I was back in the body of Ash, or I guess the name he went by now was Maximus.

Years had passed I could tell just by the landscape and how I carried myself. He wasn’t in the monastery like in my last dream. Those years had changed him and the years after even more so.

It was odd in the dream that I had his memories. It wasn’t like I was seeing them as a dream, either. It was just that I knew what happened. After leaving the monastery, I spent many years fighting the endless war with the Dark ones. Yet, I knew that even during those years of fighting, it wasn’t the fight I was after. I was still searching for clues about what happened to Taphine. Order and Chaos hadn’t told me something significant, but I didn’t know what it was.

Maximus chose not to lead when he fought and only attacked the armies alone. He would fight for days on end, reaping the lives of countless orcs. Never being able to turn the tide as it approached. No matter how many armies of goblins or orcs he killed, more came.

I had always felt deep anger, and causal violence were the things that most described him. However, now he almost seemed burned out. He didn’t rise to fights the same way as before, and while he didn’t avoid battle, he no longer charged toward it. He had been called Ash before, where he would be all that was left after Chaos went through. However, now I was truly spent.

I no longer rode but walked where I went, and the weapons and armor that were part of who I was were gone. I wore simple homespun clothes, had stopped shaving or cutting my hair, and only carried a simple staff. In many ways, I was returning to my roots as a wild human. Yet, I lacked a tribe—a family.

As I wandered, I watched how people interacted. I tried to help where I could, feeding a child or putting out a fire. In towns and cities, I saw over and over again the same things play out. People all tended to act the same way, seeking the best for themselves.

However, there were those few exceptions that did things for others. The street urchin that, when I fed, would run off with the food to give it to another. The farmer, who would run into a fire to pull out a neighbor. The merchant, who, when no one was watching, would go and feed the homeless.

The melancholy feelings of being a survivor seeped into everything that I did. What good was it that I had thousands of years left now that I was a demigod if no one I knew was with me? The other champions had fallen before reaching the same heights. The Sisters had stopped talking with me as much now that I was no longer their champion though I was still their priest. Yet, even then, it was only because I agreed that the Dark ones needed to be removed.

I no longer trusted the Sisters to have my best interest in mind. I was only a convenient weapon that had lasted long enough to become a powerful one. I was sure that if I needed help now, they wouldn’t answer as I wasn’t actively working for them.

As I had those thoughts, I stopped to think on top of a steep hill. My mind drifted across how the goddesses had failed me repeatedly. They left my friends to die, but more than that, they left those I loved to die.

I sat down on the hill and tossed small stones down it. It would start in the same place each time, but by the end, it was in a different location. After about the tenth stone, I rolled while pondering my extremely long life. I pulled out a small book from the folds of my robe and started to scratch notes of what was going on with the stone.

It was the first time in this dream that I felt more than a glint of anything other than melancholy. Even in the battles I didn’t avoid, there was nothing except plain disinterest. Yet here, rolling a stone down a hill, I was happy and focused. It was the same single-minded focus that I was used to feeling in all of these dreams.

I wasn’t sure what I was working on, but I could tell that it was important. The dream time kind of blurred together as I worked. From the random stones, I changed to shaving off rocks with magic and turning them into balls. Then from there, I moved to watch sticks floating down the river. I would toss several off one side of a bridge and walk to the other to watch them. Maximus would note which was the first through, collect the sticks, and repeat the process.

I had no idea how long I kept at little things like that. But there was a change when I started to use his spells to shoot at things. I was getting angry at all the variables, so I redesigned a dungeon to do what I wanted—a slope that was perfectly flat, a river that ran without obstructions.

Yet, when I kept testing things, I noticed even then, there were slight changes in my results. Not much, but minor. The way I would roll the ball could change its course, or if I gave them too much loft in my toss, the sticks might not land the same. My one notebook was replaced with dozens as I kept working, focused on something that I didn’t know what was.

From sticks and stones, I progressed to my spells and active skills. Days turned into weeks, and weeks into years. I wasn’t sure how long I spent in the dungeon, just working on minor changes to each spell—slight changes to the way I made a strike.

