For a thousand years, Gerr had been a goddess, or was it a day?
Time acted like a deranged snake in the gods’ plane, it twisted and looped and generally felt nonexistent.
Gerra was the goddess of last chance, she always has been. People worshipped her for millennia, and yet only a day ago she was a mortal.
She had a baby boy, who was a young man, and an old toothless one at the same time. She saw every moment of his life, of all his possible lives. Sometimes her son died two days after she became a goddess, others, he reached maturity before falling to the cold touch of death.
She had to perform miracles every second, yet she was stingy in granting her favors. Only one in a million could bask in the goddess’ light.
Not her son though, she never failed to correct his life’s path. She couldn’t interfere with his choices, even a goddess had her limitations. Still, she could affect external forces that would have led his life to be shorter or would have led him to a sad lonely existence.
A second ago, she called on a kind neighbor to take care of him, then she went back and called on the orphanage of the king. When the kind neighbor took him in, he died at the tender age of nine, he was too sheltered.
She told a man in his dreams to go steal her son’s coin purse. If he kept the coin, he would have been killed in a road ambush as he traveled between cities. Better, without the coin, he had to find a job in the king’s stables.
Tending horses taught him patience and compassion, but not too much. She whispered to a docile mare, and it kicked him in the chest. Gerra visited him for the first tie then, remade his ribs and strengthened his bones and tendons.
He had to leave the stable, the horses shied from him almost on sight. He was touched by a goddess, and this made him more than a mortal.
She made him lose his job at the knowledge academy the next second. He might learn a lot by watching the scholars, but he would die as he watched a botched experiment.
Out of coin and job, he joined the king’s army. This was more like it. She blew at a fold of land and it changed to rock under his feet. He slipped and impaled himself on his own sword.
They released him from the army. She visited him again, this time making his bones as strong as a rock, and enriched his heart and mind with dreams of valor. He resented having a goddess for a mother, but it doesn’t matter.
He joined an adventurer’s band. They opted for being robbers. She arranged a freak accident where all of the band tripped over the edge of a ravine. He wondered how they couldn’t see it in time.
He joined another band. This one seemed right. He would remain with them for five years.
She killed a dragon who almost swallowed him. She evaporated a lesser animal god and absorbed her essence. She smote a whole family of cyclops.
He stood defeated, broken, yet he was alive and this was what mattered. He looked at her with bitterness filling his eyes. “Hello, mother.”
If you like this story, check the other parts as well: Broken Fighter, part 1, Broken fighter, part two, Gerra, Broken Fighter, part 3, Kortasakh, and Broken Fighter, 4, Neverending
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