Chapter 17 from Rise of Baal (First Draft)

Chapter 17
Gaia spoke to him in his dreams. He had never had dreams before. He dreamt of an open field, barren with no life. The rain would come down and soften the soil and then the sun would come out and harden it. Slowly, very slowly, nails and glass and wires came out of the ground, sitting there on the surface. As more and more rusted metal and shattered glass came out of the ground, the more the ground healed. The ground started to grow flowers, short stunted flowers. With more time though, the flowers grew stronger as more debris and trash came out of the soil. The mangled metal and broken glass were pushed by the grass and flowers into the center of the field. Soon the parts became legs and hands and a torso and then a face and when the creature opened his eyes, John opened his eyes and looked up around him.
He sucked in his breath. Gaia was doing something to him, to his coding. He wasn't supposed to sleep or dream or be so self-reflexive. He didn't know what the dream meant. But he knew who it was from and he was meant to see it. It was better than the dreams where she had held him down deep in the earth, his joints fossilizing or rusting and his mind screaming against the pressure and weight of the entire mantle.
The small tent he was in was open on the sides. The roof of the tent wasn't much more than a small tarp, but it kept the sun off. He did appreciate the relief from the sun. Being made of metal did make him overheat and he hadn't been able to fund enough aluminum to keep it from being a serious problem while he had been hunting Nathan. He looked over to the side and saw the young Centaur filly, standing next to a couple of sphinxes who had been his guard. He slowly sat up.
"Hello you three. Are you ready to talk?"
"Not yet John," the filly replied.
"Legion, please," he replied. A tremor shook through him. He was Legion. He was not John. John was dead and he was eternal.
"John, if you please. Penny said we were not to call you Legion for any reason while you were with us. She wants to remind you of who you are."
"I'm the tin man who comes into your village in the dark and slaughters all your children," he laughed. His voice box sparked in his throat.
"We're all children here," the filly replied, "and were not scared of you, John. We know you raised April the best you could."
"I did not do that. John did. All I did was murder the last of the firstborn."
A small, struggling, girl walked up. Her skin was white, but marbled black with short, badly-cut white hair. She looked so human, but there was a quality to her that made him feel young. Her eyes were so alien, like they lived in a different universe. Three harpies swarmed around her, like she was their mother hen.
"You did not murder the last of the firstborn. Nathan did. You preserved the firstborn through April and she still lives because of your sacrifice."
"What do you know of my sacrifice? Why weren't you there to stop Nathan? You Nephilim are supposed to have all this power, but you did nothing while he murdered ten billion people."
"For my part, I had been imprisoned for nearly a thousand years by this time. My mother, from what I have been able to learn, was working with Nathan to help him develop the virus that killed so many and developed the vaccination which turned the firstborn into the second born. Gaia in her anger destroyed all the firstborn's civilization, down to every last record. All I had to go on was what a six-year old girl told me and what I could see from the evidence of the virus and vaccine." She stood there defiant, but her legs trembled a little. Something was very wrong with her and he wanted to escaped this menagerie led by a dying Nephilim. They were going to be a target for Nathan."
"Let me go. I've been chosen by Gaia to kill Nathan. At any cost."
"Even your own life?"
"Yes. Even my own life," he said defiantly. "She will just rebuild me again until I finally defeat Nathan."
"What if you can't? What if you aren't meant to defeat him?" She was looking at him with a compassion. All of them were. He did not need pity from some second-rate goddess and her third-rate science experiments.
"I will. I would have last night if you hadn't interfered. I was so close."
"You weren't close at all John. He had physically changed a harpy so it would look like him. We found the body of the harpy this morning. It died changing back. It was . . . gruesome," she said choking on the words. "Last night's fight was a distraction. He made it inside of Arcadia and he is now safely behind those walls and certainly already working with King Tyre."
"You . . . aren't lying? Are you?" He had an ability to read the heartbeats of people and he could even "smell" chemical changes that came with lying.
