Collide Gamer

There was always a line on the Light Island.

Well, that was overplaying the matter. It was a figurative always and it usually wasn’t the longest of lines. Though the wisdom of the Celestial Devourer was often sought, there typically weren’t enough people in the Guild Hall to create anything longer than a ten minute queue. Even that number was less owed to their numbers and more to Stirwin’s wish to be thorough. Some people heard what they needed within 30 seconds, others needed 3 hours.

Those that had conversed with the crocodile of light and magic once often came back. Philosophy, general life advice, or just talking to a friend, the reasons to seek him out again were numerous.

At this time, the line to the temple was well over a hundred metres long.

John strutted past the influx of people. Unappreciative glances at the line-cutting were short-lived. People realized who he was in an instant and then just let him pass. Some attempted to chat him up, new Abyssals, not all of them. John just ignored them. He had his mind on the path ahead.

The Light Temple was an odd structure. On the outer rim, it reminded of an Indian stepwell. Descending one of the manifold staircases around the edge brought one down to a different sensation entirely. Dozens of doorways were set into the walls, always in the centre between the symmetrical layout of two sets of stairs. They led into a labyrinth of light and mirrors meant to test those of the appropriate soul type, one of the many mechanisms the Guild Hall had to help new elementalists along.

The floor of the temple was dominated by a rectangular pool. Its corners were beset with obelisks, their sandstone colour and gold-silver trim harmonizing well with the radiant desert all around them. The architecture had a faint Egyptian vibe to it, though it lacked the hieroglyphics to round out that feeling.

At the edge of the pool, partially basking in the luminescent essence within, sat the Celestial Devourer. By virtue of the magic in the island and other advancements made over time, he could keep his adult form in this space without any influence on John’s part. He was a three-metre long beast of scales, claws and teeth, a long-limbed crocodile – a wingless dragon, really.

An appearance of a monster and the silver-eyes of a mentor, Stirwin remained focused on the woman in front of him. Whatever he had said last had left her stunned, shoulders pulled back and spine rigid. Stirwin awaited her recovery patiently. A small motion by his snout indicated that he noticed his summoner.

“You need time and I have another arrangement… I implore you to reflect, but do not walk away yet,” the Celestial Devourer spoke to the woman. She looked after the crocodile, as he trotted over to John. “You do not come here often.”

“Indeed,” John agreed. “May I ask for a walk, conscience of mine?”

Wisps of gold and silver light pushed out of Stirwin’s nostril in an amused snort. “What a title,” he responded, his voice a deep, charismatic rumble. With certainty, he walked to the right with John by his side. “And what brings you here, then?”

“General reminiscence? Obligation? Truthfully, I do not quite know,” John responded. He ascended the staircase, while Stirwin dragged himself up the side of the temple with his claws. Even with their connection, there was something objectively unnerving about a crocodile having this vertical manoeuvrability. “I feel like I do not talk to you as often as I perhaps ought to.”

“It is in the nature of our relationship. For all of your faults, you are not a foolish man. You do not need advice, just a curtailing observer.” Stirwin led them off to a random direction. Soon they trotted on the golden grains of the supernatural desert, climbing a dune with no other purpose than to walk as they talked. “You are feeling anxious.”

It was an observation. John hesitated, observing his own feelings. “I suppose I am… huh,” he agreed. “That’s odd. What do I have to be anxious about?”

“Nothing. Everything.” The clashing words hung in the air for only a singular beat, before the Celestial Devourer continued, “You are feeling what is normal when one is at the precipice of great change.”

“It’s not that great a change. I am just putting a second ring on Jane… Yeah, I don’t believe that,” John corrected himself before Stirwin could. “I did not think that it would really faze me though.”

“No man is immune to his own subconscious. Everything will change after this overdue rite.” The Celestial Devourer turned his head, studying John intently with one eye just as they reached the top of the dune. “Should I hazard a guess on what it is that awakens this nervousness in you?”

“Can’t hurt,” John said and turned right. Magically heaped sand yielded to his step, cascading down the side of the dune as they walked along the crest.

“Who is John Newman?” Stirwin presented a question.

“Genius, greedy, lustful harem-assembler of a man with enough wisdom to know what he is doing wrong and too little control to always act against it,” the Gamer responded.

A mirthful chuckle echoed from Stirwin’s scaled neck. “Quite,” he agreed. “Let me be more precise. Who is John Newman in absence of Jane Hollmey?”

That… he had scarcely even considered before. John understood immediately why that woman had been standing stunned before Stirwin when he arrived. Only his tendency to reflect regularly on the self prevented him from suddenly stopping in their walk. “That is a good question.”

“And perhaps the foundation of your anxiousness. Though, even with access to your soul and thoughts, I cannot say that for certain.” Stirwin was one pace ahead of John again, the Gamer walking parallel to his summon’s foreleg. “Explore it verbally, if you wish to.”

“I have been with Jane since all of this started… well, since I entered the Abyss.” John fixed his eyes on a large obelisk in the distance, one of the many ornamental parts of the environment. “It was her that urged me to be more confident and it was with her that I built my harem. That started as something I wanted for my own… youthful folly, really. It became something so much bigger.” He tilted his head, as if re-adjusting the way his brain was levelled would let some new thoughts fall out. “If I removed Jane from my life tomorrow, putting aside my grief, who would I be?”