At some point, I introduced targets and had them attack in droves. I fought for weeks straight with no stops and then sat down and thought through it all, writing everything down. The fighting with the dungeon targets was the most focused in battle I had been in a long time. I watched each movement to understand what I was doing, forcing myself to work on each attack and not just react. Then I would change it slightly on the next and the next.

At last, Maximus seemed to have enough of working by himself that he got up and left the dungeon. I was agitated at my research which I still didn’t know what was for. I knew I was working on something but didn’t have the context of my thoughts.

After leaving the dungeon, my dream self bought land near one of the towns. Then I started to farm. Years went by, planting the same things in the same spots. Yields went up and down, but as time passed, they just went down.

I knew what my dream self didn’t. I was over-taxing the land without rotating crops or even resting it. Soon one of the other farmers told me the same thing, which pissed me off to no end. I threw all of my notes on farming away and moved again. About two hours after leaving the farm, I returned and got my notes picked up and organized. Then I left for good.

This time I found a place on a river and started to work out farms on my own. I removed the trees and used the stones I found to build walls. It was hard work, but in the end, it was worth it. I had four plots of land, each the same size, each on the same body of water. Then I spent years working on the farms. Each one I split into four subplots and rotated through them. I wrote everything down, making sure to be precise with all my planting.

My anger rose across the winters as I read all my planting journals. It didn’t matter what I did. There were always seeds that didn’t sprout. I might plant the seed in the same spot my last great plant had been in, yet that year it didn’t do anything. Then sometimes, in the places where it did grow, I still didn’t have a great crop.

The years turned into decades as I farmed the same area. My farm grew to the size of a small city. I placed spells on all the walls to keep out vermin but to let in the bugs I needed. I built a dam and kept the water flow constant throughout the farm. I even built a magical dome over three of the farms to keep all the weather out.

As the years went by, my little farm was found by others that were exploring. Then people started to come and settle near me. They asked me questions about how I was farming and why I was doing what I was doing.

I wasn’t happy with people coming as when they came to talk with me; they walked through my farm. Which meant they were changing things. Things that I had a problem accounting for. Even their water use was starting to cause problems. Yet it also gave me ideas about what was happening with the farm.

While I was pursuing my own studies, I hadn’t forgotten the greater world. So as people settled, I taught them about the Sisters. Even though I wasn’t happy with them, they were the best thing for the world at this time. As the city rose around my farms, we built a temple for them. The city lived in peace for a number of years as I taught them about farming the way that I was.

As I taught them, I studied what they were doing. I even studied what they did in the taverns. I watched new games like dice and darts and then practiced on my own. Darts were easy to figure out. Dice, however, changed how I looked at farming.

The variable with dice was easy to control, yet the outcome wasn’t. I set aside farming and moved on. I walked to one of the larger cities, looking for the gaming establishments people had told me about.

As I traveled, I took notes of everything happening around me. The weather, what I wore, and how often bandits would attack me. When I got to the city, I found what I was looking for. It had dozens of establishments filled with games of chance.

I bought the smallest home I could find near one of the establishments and then started to expand it. I dug down and out, using magic to remove the dirt. Then I pulled a dungeon seed out from my bag and planted it. Once that was made, I entered the safe room and started working.

At this point, I knew that Maximus only slept when he wanted to let my brain catch up to what he was doing. He used sleep to make connections that he wouldn’t normally see. So it surprised me that each night in the safe room, I slept. However, I spent each day working on a growing layered enchanted stone.

I would wake up, run down to the stone, pull out a quill and a jar of ink, and write more and more on it. It was like he was recording what he dreamed. However, I never knew what those dreams were. I didn’t know how many weeks or years passed as the stone grew layer by layer to the size of a bowling ball.

As the stone’s surface was covered with inscriptions, a new layer would appear overnight. Then I would start again. Each book I kept with the experiments was also copied onto the stone. Then spells were written around them using connections that I had no idea what were.

