Ch 34

Ben spat, looking at the burned up, empty site he had been relaxing at earlier in the morning. The sun was down, and the moon was full, illuminating everything. Ben had seen it happen with his own eyes, things vanishing if you got too far away from them, their tendency to appear again or for copies to be dropped by monsters upon death. The only signs in the camp were of a struggle, scorch marks and and the faint odor of something fresh, like washed clothes.

“Of course it's empty,” he said, accumulated exhaustion finally weighing him to the ground. After his run in with the wurm, it had been several more hours of methodical slaughter before he made it back. Not since he had been six years old, locked out of his parent's old house for a few days while they were off shooting up heroin, had the ground felt so blissfully comfortable.

His instincts could scream all they wanted, but Ben wasn't in any state to hear them.

–

Casimer could feel Ben drift away, and felt the Aim Hero Renegade fall into a deep, exhausted sleep sometime after that. There was a strange emotion running through him, something he couldn't place. His monsters were closing in on the area even as he watched, a whole pack of Grass Wolves to pin them against the wall, where the Cliff Face would easily finish them off.

“He's worked hard today, hasn't he?” he asked, petting the regenerated giant bull wurm. Casimer had been able to get a very good idea of exactly how much mana a human could process before total exhaustion, which was his entire goal for boxing Ben in and facing him with stationary enemies. It was a good strategy, totally exhaust something before killing it, but Casimer didn't have the heart for it.

Without understanding exactly why, Casimer mentally sent the creatures away to hunt other game, what little remained of the natural wildlife. He moved himself to the furthest edge of the strange radius that surrounded all living creatures, the radius which kept him from simply ripping them apart and eating that way. With Ben, and humans in general, it was much larger than with smaller creatures like mice. Around his core, he built a body of dirt, functional and easy to maintain. Then, reaching into his own stomach region, he began pulling out logs of wood until he had an armful, and went into the camp.

Ben was dead asleep, and the Renegade had opened a watchful eye the moment Casimer had formed in the distance, and kept it aimed right at him, following his every movement.

“Relax you stupid ape,” Casimer said in a low whisper, dropping the wood carefully, experimentally pulling more wood from his stomach. “I can create things inside the radius, as long as I'm in it, huh? What a stupid restriction,” he said as he stacked the wood. Casimer tried to light the fire directly, failed, then pulled a glob of burning, liquid gold from his stomach and placed it under the logs, which began to smoke and crackle to life immediately.

As he watched Ben sleep, curiosity moved across his mind like a wandering god, and his body of dirt transmuted, gaps filled in by pink flesh, until a perfect replica of Ben sat across from him, dark purple gem set in the center of his collarbone. The light of the fire played across his body, which had a wet, embryonic layer of thin, evaporating slime across it. Casimer pulled several collapsible lawn chairs from his stomach, three to be exact, then arranged them around the fire.

“Get over here, stupid,” Casimer said in his own voice, motioning for the Aim Hero Renegade to come and have a seat, which he did, innocently following orders. The final item Casimer created was a replica of Ben's glass bong, complete with water and weed ready to go.

“Why on earth was he doing this?” Casimer said in a forceful whisper. He looked at the renegade, who was watching with sleepy eyes. “That won't do, I want as many test subjects as I can get,” he said, reaching over and touching the Aim Hero Renegade on the forehead, washing his exhaustion away and restoring him to peak physical condition.

“I've wired myself into this body completely,” Casimer explained, squinting and moving through the clunky motions of lighting the pipe and smoking it “so in theory, I should be able to feel this.” Casimer inhaled the smoke, then immediately began coughing it out, prompting several soft ooks of concern from the renegade.

“Stop worrying,” cough cough “stupid. Now it's your turn,” he said, and handed it over. The renegade stared at it, then looked back at Casimer with wide eyes, who began laughing softly. “It's all right, you just did this yesterday, just try to remember,” he said, standing up on unsteady feet and grabbing the aim hero renegade's arms and hands, manually molding him into the proper positions. Muscle memory took over at that point, and the renegade lit the bowl and inhaled. The moment the smoke hit his lungs, a massive hit of white smoke, he let out a monkey like shriek of surprise, and fell back, an almost exact repeat of the days previous events when he tried to drink the bong water.

Ben's eyes snapped open, and he sat up, breathing hard, looking around.

–

It was, without a doubt, the strangest scene he had ever woken up to. Across from him, buck naked and covered in red/pink, thin ropey slime, was him. His doppelganger was laughing and the area stunk of freshly smoked weed, the kind he normally liked to smoke. The Aim Hero Renegade was gently setting down his bong, thick white smoke coming from his mouth as he continued to shriek, though his volume was rapidly decreasing, and his tone was becoming more questioning than panicked.

“Sorry,” Casimer said, “I didn't mean to wake you, Ben.”

