by Eddie Patin
The whistling and howling of the storm was a siren's song until its heavy winds threw a rock at Jason's face.
He woke as the black gale was dying down.
Jason cracked his eyes open and smelled sulfur, mud, blood, and piss. Warm water splattered his face in angry waves on the wind. The sky was grey and chaotic, but the dark, swirling storm was gradually retreating away as if it was a massive, living thing moving on to find more victims.
Everything hurt. It was all sore. As the mild air of the bog woke his skin and Jason felt this 'Troll Swamp' world come more into focus, he felt the pain in his left thigh more than anything else. He was aching and tight in many places—no doubt from the rigors of the stress and the fight—but his leg felt like a dumb mass of clay with wicked fire burning inside. The torn skin where the spear had penetrated his Merc armor felt fiery and crispy.
"Oh, fuck me..." Jason muttered, straining to lift his head.
He had collapsed in the mud and spongy earth full of scraggly brown growths and crawling, rust-red algae in small pools of standing water. Red strands of the stuff were clumped up and gathered around drier areas of the bog as if yanked out of the water and thrown around like confetti by the passing storms. Jason was against the side of a root-cage that expanded like a monstrous plant tumor from the bottom of one colossal, mushroom-shaped tree.
He groaned as he tried to rouse his body.
His thigh flared with ridiculous pain that made him cry out. Down the slope from where he woke, halfway between the troll's cave and the thick swamp forest they'd arrived in, Jason could see that the pools of muddy water were thinly veiled with mist.
He saw the three bodies of the ettins who'd approached him after he'd rifted away from the cave. They all died one by one in a line coming at him; the first from his AK, and the others still smoking and gently burning from his particle beams. They were huge lumps of muscle and filthy hide with scant, crude clothing made from matted fur. The boorish ettins almost looked more like huge rocks, dead in the mud and stringy, red algae, than bodies; they were boulders of disheveled flesh.
Jason's AK-47 was down in the rust-colored muck near him.
That's where I dropped it before drawing the lightning gun, he thought, then he looked around in a panic for the futuristic pistol. Jason found it on a moist pad of spongy, dark ground with crimson-red algae slime and tendrils clinging to its silvery grip.
"Shit," he muttered to himself, trying to wipe the muck off of the weapon with his gloved hand. "Gross..."
Jason himself was covered in mud and reddish gunk. He must have been splattered by crap consistently as the storm had raged over his unconscious body. His leg burned like hell. When he tried to put weight on it, a sharp, cutting pain rang through his quadriceps, making him yelp in agony.
"Oh, fuck!" he cried, sitting down in the mud again.
He saw the spear that had gotten him lying on the ground. Reaching over to grab it, Jason cried out in misery as his leg flared like a knife blade was turning in his wound. He snatched up the ettin's weapon and pulled it back to him.
The spear's shaft was exactly what he'd expected: the long stalk of one of those reeds in the clearing akin to cattails. The savage giants made their primitive gear from the world around them, of course. Its tip had a spearhead carved from a root into a long, gnarled point. The root-point was filthy and smeared with an orange substance like apricot jam.
When Jason touched the stuff on the end of the spearhead, drawing out a sticky line of slime between his finger and the weapon's tip, he felt a freezing fear wash through him.
He looked down at his leg.
How long had he been unconscious? It was poison. It had to be, right? Had he been poisoned by the wound? Is that why he became so woozy and eventually passed out?
The sudden thought of what would have happened to him if he hadn't killed the ettins before dropping unconscious chilled Jason to the core. His constant fear ever since he'd realized that he'd be truly dealing with giants on this world—huge, overpowering brutes with simple, evil minds—was the idea of being dismembered and tortured, helpless against their superior strength.
That almost happened, didn't it? Jason thought.
He felt sick.
Jason looked back down at the distant troll cave, taking deep breaths to try and keep from throwing up.
Where were his friends? Where were the other Reality Rifters? Had they really been kidnapped by that huge, blue giant? Jason wasn't sure. It felt like it had been a dream.
