The Tournament 01: The Reincarnate

"No shit, Sherlock," was all I said, using a favored term from Alanna, a past self from a millennia prior.

Hey blue eyes were hard. "We hold sway over your world so long as there is belief and worship. I and my kind can heal you world, save your race, but the gateway between our dimensions must be open. To do that you must win. There are eight of you fighting to open the gate, and not all of us, called gods by your people, will be able to save it. I will, I and my sisters and brothers, but you need to win. To do so you must kill the other seven, and Li Bao-Zhi is one. He is not the worst nor the strongest and so you must train."

I wanted to rage at her and deny it, but all the voices in my head quieted. They knew, we knew, I knew it was the truth. All my lives had been leading to this. "What must I do?" I asked with heavy resignation.

"Run so they do not find you. Neit is on this plane as well, I will send him to you. He will help you. If he cannot find you seek out Stellan Kellner, he is of this land as well. He is one of the seven, the Norse champion, but I am told he is a man of honor. If Neit does not find you seek Stellan out to guide you, but seek only knowledge. Honor he may have but he is no fool. Remember what you have learned, you must fight, strengthen, and prepare. Do not let any of the others catch you unaware. I will return."

"Why are you leaving?" I demanded, but by the last word from my lips she disappeared.

My arm was healed I had a box of gold, and the crowd was quieting now, searching for me.

I hopped onto my bike stuffed the lockbox into the only empty compartment of my bags and started the bike up. The crowd heard and turned to surge towards me. I spun out the parking lot spitting gravel and rode onto grass, heading for the dirt track that had led me there.

I would keep moving and the god would help, but if this Neit, a name I recognized as Morrigan's male counterpart in the dead pantheon, never came I would chalk this up to ne hell of a hallucination. Even if it made strange sense and explained away the years I'd spent locked in attack room, called mad, the years I'd wandered and fought, it was still a strange vision of Hell I wanted no part in.

Fighting to open a gate to gods who could save the dying world? Even if it were real I wasn't so sure it was the right thing to do. After nearly three thousand years of humanity I needed a break. Imagine how Mother Earth felt.

Even as the thought drifted through my mind the chorus of my soul told me there was no escape from fate. There was nowhere I could run to escape the fact that I was the Reincarnate.