“What the fuck is going on? Casimer, is that you?” Ben said, heartbeat remaining elevated and overworked adrenal glands squeezing the last meager drop they had into his system.

“Yes. I've decided to give you a pass,” Casimer said casually, the familiar face he wore smiling at Ben. “Would you care to join us?” he asked, holding out the bong.

Some part of him, the dwindling portion of his mind that insisted on sanity, threw it's hands up and walked away from life, possibly for good. Because it knew, it had watched Ben for his entire life, that whenever Ben asked himself that question, the answer was always the same.

“All right,” Ben said, “Just this once.”

–

Some time had passed, Casimer in no rush to begin talking, the Aim Hero Renegade having fallen asleep at least an hour ago, and Ben engrossed in his own thoughts. In the small amount of words exchanged between them, Ben had asked Casimer to put on some clothes and possibly a different face. He'd consented to the clothes but insisted on keeping the face. Casimer now wore a set of powerful looking full plate armor, complete with a sword-belt, but no helmet. Occasionally, Casimer would cycle between other fantasy style outfits. Ben noticed a while ago that there were only five. He had just come back from getting more wood for the fire, when Ben started talking.

“Is it wrong this has been the best day of my life?” Ben asked. Casimer shifted, startled.

“I hadn't considered that,” Casimer said, looking lost for the first time since Ben had met him.

“Why didn't you rush us?” Ben said suddenly, breaking the silence.

“What?”

“When we were pinned against all those poison spike traps. You had plenty of room, so why didn't you flood the forest with tanky monsters and push us towards them?”

“I hadn't considered that either,” Casimer said, eyes wide and head now held between both hands.

“All day I was worried about that,” Ben said “I kept thinking, 'just clear a path through, just get an escape route as fast as you can'. And then, it started getting later in the day, and I realized you weren't going to do it. And all I could think about is, why not? So it was inexperience,” Ben said, trailing off and revisiting the train of thought.

“Was this really the best day of your life?” Casimer asked, leaning forward a bit, voice clear. Ben hesitated out of a sense of obligation to his life so far. It was no easy thing to discount his entire life, no matter the number of his troubles.

“Yeah. It really was.”

“The best day of my life,” Casimer said, eyes following a memory “was the first time I was defeated, and my eyes were opened by a friend. If not for that, today never would have been. Tell me something, if you think you are getting off this mountain alive, what are you going to do out there?”

“What do you mean?” Ben asked.

“What's out there? What's really out there?”

“Can't you see it yourself?”

“I can't leave this place anymore than a tree can leave it's roots. All I can do is grow.”

“You heard a bit of it when I was talking to Ahr,”

“Excuse me?” Casimer interrupted

“Aim Hero Renegade? I'm shortening it to Ahr, I'm sure you've noticed it's a really clunky name. Anyways, outside of here is civilization. Everything we've ever built, all our knowledge and wealth, the system of human dominance over the earth, our culture. We've harnessed fire, we've taken flight, we've split the atom,” Ben said, and Casimer made a dismissive 'pfft' sound and waved a hand through the air, an ominous orange light blooming for a moment before vanishing.

“Uh. . .” Ben said, staring at the spots the dim light had left in his eyes, “Right,” he said and got control of himself again “Ok, try this one on for size. You see that moon?” Ben said, pointing at it.

“Yeah, what about it?”

“We've been there. Sent a human out and he walked on it.”

“How?” Casimer asked, and Ben let him ponder “What an impressive group I'm sharing my world with,” Casimer said, face tilted up to the moon, staring “It's so different, looking through these eyes. Inside my domain, I can see everything within, the contours of every grain of dirt, under the ground, a total sight. Outside is different, just light and impressions, like filtered through water. These eyes though,” he said, and stood up, letting his head hang back to stare up at the sky “They can't see a damn thing, not inside the grass, only in one direction, and only a small bit of the colors of the world.” Casimer blew out a breath, close to a whistle.

“But they can see far,” Casimer said slowly, eyes watering as he stared at the stars “They can see so very far. It's no wonder your people went to the moon, to your senses, it's right there,” he said, and in addition to the omnipresent voice, Casimer's body said it as well, giving Ben the goosebumps.

“Do you think you'll end up on the moon someday,” Ben asked, staring up as well. Casimer looked over and laughed.

“Come for a walk with me, Ben, and we'll be able to answer that question in a much more certain way.”

Casimer stood, clothes changing to bright blue robes and a long crystal tipped staff falling from the wide sleeves. Ben watched eyes wide, and Casimer noticed him watching.

“You didn't even look at the gold with eyes half as covetous as the ones you have now,” he said slyly, and Ben turned his gaze away, embarrassed.

“We want magic even more desperately than water or gold,” Ben whispered his realization to himself. But Casimer heard.

