Upon landing in Corpus Christi, Orton immediately sealed the bag containing the clay tablets with his most powerful runes of forbiddance, then began casting every divination he could think of in an attempt to head off whatever inevitable betrayal Tecahapoatl would try to inflict upon him. He tried at first to count the possibilities, but gave up after the hundredth and ninety-first.

Admittedly, he had to appreciate the artistry of some of them -- as a spirit of faith, the dead god was extremely limited in his capabilities. He could only manifest as a hallucination, with no power to compel or control, and even that was restricted to those who knew of his image or his history (a rather diminutive pool of persons currently limited to just Orton), but his predictions told him in no uncertain terms that Tecahapoatl was crafty indeed and could use a nigh-infinite number of gambits to trick him or other bystanders into opening the bag, revealing the image upon the tablets, and then convincing any mortal he could manifest for into doing his bidding, no matter how insane it appeared. He also quickly learned that attempting to lock, seal, or otherwise render the tablets inaccessible was pointless; after watching himself be tricked into breaking his own bindings for the fortieth time, he conceded that he wasn't going to outsmart an actual god, even a dead one. No matter how cool the end results of such manipulations might be (his favorites were a pitched wrestling battle against a crazed hobo while dangling from a seatbelt over a cliff, tied with a martial arts fight with an amphetamine-addled pilot while hanging half out of a helicopter), he recognized that stubbornness wouldn't get him anywhere this time. So instead, he changed his strategy.

Carefully and painstakingly, he sought out the prognostic routes with the absolute fewest number of bystanders -- usually only the driver of whatever vehicle was conveying him -- and then put all of his efforts into limiting his contact with anyone nearby. He poured power generously into spells, arts, and invocations designed to render him invisible, shunt attention away from him, or otherwise obscure his presence to the exclusion of all other defenses (hoping desperately that Gentry wouldn't choose this period to scry on him) and then simply gritted his teeth and endured through the days and weeks of interminable boredom and discomfort which followed.

He took buses, mostly -- being able to sit at the back with maximum distance between him and the driver was always a plus -- but occasionally had to steal cars or walk in order to navigate the more desolate stretches of the journey. He did not, at any point, set foot on another plane or train; many of the foreseen situations he would encounter on those took the form of Tecahapoatl engineering various games of "talk the mortals into murdering each other and obfuscate who's killing who", which he did not want on his conscience and could not afford to waste time on. He dared not sleep or relax his vigilance for an instant, either; he'd seen the vestige charm even animals and insects into opening the bag while he dozed in the predicted timelines he'd beheld. So instead he energized himself with arcane words and alchemical mixtures, tottering ever northward in an increasingly erratic and sleep-deprived fashion as he journeyed across the continental United States and upwards into Canada.

As he traversed Manitoba, civilization began to thin out; bus routes became sparse and unreliable, and he was forced more and more often to steal cars which inevitably broke down inconveniently soon. Upon reaching the city of Churchill, he discovered that there were no more roads at all, and had had to strike out on foot to reach his destination. After the fourth time he had to fight off wolves, he was discovering new frontiers of exhaustion; he slogged across tundra, stomped through icy groves of evergreens, and, when all else failed, charmed a moose and rode it the last ten miserable miles to Rankin Inlet. He huddled disconsolately in a tiny boat for fifteen additional miles through icy, choppy waters to reach the (he thought) irritatingly cheerfully-named Marble Island, then around its western and southern coasts until he reached the much-more-fitting-to-his-mood Deadman Island. He sighed heavily as he stumbled through the freezing surf up onto the rocky beach and dropped his bags to the ground; it had been a very, very long twenty-six days, and he was too tired even to be glad that the end was in sight.

"Ey, you's supposed to crawl when you come ashore here, don't you knows that?" mocked the apparition of Vinny gleefully. "It's a sacred site to the Inuit, man. You gots ta be humble, like in dat Indiana Jones movie."

"Go fuck yourself," Orton groaned, trying to resist the temptation to expend more power on warming himself up.