"Oh, God," he muttered, staring at where he knew the troll cave was. He stared at the mound where they'd been standing just before he rifted away. "Oh, God—they've been taken away!"
He thought of them all. Jason figured that Morgana would come to mind first, but he really loved them all. He couldn't imagine life without Riley or Gliath either. Where were they?!
Jason struggled to stand. The intense pain in his leg made him cry out. He picked up his muddy AK and slung it around his back. He lifted the OCS and realized that he had no idea what time it was when they were attacked. He had no idea how long he'd been sleeping.
The pain was a constant screaming in his head; an endless burning flame in his leg. Jason put his weight on his right leg as best he could and tried to clear his mind enough to think.
Figure it out! he thought. Find them!
"What time?" he asked himself as he navigated to the bookmark he'd just set.
He found it. Troll Cave. There was no local time here. The day/night cycle was N/A. But from his OCS, he could tell that it had been forty-seven minutes since he'd set that bookmark.
"So I wasn't asleep long."
He'd set that bookmark with an anchor in the temporal dimensions so that he could go back if he needed to.
"I need to go back and warn them!" he exclaimed.
Won't make any difference to this universe, he thought. At least, Jason figured that he had it right. If he just went back in time to save them, wouldn't that just shunt him off to another parallel universe, especially since he was already there doing stuff with the team? It would be just like when he'd met Jason 1241 in that alternate version of Earth where (when) he was chasing the alpha minotaur. He'd thought at the time that he'd be able to go backwards in the temporal dimensions to 'try again' but ended up going into an alternate world instead. Then he did it again when he tried a third time, resulting in meeting Jason 1242.
Could he do anything by going back to there now?
"Probably not," Jason said to himself, adjusting the coordinates so that he could rift back to the cave but remain in the same time that he was in. There might be some use to going back there—to the same place and time—but not to save his friends. Riley, Morgana, and Gliath were who the fuck knows where now, and warning some other versions of them wouldn't help that.
He had to stay in u1243 to save his actual friends—the versions that he knew and loved.
Suddenly remembering their radios, Jason reached up to his where it was attached to the backpack strap near his CamelBak water hose. He made sure that it was on. It was. Pressing the button, he leaned toward the mic.
"This is Jason. Reality Rifters, do you copy? Is anybody reading me? Over."
They were somewhere. That huge blue giant had taken them away.
Titan, Jason thought with a chill.
He gasped.
"Was that the titan? The primordial giant?!"
Jason stared at the distant troll's mound. He watched the dead ettins smoke and smolder. There was no response on the radio.
He pressed the button and tried again.
"Riley, it's Jason! Are you hearing me on your radio? Morgana? Gliath? Is anybody reading me? Just press the big, black button on the side so you can talk back to me. Over."
He looked down at the troll cave. Jason groaned. He needed to go down there and look around. Eyeing the watery hole, a hundred yards away, he groaned again.
Jason looked at his OCS and adjusted the temporal dimension sl
iders on the 'Troll Cave' bookmark. He turned off the sliders for the fifth and sixth to make sure that he wouldn't slide along Probability Space. With the OCS focused on only the third and fourth dimensional coordinates, he opened a rift to his bookmark that would land him right in front of that terrifying hole.
The unfurling portal was loud in the murky and misty bog, crackling and roaring above the steady din of insects and croaking creatures. When the center cleared, Jason stepped through, grimacing and crying in pain.
His leg hurt so damned bad. It was agony. He wouldn't be able to keep this up. He'd have to figure something out. He'd been impaled through the muscle. It was amazing that he didn't bleed to death! Jason was reminded of his worst wound in the Wilderlands. Back when his first plan to kill the wyvern had failed, he'd run away into the night toward the lake but was cut off by raptors in the dark. A big fucker had managed to slice across his thigh with its deadly, sickle-like claw. That night was a terrible night. Jason had spent most of the dark hours in a tree trying to stop the bleeding. Still, that grisly wound hadn't hurt as badly as his leg hurt now.