At last, I left the safe room and returned to my small house. I had to kick out squatters who said they had been living there for years and that the owner had abandoned it. Then I started to go to the gaming establishments. Each night I would go and play the games, and through the day, I would record directly on the stone what I did. Once again, time seemed to stretch on as I worked or played.

The games started to get easier and easier for me the longer I played them. I understood their rules first, and then I began to develop systems of play. Each play was something that I wanted to do to see if I could change the outcome of the games. It was just like rolling the stone was to me.

After many more years had passed, I picked up my traveling gear and left again. It had been hundreds of years at this point since last I went to battle the forces of the Dark ones. However, that was where I was going. I wasn’t going for the same reasons as before. In the past, it was because of anger. Now it was because I wanted to see how battle worked.

I was no longer the champion of the Sisters. I knew they were right in their war with the Dark ones, yet I was sure I didn’t like the Sisters anymore. They had let me down where it mattered too many times. Far too many people I cared for had died, and they did nothing to help. The Dark Ones did what they wanted to do on the planet, but the Sisters were unwilling to stop them or perhaps too weak to be able to.

I would tell people who they were, but even in this city with a temple, I never visited it. I didn’t mean that I wanted the Dark ones to win. I still hated them for their actions and how they ruled their lands. They were my true enemy as they took from me the things I loved. The Sisters, however, were fickle allies at best.

So I took my stone, left the city, and went to the front lines of the war with the dark ones. I didn’t tell anyone I was coming and suppressed my power so that I could hide. Then I joined the ranks of the ordinary soldiers. There I practiced what I learned when farming and gaming. I worked the small changes I could effect as a soldier to see what outcomes I could make.

I recorded it all on the stone. Countless battles and several years later, I left the front lines and returned to my farm. I slowly walked through all of it to see the changes others had made and recorded it. It was strange the almost disinterested view of the farm I had. I didn’t care that others were using it, and they weren’t doing as great of a job as I had. I had moved on, but I just needed to check on things one last time.

I sat down on the roof of the farmhouse and started to force the stone I had been moving from place to place to shrink. As it shrunk, it began to change colors. It had always been a light gray so I could write on it. Now, however, it turned to the blueish black of my ink as the layers compounded onto each other.

It took several days of my focus to force its transformation, and in the end, I had something about the size of a quarter. I smiled at the thin flat stone and tossed it into the air. As it spun, it landed on my outstretched right hand and slowly sunk in.

I felt Maximus’s power start to rise as the magic of the stone fused with his body. Then he started to lift off the roof of his farm. As he floated up, his body shifted and became in ways less real but firmer than it had been in others. Dozens of lightning bolts crashed onto me and entered my right hand.

I stared up into the sky as the air around me broke. The Sisters stepped out of the broken sky. Or rather, they projected themselves through it as I knew they couldn’t be on this planet.

They spoke in unison. “Ash, how high do you reach today?”

Then they reached out and touched my head. The world changed, and I was in a dark empty room. I felt a smile come upon me as a pop-up showed up. I had never seen any of Maximus’s screens or pop-ups until this one.

Choose your Primary Domain

Rules

Chance

Order

Chaos

Seasons

Harvest

War

Research

Magic

Games

Each one I selected and looked at. Rules and Chance were both Legendary tier domains. Order and Chaos listed as Grand tier. Seasons, Harvest, and War, were high. Research and magic were medium. Games was listed as low. With a great smile, I selected rules. As I did, the next pop-up appeared.

Chose your Secondary Domain

Rules*

Chance

Order

Chaos

Seasons

Harvest

War

Research

Magic

Games

I laughed and felt the coin in my hand start to change. Then I selected Chance. The empty room vanished, and I was back before the Sisters. As I appeared, they both smiled.

Then as one, they asked. “Our Battle Priest, what did you choose? What god did you become today?”

I nodded to both of them and said. “I reached as high as I could and grabbed that which was before me. I am the god of Seasons and Harvest.”

With a slight smile, I thought. “Now we can work on letting people forget you.”

* * *