"No. What we saw," she shivered, "we all want to unsee. That poor harpy gander never stood a chance." The harpies chicks around her pulled in close, their shiny bright feathers laying flat. Their faces were hard for him to read, but he could read fear.
"I still have to go. Gaia has a hold on me," he said as he pointed to the codes on his chest.
"She had a hold on you, and it was quite strong, but while you were 'sleeping', I was undoing some of it. Not through magic, but I have a fairly good sense of how Uncle Hephaestus built his automatons and I learned how to redirect some of the commands she wrote. If you want, you can do anything you want now. You will always feel a pull towards Nathan, but it won't be a compulsion. It will feel like a craving for ice cream when you discover you are allergic to it. You will miss it, but it won't cause you to eat it and die."
"Ice cream? How do you know about ice cream if you were asleep for a thousand years."
"April. She was a six year old girl who loved ice cream and her mother had shown her how to make it using some ice and a bag. You have another compulsion on your heart. You need to find April. You made a promise."
"John made a promise," he replied, his jaw grinding in frustration. "I'm not John."
"You are everything John was meant to be and could be if he had gone through what you had experienced. Which makes you John."
"You don't know what I had to do to my friends and colleagues. You didn't see me kill them. I could still see their faces after their transformations. I killed people who trusted me and loved me."
"You saved April from a certain death at their hands or a long death at the hands of Nathan. Yes, you did horrible things. But," she said looking down at her own hands, "you're not the only one with blood on your hands." She looked back at him directly. "We can't save everyone sometimes. Nathan had already sealed the fate of the other firstborn. What could you have done differently?"
"I could have done my job to protect them," and he broke down crying. He had never cried before. What was wrong with him.
The young girl came over to him and hugged his shoulders. "I gave you some updates John. I know this is hard, but you have to grieve what happened and even your part in it. It wasn't something you wanted to do, but it still has hardened your heart."
"I don't . . . have a . . . heart," he replied through his sobs.
"You do now. The firstborn didn't know how to give you one, but my Uncle Hephaestus said it was the first thing every automaton needed and the rest of their body should be built around it. They gave you a mind, which served a purpose. With your heart, you'll have to learn everything again from the start. Gaia will be mad at me, I'm sure, but I won't let her send you to your death over and over again to feel better about losing the firstborn."
She stood up, leaving him alone on the cot. "In about an hour, we are leaving. We are headed back to Thessaly. We will not be going after Nathan," the filly coughed, interrupting Penny. "No. No one is going after Nathan. I will speak to him myself and set some ground rules."
"About time," the filly said with some resentment in her voice.
"You're right Lydia. I have failed and made a mistake. I will avoid making this mistake now."
Turning back around to face John. "It's your choice now. Are you Legion? Or are you John?" And she walked away.
Legion sat there, his tears still streaking down his metal face, but the sobbing had ceased. He hadn't realized how much he had needed to mourn the death of his friends. He did a diagnostic and found the heart she had placed inside his chest. It wasn't large and didn't look like the heart of an animal. It was wrapped a small box, wrapped closed with a weave and braid of her white hair. The hair from her head was soldered into the circuits which controlled his logic and motor circuits. He couldn't sense what the wooden box contained though. All he had to do was open his torso, pull out the box, and free himself from this heart. And go back to working for Gaia, to punish and kill Nathan for what he had done and had made him do.
He opened his chest. He found the box and started to pull. The two sphinxes guarding him just watched quietly, saying nothing. They were young, maybe seven or eight years old. But they bore scars from battle and hunger. He could see a gauntness in their cheeks. They each carried a sword like a soldier. And he felt a deep pity well up inside of him for them. They were children. Not soldiers. They weren't meant to be fighting this battle. They were meant to be protected. And he looked around at the camp and everyone tearing things done. Penny was arguing with a sphinx cub who was taller than her, but she seemed to be winning the argument. They were all children, even Penny despite her age. The adult minotaur from the previous night had died protecting them. He looked at the ropes staking him down and saw they were no longer tied at the end. He could leave. Nothing would keep him here with these children. Nothing but his heart.