Gradually, the ebb and flow of anger and regret left him standing merely tired and confused. On the one hand, everything he'd ever worked for was gone, as was every one he'd ever known or loved. His parents would think him dead, would bury an empty box just like they'd had to bury his sister when an avalanche took her 20 years ago. That thought grieved him most, his parents deserved better than to bury their children.
Shaking his head and the thought away he searched for silver linings. His hangover was completely gone. He didn't know what caused that initial pain but, by all rights, he should still be carrying a head like a melon and a stomach packed with sawdust. His ulcer didn't hurt at all. Hell for that matter, he looked down at himself and realized that his body felt better than it had in years. He'd been going down-hill rapidly the last couple of years and 43 had not been a good year for the Ulric Einar vintage. Now his body looked like it had when he was 26. He even had abs. He'd never had abs.
Furthermore, he didn't have to go to work today. No more 14 hour days. No more forty-five minute department meetings that could have been 5 minute emails. No more project manager kicking him in the balls daily to invent a solution to a quarter billion dollar problem. When you get right down to it, wasn't dying the easy way out?
He returned his attention to the Watcher, taking in once more her impossible beauty.
"Ok. So maybe things weren't going so great back there. Maybe you didn't exactly grab me in my prime or just before I had a threesome with 10/10 twins on top of a tank rolling through the American white house lawn or anything like that." he conceded.
"But why? Why me, and why bother?"
"Thou were not meant to be in that world to begin with. It happens, occasionally, though not rarely, that a resonance carries souls from one world to another." the Watcher explained
"Mostly these transported souls never notice and live out their lives complete. But not thee. Thine passions never swelled from common spring, thy wave never synchronized with those of that world. Always there would have been some missing piece, for it was not the world thou were meant to abide and there was none in that world that could rectify."
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That last statement hit home in a way he'd never quite considered. It did seem to make sense. Always out of synch he'd felt. Just ever so slightly off the beat compared to everyone else. He'd assumed it was a mild autism, or some kind of undiagnosed mental disorder.
"You said you were the Watcher for this world, what about my old one? Does it also belong to you or is there a Watcher there as well?" his mind had, at last, found a problem to dissect, a puzzle with pieces to be assembled.
The Watcher frowned "Is this some form of mortal teasing? Thou hast to know thine Watcher perished long ago. One of the great minds of thine own country declared that god to be dead. Nearly all of your myths include the inevitable fall of the pantheon in reflection of this fact. It is imbedded in the species consciousness, though some choose to carry on in ritual delusion to honor the ancient ways of the cults that followed that deceased Watcher."
His eyebrows furrowed as he considered this. It was true. The Christians had their dead Christ, the Buddhists saw their Buddha ascended to Nirvana, the Norse awaited Ragnarok, and many other religions held similar themes. That Nietzsche had declared God dead wasn't a religious statement though, more a reflection of the loss of modern man for the need to attribute to the supernatural what could be understood rationally. But still. He could see the point.
"I never thought about it. I was never a believer and neither were my parents. And all the people I knew that were tended to be wack jobs I wrote off a long time ago." the gears turned while he thought it out
He clarified "So the world I'm from really has no god? But this one does? What does that have to do with your soul harvesting my humble person?"
"The one who was Watcher for your world perished long ago, the victim of a hostile power. There are creatures called Abyssals which roam from world to world through the deepness of the cosmos. They are the antipathy of Watchers, seeking to bring ruin and endings. One infiltrated thy world in its infancy and nearly collapsed its core. The Watcher of that world drove the creature away but could not stop the destruction entirely. He drug a nearby sister planet which had failed and pulled it into the core of thine world merging them to save both and creating your moon. "
She frowned at this last and looked away as if seeing the event. Maybe she did, she was a creature called a Watcher after all.
"This is not the way of our kind, nor do we wield such power without cost. The act of saving these worlds cost the Watcher his existence and he spent the last of his energies stabilizing his working. Thou hast seen the imprint of his visage on the moon called Luna, a pattern of craters in the image of a face." She continued
"I am diligent in my hunt for abyssals, and have prevented such incursions. Even so they manage to touch the world from time to time, it is beyond even a Watcher's powers to completely isolate a world throughout existence. Thine own soul belonged to my world and, since it was suffering, I was in position to use a resonant node between our worlds to correct its placement. But a physical body could never survive such PASSAGE."
Again Ulric's bones vibrated with the ground and his knees popped. That was some serious mojo.
"So you just ran me through the cosmic juicer and reformed me here?" he ventured.
"Exactly." She was almost smiling again. Sadist.