Once on solid ground again, Jason released the rift.
He was left standing in the area where they'd huddled against the troll's cave during the storm. There were dead ettins face-down in the muck. The closest of them was one that Jason had killed before escaping. He suddenly remembered the troll's crawling, disembodied arm and looked down around his feet with a jolt of fear...
The arm was gone.
"Shit," Jason muttered.
With rising dread in his guts, he looked at the water-filled hole leading to where that troll had slinked out of. The weather was clear for now. The water filling the cave's throat rippled slightly from some unseen movement in the earth.
Jason scrambled to get away from the terrifying hole, limping on his wounded leg and crying with almost constant pain.
He approached where Riley had been standing. There, he found the cyborg's rifle lying in the mud. Reaching down, Jason picked up the beautiful Marlin 1895sbl lever gun. Its stainless steel barrel and receiver gleamed where it wasn't splashed with mud.
Jason wiped the weapon off as he looked around.
Just as in the dreamy vision he'd seen from where he'd passed out, Jason saw the strangest thing. There were areas of the bog, circling around the backside of the mound, that were now solid and mostly-dry.
The dry areas were perfect footprints rising from the mud and muck.
"What the hell...?"
It was as if that huge giant had walked up to his friends, and with every step he took, the ground rose six inches from the bog and created steps of dry mud perfectly sized to his giant feet. They were inverted footprints of dry ground.
Wow, Jason thought.
Past one dry step, Jason saw Riley's flying disc, discarded and forgotten, reclining against the mound's slope. He cried and grimaced in pain as he hobbled over there then picked up the artifact. It was a lot lighter than it looked; no doubt some sort of really fancy metal alloy.
"Well, it is magical," he said to himself.
But is it? he thought. Is it, really? It might just be some very fantastic technology with a built-in recharging power source just like his lightning gun. Surely a disc capable of carrying a man's weight like that in the sky required phenomenal amounts of power in an absurdly small size. But then again, so did an electron particle beam pistol, right?
After turning the disc contraption around in his hands and playing with it for a moment, Jason found a few recessed buttons. He pressed one, and the thing came alive in his hands, folding up the fins and steps extending around its center until the whole thing retracted to the size of a dinner plate.
"Cool..."
Jason found a sling like a thin metal cord that retracted to whatever length he wanted, so he made some slack and slung the device over his back just like Riley had.
Reaching for the radio hanging from his backpack strap again, Jason called for his friends again.
"Riley, Morgana, Gliath," Jason said, holding down the button. "This is Jason. Do you read me? Over."
There was no response.
He looked, following the strange reverse-footprints of lighter-colored dry ground extending from the mucky bog and patches of red algae. The tracks extended across the huge clearing away from the troll's mound. In the distance, there were two more tree lines—two more areas of hundred-foot-tall mushroom-shaped trees—with more of the clearing extending between them like a wide alley. The clearing-alley went on for as far as Jason could see past the troll mound in both directions. The giant's trail went one of those ways.
He pressed the button again. "Guys—where the hell are you?! Do you read me? Come in! Over." He released the call button. "Where the hell are they?" he muttered.
The steps continued for as far as Jason could see.
There was no way that he could follow the giant in his current wounded—
A sudden hiss behind Jason made him spin around, screaming out in pain as his left leg nearly buckled under him.
Jason watched with stark terror as a second troll climbed out from the submerged cave entrance, dripping with water.
The creature rose from the watery hole—all rangy arms and legs; knees and elbows—stretching to its gaunt, imposing height of eight feet. It smiled with insane hostility, its face stretched into all points and teeth and a long, hooked nose. Water dripped from its wide, green ears, and its black eyes were partly covered by sheets of limp hair like cords of plant matter. Its hide was green and rubbery; its hands broad with extra-long fingers tipped with cruel claws.
For a moment, Jason thought that it would laugh. Its horrific face was almost maniacal.
Then, it did laugh with a high, cackling voice.
