tower, Jason just followed Riley's direction. At this point, he didn't really care anymore about finding more loot. They would get so much freaking gold from all of those golem hearts and they'd already collected a pretty interesting bunch of stuff from the necromancer that they'd have to look at more carefully later.

  Some of the most notable items were on the necromancer himself, the genetic engineer named Derek Norton who still had his zombie wife and daughter preserved in hyperbaric chambers. How long had it been since this world—much like Jason's—descended into this dark age? Eight hundred years was it? Nine hundred? Jason knew that he could just check his OCS, but he was too damned tired to care.

  They took the necromancer's pistol, along with its holster and two extra mags. It was a bizarre, space-age weapon that shot what Riley called a 'particle beam'. Jason liked to think of it as a lightning gun. He remembered seeing the charred and smoking bodies back in the village Crossroads and knew what it could do. Riley had also found a really interesting knife (and sheath) from the dead man. The blade was curved and deep black with wicked serrations; something gaudier and more ritualistic than practical, but also cold and light and epically balanced. Maybe the knife was magical. The soldier had also pulled the strange, high-tech cleats off of the necromancer's boots, which seemed to match up with the floating disc that the fiend had abandoned back in the main chamber before escaping to his secret room. Yeah—that was a flying disc, alright; some sort of transport from a world with much better tech than Earth. The device reminded Jason of the Green Goblin's 'flyer' from the Spiderman movies. Jason kept the necromancer's journal, of course, and Riley had given him the two rings he'd found on the fingers of the severed hand to hold on to for the time being. There were also two strange, large gemstones—a purple one and an orange one—that Riley had decided would be good for them to keep.

  Throughout the rest of the tower, the four of them found a variety of other things mostly mundane, including a small collection of modern weapons and ammo. One of the more interesting guns present was a sleek-looking 5.56mm AR pattern rifle made by a company that Jason didn't recognize: Primus Arms. Jason insisted that Morgana strap on the AR-15, which made her mighty uncomfortable for a while until Jason convinced her that it wasn't going to explode.

  Eventually, the four of them circled back to the main chamber with the vile, chugging machine and spitting green fire. They didn't bother to take any loot that would be easy enough to buy back home. Jason left the necromancer's normal gear alone and they didn't mess with the variety of low-tech stuff and crafting materials on the shelves.

  Before leaving, they opened the inner sanctum door with the severed hand one last time. Directing everyone into the room to take cover, Jason took aim at the spinning, chrome-like ball above the green fire machine from a position behind the door frame in case his bullet came flying back at him.

  He carefully put the front sight on the spinning 'disco ball', clicked off his safety, and fired.

  The large metal ball was not solid metal. In fact, it was more like the consistency of a giant, silver Christmas ornament. When Jason shot it with his AK-47, it shattered like an exploding star! The structures and scaffolding around it collapsed to the stone floor with a heavy clatter. The chains and manacles fell, and the pedestal listed to one side then pivoted into the circular recess in the floor full of the boiling goop.

  "Well, I'll be," Riley said, watching the thing fall apart with great gouts of roaring green flames. "Why the fruk would such a huge elaborate thing be left so damned vulnerable?"

  Green flames shot out of the hole in the floor like solar flares; angry, pale fire creatures trying to set the tower around it ablaze.

  Watching the fires dance and lash back and forth, Jason felt himself buzzing then suddenly swooned in and out of sleep. He sighed, shaking his head, and turned away, facing the bed and hyperbaric chambers. Staring for a moment at the mutilated, bloody slump of what remained of Derek Norton on the floor ahead, Jason thought back to how surprised Derek was when he'd recognized Jason upon waking in his pod...

  What? Jason?! he'd said.

  Thinking back to the notations of this universe in his OCS, Jason was suddenly intensely curious about his connection with the necromancer. Was it something having to do with the 'evil Jason' after all? Why the hell did the evil man recognize him?

  "Let's get home," Jason said. Looking over at Morgana, he saw her smile back at him.

  "Great fruking idea," Riley said.

  Reaching into his shirt, Jason found his home key and opened a rift.

  It was eleven A.M. when they'd tallied up all of the golem hearts and had laid out the various loot from the tower on the stainless steel table in the back of the garage. Jason stared at the necromancer's journal sitting among the captured gear. He wanted badly to spend several hours reading through it—after he got some sleep. What sort of fascinating stuff would be in there? Maybe he could learn about how real magic worked! The idea of an entire person
al history from another world—another universe—made Jason realize that he'd have to be careful not to get lost in all of the little stuff out there among the infinite omniverse on his coming adventures. History abounds, and now, Jason had access to infinite worlds' worth of it.

  All in all, from the nights hunting in New Bozeman, the day hunting the dormant gargoyles in the woods, and the final battle that also netted them the necromancer's huge supply from the main chamber's cabinet, the Reality Rifters had collected an astounding sixty-seven golem hearts.

  Riley grinned like a madman. Jason could practically see dollar-signs in the man's cybernetic eyes. At four ounces of gold per heart, getting something like $1200 per ounce of gold ... shit ... Jason was way too tired to figure out their overall haul, but it was ridiculous! He laughed with Riley, even reaching up to pet Gliath on one ear in giddy happiness as they cheered together. Morgana leaned against the table looking over all of the stuff and smiling drowsily. She casually looked around at the garage, but her eyes kept returning to the huge stack of glowing stone hearts.

  "Oh!" Jason exclaimed, rubbing his weary hands together like a cliché. "We should build an addition onto the house! Make more space! I bet we can afford it—you know—collectively."

  With a smirk, Riley clapped Jason's shoulder. "Yeah, maybe, Jason. Maybe."

  Jason was getting his backpack organized. As he straightened the main compartment to pack it up again with some of the sixty-seven golem hearts, the 'Spare Air' canister he'd lashed to one side with molle webbing clinked against the stainless steel table. He knew that he'd have a little extra space since they'd be carrying most of the hearts in a big leather bag, so he slipped the necromancer's journal inside. If they had any downtime at the Market for whatever reason, Jason wanted to look through it.