"Hey, I'm just tryna watch out for my buddy here," protested the bloodstained hallucination. "The legends says that if you don't crawl, you die exactly a year later. You wanna save the world from Gentry an' then keel over from some curse?"

"I'm about a half-inch from choosing to keel over right here and now if you don't shut up," warned Orton. "A cursed, uninhabited island barely fifteen hundred miles from the North Pole sounds like a great resting place for the last trace of your presence on the planet."

"Hey now, no need for any of that," Vinny whined, raising his hands and backing away placatingly. "Let's not go crazy here. I help you, you help me, that's what this is all about, right?"

"Sure, right." Orton fumbled with freezing fingers to extract the dog-eared legal pad he'd been scrawling on intermittently for the last four weeks. "Here's my end of the bargain -- papers detailing your historical provenance, to be submitted along with your tablets to the museum of your choosing when you give me what I need." He shook them, not without irritation, at the hallucination. "But first you have to hold up your end, you overgrown plurigenic tulpa."

"Right, right, of course," Vinny replied cajolingly. "We're almost there, see, it's just over this ridge."

Groaning, Orton summoned the last dregs of his strength and limped up over the rocky breast of the beachhead, immediately almost tripping and falling down a sharp slope of scree. Recovering his balance and surveying the desolation before him, he sputtered with indignation. "This is a rock! It's barely a thousand feet across! What am I supposed to be looking for here?"

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

"Ey, it's almost two thousand at its widest point," shot back the phantom immediately. "Ain't my fault this spot's one of the narrowest." He pointed towards a tiny pondlet a hundred meters or so from Orton's current position. "There's what you're lookin' for, over there. You made it this far, surely you can make it the rest, yeah?"

Grumbling and grousing, Orton stumbled his way over the rocky terrain, almost insensate with exhaustion. As he approached the pondlet -- barely more than a watering hole in size -- he abruptly jerked to a halt, his sight beyond sight illuminating a warning in his mind. He whirled, staring at Vinny. "You motherfucker."

"Eh? What'sa matta?" asked the phantasm, picking its misshapen teeth with a fingernail.

"That puddle is surrounded by sinkholes. You were trying to get me killed." Angrily, Orton began to stomp back towards the beach. Vinny, looking alarmed, chased after him quickly.

"Look, eh, you're just tired, yeah? Maybe you're just bein' overcautious, you ever think of that?" The specter was incapable of sweating, but Orton could practically smell the dead god's desperation. Reaching the sea, he shook the legal pad at the ghostly figure angrily.

"Four weeks! Four weeks you made me trek across a quarter of the world, into the godforsaken wilderness!" Turning, he hurled the legal pad out into the ocean with a grunt of rage.

Vinny watched it sail off through the air (hurtling an impressive twenty-five feet or so) before splashing down into the icy water, then turned back to Orton with an expression of equally cold disdain. "We was never supposed to make it this far, you pissant mortal. You was supposed to die on the way, or lose the tablets to somebody else, yeah?" Vinny rubbed his hands through his hair in frustration. "I dinnit count on you bein' such a pain in the ass!"

"Yeah?" Furious, Orton dug the tablets out of his bag, slamming them down on the sand. "Do you even know where the fruit of the tree of life is? Or the secret behind Enna's power?" He raised a boot over the tablets menacingly. "Or did you just jerk me around to waste my time on all of this?"

"Aaargh!" The dead god's avatar shook both fists at the air in a long-forgotten gesture of insult. "The fruit of the tree of life is DNA, ya moron! It's metaphorical!" The phantom whirled, gesticulating in every direction. "The only physical fruit was the one they actually ate! You been chasin' somethin' that don't even exist!"

Orton growled, raising his boot higher, and began to fill himself with energy for a mighty stomp. "So what you're saying is, that you have no use to me at all?"

"No! Wait!" The apparition raised its hands pleadingly. "I do know what's up with the girl, yah! Swear I do!"