"A lost morsel! A new piece of meat, just for me!" the troll exclaimed. "Why, you look soft and easy to eat!" Its long, sharp teeth were yellowish-grey, and seeing such a creature move in a somewhat humanly-manner and speak so clearly was weird beyond belief.
Jason felt fear flash through him so solidly that he almost fell down.
He realized that he was still holding Riley's rifle, so he shouldered it.
In an instant, the troll moved with nigh-supernatural speed, exploding from the water and crossing the distance between it and Jason with a few long, gangly bounds.
"Wait!" Jason cried.
The troll slowed to a stop before him. Jason trembled, smothered by numbing fear. His leg screamed in agony. He felt his hands shaking as they held up Riley's heavy lever gun.
Looming over Jason, the troll flexed its long, clawed fingers. It cocked its green head, sending another cascade of water sweeping down from its seaweed-like hair. It widened its eyes looking over him. They reminded Jason of a frog's dark eyes for some reason. Jason felt his bladder muscles flexing in and out and almost pissed himself again.
"Wait?" the troll repeated, dripping with banter. "Soft meat wants me to ... wait? Why should I wait? I see your soft flesh in that strange skin of yours. I see your sweet blood pulsing through your neck..."
Jason raised the muzzle of Riley's Marlin and fired at the troll's sunken, knobby chest. The rifle boomed and almost knocked him over. Damn—with those hot hard-cast lead rounds, that 45-70 kicked like a mule!
The troll recoiled, surprised. Its eyes flared in black anger, and it rebounded with a murderous scowl as Jason cycled the action with nearly-paralyzed hands.
Click-click.
He fired again, knocking the troll backwards a little more as the Marlin's buttstock slammed into his shoulder. He cycled the action once more, wondering how the hell he going to stop the monster when it regenerated. Maybe his lightning gun could ignite it when—
With blinding speed, the troll lashed out him, slashing one big hand's full allotment of claws across Jason's left side. The monster was so immensely strong that Jason was sent spinning through the air to the ground.
As Jason hit the bog with a huff. The pain in his leg made him scream. H
e didn't feel his guts spilling out, and he still had his arms, so he figured that the minotaur-hide jacket must have kept the troll's wicked claws from tearing him apart.
Then, immediately, the huge, green creature was crouching over Jason.
He screamed as the troll spread out the long fingers of one hand and pressed his chest, rifle, and arms into the ground.
"Stop it!" Jason screamed, fighting back the madness of the pain in his leg. "Don't! Don't! Stop!"
"Why stop?!" the troll replied. "I will eat you, soft meat! I will tear the strips of meat from your bones as you scream. I will pick my teeth with your fingers and toes and suck the sweet marrow from your bones. You smell sweet indeed. Sweet meat..."
Adrenaline flushed through Jason in waves. Pain smashed his nerves whenever the waves subsided.
"Wait!" Jason cried, stammering, his mind racing. What the hell could he do?! "Don't eat me! Not yet! You win!"
"Of course I win, puny, sweet meat!"
"But I am already wounded!" Jason cried. "The ettins hit me in the leg with a spear! I'm poisoned! You don't want to eat me; I've got poison in me!"
The troll sneered, drawing in close to Jason's face. It smelled weird in a way that Jason couldn't explain. There was no musty, stinking mammal odor to the creature; not like the ettins or the minotaurs from Maze World. Under the scent of mud and sulfur was something completely alien to him. The troll's wide smile showed fangs that were thin and pointed like that of an angler fish; truly monstrous.
"I am not worried about poison, silly food," the troll said. "You cannot convince me to not eat you! I have not had small soft sweet meat like you in Shattered Swamp for quite some time."
"Then don't kill me yet!" Jason cried. He struggled under the troll's hand, thinking that maybe he could angle the Marlin rifle up again, but it was no use. His leg felt like it was on fire. The troll pressed him down so firmly, it was as if someone had parked a truck on top of Jason's chest. This was a nightmare. "If you hardly ever see humans like me—that's what you mean, right? Humans?"
"Human..." the troll replied, trying out the word.
"Then leave me alive for a little while!"