“Come on then,” Casimer said, tapping the ground with his staff, and the ground rumbled in the distance. Ahr opened his eyes and stood up, alert and ready to follow. The three of them walked, Casimer in the front leading them through the brush, until they found a set of stairs that descended into the ground. They were wide, with a tall ceiling, made for easy walking. Ben hesitated only a moment, and Casimer laughed.

“You aren't food, Ben. You're my first 'friend',” he said, giving the word air quotes “and I 'promise' you'll be all right.” Casimer was smiling, clearly amused by his correct use of the new concepts. They stepped into the darkness and began walking.

It went like that for some time, going further and further down in total darkness. Ben coughed, then stumbled on a step. Casimer caught him by the arm and righted him back up.

“My mistake,” he said, then he began to glow, illuminating the passage “We've still got a ways to go.”

For Ben, the process was a strange one. Each step down reminded him of something, like a distant nostalgia unremembered, of events that never happened to him. He felt as though he had made this journey a thousand times, the endlessly repeated pattern of the steps bringing him into a trance, following a version of himself that knew far more than he did into the depths.

“We're nearly there, Ben,” Casimer said.

“What time is it out there?” Ben asked suddenly, a child-like note of pleading in him.

“It's still night, why do you ask?”

“I want to show you something. Let me know when it's almost morning, and we'll come out then.”

“All right, I'm looking forward to it. I've made something comfortable for us to rest on further up ahead, let's wait there.”

–

“You know,” Casimer said, breaking the silence, pulling Ben from the strange, internal panic that had gripped the entirety of his mind. “You never answered my question, about what you were going to do out there, once you got away from the mountain.”

“I don't know what I'm going to do, Casimer,” Ben said, coming back into focus. “I don't know what I'm supposed to do. You know, my parents aren't really dead?”

Casimer looked startled, the grabbed his chest as though experiencing a pain.

“When I was a kid, when they took me to the morgue, I didn't even look at their faces. They must have been some random junkies who looked like them, but I didn't care. All I wanted was to get away from that house, get away from them before they got me killed.”

“Go on,” Casimer whispered, and this time it was only with his body that he spoke.

“Years and years later, I saw them in Vegas, the two of them, still together, still using. They looked like fucking ghouls, filthy, homeless, begging for money. I still knew though, I still knew who they were.” Tears welled up in Ben's eyes, not touching his voice “And you know what they did, when I told them I was their son? They started begging for money. They didn't recognize me, all they saw was someone who might be able to help them get high. Then, when I left, they called me a cheap fucker and said they were glad they never had kids. When I walked away-Casimer, are you all right?”

Casimer wore a brutal smile on his face, flushed with blood under the skin, like his entire body was clenched up.

“Oh, oh yes,” Casimer said “I can feel that, Ben. I can even remember it as though I was there. This anger, that moment, it's written in your blood like a burning scar. How can you stand to feel this way!” he shouted “I can tell you something, Ben. If anything ever made me feel this way, I wouldn't rest until I had torn it all down. Yes,” he hissed, eyes wide “yes I know what I am feeling. This is older than me, written in something deeper than blood. I'm going to show them all,” he whispered, a confused look on his face “I will have revenge!” he shouted, and the mountain shook.

Ben felt it as well, like his blood had caught fire, the anger of a betrayed child finally given a voice. It played like a music in his spirit, the song his soul had waited a thousand years to hear. Like a madman preaching his doctrine of salvation, and the people singing along, a chorus of 'Burn it down! Burn it down!', on repeat, just beyond the edge of his understanding. All Ben knew, all he could understand, was that his future had become larger; the fog that had descended on him all those years ago as a child in the Morgue of Hope, Nevada, had finally lifted.

“I think I will too,” Ben said, heart beating a thousand miles a minute, sweat breaking out across his body. Ahr, sensing the mood, began beating his chest and screaming, looking for something he could throw. Ben wanted to laugh, but a much larger part of him wanted to start beating his chest as well. He did neither.

“It's almost dawn, come on, Ben. I want to see what you had us wait for.”

They walked, a fifteen minute stretch of burning silence, each locked in their own thoughts. They emerged on a world painted in the colors of the rising sun, sky orange with the coming light. Casimer stood as though stunned, like he had been struck, human eyes locked on the horizon.

They watched for half an hour, the slow progress of Heilos as he raised the sun, tears openly shed by all watching.

“Thank you for that,” Casimer whispered, and pulled a strange metal object from his sleeve, about the size of a pear, then put it in Ben's backpack. “You'll come back, Ben.”

“How do you know?”

“After what I just gave you, I can guarantee it. I'll follow you for as long as I can and see you on your way out.”

To Casimer, the walk away brought a strange pain. He could see the boundary that contained him clearly, like a fish rising to the surface of the ocean, the impassable mirror barrier where the sea met the sky.

“I can go no further,” Casimer shouted, pressed up against the boundary. “Goodbye, Ben.”

“Goodbye, Casimer!” Ben shouted from the veiled unknown “Thank you for everything!”