The question summoned forth a phantom of himself he had not remembered in a long time. The broken man that he had been in the hours that he thought Jane lost, dead at the hands of Thana, and the days thereafter he had spent obsessed with getting stronger no matter the price.

If the same events unfurled today, he would not react the same way. The harem that had only started to form at the time was fully fleshed out now. Rave was no longer the sole light of his life. Even without her, a fact remained. “I am the one who keeps my women happy,” he said. “Though that then cascades into the next question: who am I without my harem?”

“You are blessed with a degree of certainty few can ever have,” Stirwin said. “You do not need to doubt your women’s love. The mark gives you clarity. It lets you invest in the mindset that you exist for them without even questioning what else there could be.”

“I am regularly thankful for that boon,” John assured. “I wouldn’t make it a habit of doubting them, but my paranoia would suggest it at times. It’d be annoying.”

“Every boon comes with a curse. Having no need to consider the question means there is a part of you underdeveloped – a part that the approaching wedding has awakened. Even the most assured man feels the cliff of being locked into a lifestyle.”

“Funny part of the human condition. I am walking into the most glorious future any man could imagine. I am quite literally marrying a half-Asian cat girl with a perfect bubble butt, finally unlocking the permission to have children with my entire harem of women hotter than supermodels. Still, there is some squirming part of me that is wondering… who am I in this? Could I have something better?”

“Could you?” Stirwin prompted him to think further.

John laughed at the mere idea. “No. No, this is my perfect future.” He took two long strides to be back next to Stirwin’s head. “Though the other question remains. Take away my harem, take away my need to provide for them, who do I remain? An emperor? That’s just a category, a duty that I hold because I want to make a world that’s better for my children.”

It felt good to say that and to mean it. Gone were the days where vanity and pride were his primary motivators. Had they ever been? Yes. He could not claim the moral purity that he had always acted ultimately in the interest of his conceptual children.

But that man was no longer him. He was finally stopping being the Gamer that went on a conquest of a continent for his own ego, to find more skirts to chase. He was no longer the guy that banged interviewers or had 40 people orgies with women he didn’t know. Those youthful adventures, fun as they had been at the time, were no longer something he felt compelled by.

Bit for bit, he had been changed by the world and his own actions. Certain appetites had gotten sated, others he had learned to live with. He knew victory and loss profoundly now. He was only 20, but he had lived more than most did in their entire lives. He could read a biography of Napoleon and think ‘wow, what a tortoise’.

“I’m a conqueror,” he said first, “but I don’t really care about that title. It feels nice to have won, sure, and I am attached to what I have built, but if I were to lose it in a neutral manner… then I wouldn’t feel terribly torn up about it. I’m a reformer, a lawmaker, a fighter, a lover… I have explored all of these parts of me over the years, but are they me?”

“They are, yes,” Stirwin answered that for him, categorically. “You are more than the sum of your parts, but you are still your parts. Remove pieces and you change the man. Yet, there are surface changes and there are entire switches of the mind. What piece is fundamental? What sits inside your chest – what would stay with you if all outside yourself was stripped away?”

John thought about that while they stepped off the dune. They were by a separate temple ground now. It was a place for elementalists to conduct summoning rituals and, apparently, for people to have a picnic. A Cleaning Slime collected dispatched pieces of plastic.

“I want to be a father,” the Gamer finally answered.

“Not exactly a state that exists without outside influence,” Stirwin remarked, mildly amused.

“Yes and no… having a child, having children, that is outside the self… but the me that is worthy of being a father, that’s someone I have to build inside myself.” John stopped, a calm smile on his lips. Something inside him had fallen into place. “That will be my motivation. The better world for my children, real and conceptual. Any role I take beyond that, be it conqueror, farmer or scribe, will be in service to that.”

Stirwin responded to his resolve with a simple, deep nod. “I can feel you are more in balance now.”

“I am. This is another one of those mirror moments.”

“Mirror moments?” Stirwin asked, tone changed from mentor to casual conversation.

“You know, when – actually, you wouldn’t know, being an eternal crocodile from a realm of magic.” Scratching the back of his head, the Gamer tried to put it into terms native to the elemental. When he failed, he just hoped that Stirwin’s understanding of the human condition was close enough to empathize. “When you look at yourself every day in the mirror, you don’t really understand the miniscule changes that occur over time. Then, at some point, you look at your face and realize just how much it has changed.”

“I will take your word for it,” Stirwin responded.

They turned around, walking back to the temple at a leisurely pace. “This was a good thought exercise,” the Gamer said. “Though I feel the need to add that I don’t generally subscribe to the notion that one should strive to define themselves by nothing but themselves.”

“Nothing? No, certainly not.” Stirwin hummed in agreement. “It is a balancing act, as you like to say. You cannot be defined solely by what is outside of you, but avoiding attachments and reliance is no good either.”

“You don’t want to be a leaf in the wind, but you also don’t want to be an empty shell,” John said with a nod.

“Indeed, you would insult my wisdom to suggest I would have said otherwise.” Several hundred kilo of animated light bumped shoulders with his summoner.

“I suppose I just wanted to hear myself say it,” the Gamer remarked with a haughty smirk.

Even if he was newly centred, he was still himself.