Orton paused, then drove his heel down with devastating force. The upper tablet cracked in half, spraying clay dust in every direction; Vinny howled in agony as a corresponding crack sundered his chest, spilling blood-red light outwards like luminous vitae. "Aaaagh!" the phantom screamed, its face twisted with rage and despair. "You can't do this to me! I'm a frickin' GAWD!"

Orton stomped again and again, crushing the tablets to powder underneath his heel; with each blow, Vinny fractured further and further, his howls and threats quickly becoming unintelligible as his physical form frayed and withered. Finally, Orton ground the remains of the tablets into powdery chunks, then gathered them up and hurled them into the icy sea. "The only way you could have gotten that information," he addressed the frigid horizon dully, "was from my own mind. Which means I don't need you at all."

Numb, he collapsed onto the shore; his body ached, drained of much of his power. Idly, he wondered if he were about to die, but a quick check of his metasensory faculties informed him that no, he would probably be fine; there was enough residual curse energy here for him to absorb that he'd be restored to at least minimal power within the next couple of hours, at which point he could warm himself up and get back in the boat to --

"Heyyy! Orton!"

What in the hell...?

Painfully, he raised his gaze to the southwest, where the voice had come from; to his shock, he saw a motorboat plying the waves barely a quarter-mile away, with Enna in its prow and Jiann at the helm. Enna was waving to him cheerfully, which he felt was a little tone-deaf given his current circumstances. Doing his best to rally his flagging spirits, he half-heartedly waved back.

As their vessel drew nearer, he bestirred himself, climbing wearily into his own boat and pushing off with a gasping effort; no sense exposing them to the island's maleficence if it wasn't necessary. Waving them back slightly, he maneuvered his own craft towards theirs, bringing his dinky little boat alongside and tying the short, salt-encrusted rope she tossed him to a mooring. With the last of his strength, he clambered aboard the larger craft and collapsed onto a bench seat, gasping for breath. "Heckin'... amazing... timing."

"Dang if you don' look a bit rough," murmured Jiann reprovingly as he cut the boat's engine. "What'n th' heck gave you so much trouble?"

"A dead... god. It's... a long story." Enna, looking concerned, handed him a canteen of frigid water that tasted like rust; he gulped at it greedily, shocked to discover how dehydrated he'd been. Tecahapoatl must have been dulling my own sense of how weak I was, he thought to himself grimly. He resolved to consider undead deities above his pay grade in the future.

"Well, how'd it go? Did you find anything?" asked Enna, sitting on the gunwale of the boat. "I can't imagine you'd be all the way out here on the ass-end of Canada just for a vacation."

Orton groaned and shook his head. "Wild goose chase. The... fruit of the tree of life... never even physically existed, apparently." He choked down another swallow of water, gasping for air as he came up. "How about... you guys?"

Enna glanced over at Jiann, looking smug, then back to Orton. "Oh, fine, no trouble at all. It took us a while to track it down, but once we did, we were in and out." She stretched, looking very pleased with herself. "Stomped through a dungeon, outsmarted a few deathtraps, got the thing, and ported out maybe an hour ago from our perspective."

"Who knows when it occurred from yours, though," commented Jiann. "Mutual entanglement sent us here, I reckon, so I'm guessin' you were in a bit o' trouble?"

Orton gave a shaky thumbs-up. "Nothing I couldn't handle. But I won't deny that I'm grateful for the pick-up." He sagged back against the seat, stretching his shoulders and sighing. He wanted a nap very badly.

"So, what do we do now?" asked Enna, somewhat hesitantly. "Were we supposed to get both of them, or...?"

Orton shook his head. "The Keeper probably knew we'd have to try to get both, even if one of them didn't actually exist. And this wasn't a complete waste of time on my end, either; I did learn something important in a roundabout way, but I don't know what it is yet."

Jiann snorted. "That definitely sounds like a waste o' time to me, Orton."

Orton tapped his temple. "I have a great deal of confidence that whatever it is, it's somewhere inside here. You don't want to know what I went through to confirm that, though." He sank back against the gunwale, looking up into the sky; dawn was just beginning to break. "As for what we do next? We find our secret weapon."